The Beginnings of Poetry

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Title: The Beginnings of Poetry
Author: Gummere, Francis Barton
Language: English
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THE BEGINNINGS OF POETRY

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[Illustration: Macmillan logo]

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THE

BEGINNINGS OF POETRY

FRANCIS B. GUMMERE

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN HAVERFORD COLLEGE

New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
1908

_All rights reserved_

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Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1901. Reprinted
October, 1908.

Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

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I ne have no text of it, as I suppose,
But I shal fynde it in a maner glose.

CANTERBURY TALES, 1919 f.

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PREFACE

The opening pages of this book contain, so one may hope, an adequate
answer to the objections of those who may have been led by its title to
expect a more detailed treatment of poetic origins and a closer study of
such questions as the early forms of rhythm, the beginnings of national
literatures, and the actual history of lyric, epic, and drama. Not these
problems have been undertaken, interesting and important as they are,
but rather the rise of poetry as a social institution; whether or not a
definite account of this process has been obtained must be left for the
reader to judge.

F. B. G.

9 SEPTEMBER, 1901.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

PURPOSE AND METHOD

PAGE

Object of the book. Historical and comparative treatment.
Sources of help. Modern scientific aids. Limitations to their
value. The evidence of poetry itself. The curve of evolution 1

CHAPTER II

RHYTHM AS THE ESSENTIAL FACT OF POETRY

Definitions of poetry. The line between poetry and prose.
Summary of the dispute. Rhythm fundamental and essential in
poetry. Proofs from ethnology, psychology, and the history of
poetry itself 30

CHAPTER III

THE TWO ELEMENTS IN POETRY

The dualism in its various forms. Poetry of nature and of art.
Poetry of the people. Romantic and rationalistic theories. The
real dualism 116

CHAPTER IV

THE DIFFERENCING ELEMENTS OF THE POETRY OF ART

Communal and individual. Mediæval and modern conditions.
Evolution of sentimental lyric. Influence of Christianity.
Reactions. Modern objective poetry. Humour 139

CHAPTER V

THE DIFFERENCING ELEMENTS OF COMMUNAL POETRY

The making of communal poetry a closed account. Elements of the
European ballad. Who made it. The “I” of ballads. Style of
ballads. Incremental repetition. Variation. Siberian songs.
Bridal songs. The _vocero_ and kindred songs of mourning. The
refrain. Refrains and songs of labour. Harvest-home.
Processions. Flytings. Festal refrains. The dance 163

CHAPTER VI

SCIENCE AND COMMUNAL POETRY

Science and theories of poetic origins. Invention and imitation.
Comparative literature and the art of borrowing. The war
against instinct. Instinct not set aside. The dualism in
poetry. Greek drama. Homogeneity of savages and of primitive
men 347

CHAPTER VII

THE EARLIEST DIFFERENTIATIONS OF POETRY

The poet. Improvisation in a throng. A study of the
_schnaderhüpfl_. Stanzas and poems. Differentiation of poetry.
Lyric, drama, and epic. Myths. Poetic style 390

CHAPTER VIII

THE TRIUMPH OF THE ARTIST

Improvisation revived. Its fate. The two forces in poetry. Past
and present 453

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THE BEGINNINGS OF POETRY

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THE BEGINNINGS OF POETRY

CHAPTER I

PURPOSE AND METHOD

It is the object of the following pages neither to defend poetry nor to
account for it, but simply to study it as a social institution.
Questions of its importance, of the place which it has held, or ought to
have held, in the esteem of men, and of the part which it is yet to
play, are interesting but not vital to one who is bent upon the
investigation of it as an element in human life. A defence is doubtless
needed now and then by way of answer to the pessimist like Peacock, or
to the moralist, the founder of states ideal or real, like Plato and
Mahomet. Scattered about the Koran are hints that verse-making folk,
like the shepherd’s turncock, are booked for an unpleasant future,
although it is well known that the prophet in earlier days had been very
fond of poetry; while Plato himself, if one may believe his editors,
began as a poet, but took to prose because the older art was declining;
with the change he turned puritan as well, and saw no room for poets in
his ideal state. Attacks of this sort, however, are as old as poetry
itself, which, like “the service, sir,” has been going to the dogs time
out of mind, and very early formed the habit of looking back to better
days. For mediæval relations these remembered arguments of Plato, backed
by a band of Christian writers, had put the art to its shifts; but
Aristotle’s fragment[1] served the renaissance as adequate answer, and
it is interesting to note that the champion of poetry in Aristotle long
outlived the philosopher.[2] Petrarch, taking the laurel, was moved to
defend poetry against her foes, and yet found, as critics find now, that
she had come by some of her worst wounds at the hands of her votaries;
for who, in any age, as Goethe asked and answered in his _Divan_, “Who
is driving poetry off the face of the earth?—The poets.” Certainly not
the philosophers and men of science, though that is the common belief.
Lefebvre,[3] in 1697, thought that he had given poetry its mortal blow
when he attacked it in the name of morals and of science; and his
onslaught is worth the notice if only to show how little Renan and
others urge to-day which has not been urged at any time since Petrarch.
Selden,[4] Newton, Bentham, have been among the scoffers; so, too,
Pascal. As to Newton, “A friend once said to him, ‘Sir Isaac, what is
your opinion of poetry?’ His answer was, ‘I’ll tell you that of Barrow;
he said that poetry was a kind of ingenious nonsense.’”[5] All this is
no more than disrespectful allusion to the equator, jocose moments of
the learned; yet it is quoted very seriously by those who think to
preach a funeral sermon over the poetic art. So that when Renan expects
to see poetry swallowed up by science, and when it is said that Goethe,
born a century later, would throw poetry to the winds and give full play
to his scientific genius, that Voltaire would live altogether for
mathematics, and that Shakspere himself, “the great psychologist,” would
“leave the drama of humanity for the drama of the world,” abjure wings,
and settle to the collar with psychical research folk and societies for
child-study,—even then the friends of poetry need feel no great alarm;
all this, allowing for conditions of the time, was said long ago, and
has been repeated in the dialect of each generation. As for the past of
poetry, kings have been its nursing fathers and queens its nursing
mothers; and for its future, one may well be content with the words of
the late M. Guyau, a man of scientific training and instincts, who has
looked carefully and temperately at the whole question and concludes[6]
that “poetry will continue to be the natural language of all great and
lasting emotion.”

Vindication apart, there is the art of poetry, the technique, the
Horatian view; and with this treatment of the subject the present work
has as little to do as with defence and praise. From Vida even to
Boileau writers on poetry were mainly concerned to teach the art, and
seemed to assume that every bright boy ought to be trained as a poet.
With this idea went the conception of poetry as sum and substance of
right living and embodiment of all learning, sacred and profane,—witness
not only the famous lines of Milton, but a part of the epitaph which
Boccaccio composed for his own tomb: _studium fuit alma poesis_. J. C.
Scaliger, when that early enthusiasm of the renaissance had begun to
wane, turned from art to science; his son and Casaubon and the rest took
up the work of research and let the art of poetry languish. On this
scientific ground, where, in spite of the overthrow of Aristotelian
authority, in spite of changes in method and a new range of material,
one may still learn much from these pioneers, there are now three ways
by which one can come to poetry from the outside, and regard it not
technically but in the spirit of research: there is the theory of poetic
impulses and processes in general; there is the criticism of poems and
poetry as an objective study; and there are the recording, the
classifying, and the comparing of the poetic product at large. The
present work belongs to this third division, and in its method must keep
mainly within historical and comparative bounds. It is not concerned in
any way with the poetic impulse, or with the poem as object of critical
study; it regards the whole poetic product as a result of human activity
working in a definite field. This must be clearly understood. At the
outset of an attempt to throw some light upon the beginnings of poetry,
it is well to bear in mind that by poetry is meant, not the poetic
impulse, but the product of that impulse, and that by beginnings are
meant the earliest actual appearances of poetry as an element in the
social life of man, and not the origins or ultimate causes, biologically
or psychologically considered, of poetic expression. What the origin of
poetry may have been, and to what causes, however remote, in the body
and life of man must be attributed the earliest conceivable rhythmic
utterance, are questions for a tribunal where metaphysics and psychology
on the one hand, and biology on the other hand, have entered conflicting
claims. As for biology, until one has found the source of life itself,
it is useless to follow brain dissections in an effort to discover the
ultimate origins of poetry. To be sure, psychology has a legitimate
field of inquiry in discussing the source of æsthetic manifestations;[7]
and going deeper into things, it would be pleasant if one could lay hold
of what philosophers call “the germinal power of whatever comes to be,”
the _keimkraft des seienden_; but times are hardly ripe for such a feat.
Even Weismann[8] concedes a “soul,” a capacity not yet explainable, for
appreciating music, and, by implication, poetry. It is better in the
present state of things to assume poetry as an element in human life,
and to come as close as possible to its primitive stages, its actual
beginnings. What these beginnings of poetry were, in what form it first
made a place for itself among human institutions, and over what paths it
wandered during the processes of growth and differentiation even in
prehistoric times, are questions belonging to the answerable part of
that catechism about his own life which man has been making and unmaking
and making again ever since he began to remember and to forecast. We
have here no concern with the perplexing question why æsthetic activity
was first evolved; it is quite another matter when we undertake to learn
how æsthetic activity made itself seen and felt. In brief, to seek the
origins of poetry would be to seek the cause of its existence as a
phenomenon, to hunt that elusive _keimkraft des seienden_; to inquire
into the beginnings of poetry is to seek conditions and not causes.

Nothing, however, is harder than to carry out this simple plan; from a
work on poetry take away both theory and criticism, and what is left? It
is true that since F. Schlegel, a hundred years ago, said[9] of art in
general that its science is its history, historical and comparative
treatment of poetry has come speedily to the fore; but that mystery
which rightly enough clings to a poetic process, the traditions of
sanctity which belong to genius, and the formidable literature of
æsthetics, have all worked together to keep the study of poetry out of
line with the study of other human institutions, and to give it an
unchartered freedom from the control of facts which has done more harm
than good. Consider that touch of futility which vexes the mind when it
sets about discussion of a topic so far from the daily business of life;
consider the great cloud of witnesses who can be summoned from any
library to prove that of all printed silliness nothing reaches quite so
silly a pitch as twaddle about the bards; add, too, that no process is
so difficult to observe and analyze as the making of a poem; and it is
easy to see why writers on poetry are always flying to cover in
psychology and æsthetics or in criticism.[10] Facing the facts of
poetry, a scholar can treat the poetic impulse and keep the facts at
arm’s length, or even quite out of his range. Treating the poetic
product, whether genetically or historically or comparatively, tracing
the evolution of poetry as a whole, for its own laws of growth and
decay, or regarding its place as an institution in human society, he
must hold unbroken commerce with a bewildering mass of material. Hence
the delight which animates to their task the numberless writers of
“thoughts about poetry,” and the dismay with which the historian looks
upon his rough and unwieldy subject. Books beyond the power of any
modern reader to compass have been written on the poetic impulse; while
all the books which treat the poetic product as an element of public
life could be carried in one’s pocket,[11]—and one need be no Schaunard
for the task. Yet the facts of poetry ought to precede the
theory,—facts, moreover, that should be brought into true relations with
the development of social man. A record of actual poetry; then a history
of its beginnings and progress as an achievement of human society; then
an account of it with regard to its origin and exercise as a function of
the individual mind,—such is the process by which there could have been
built up a clear and rational science of poetry, the true poetics. _Dis
aliter visum._ There is a fairly good record of poetry, with gaps due to
chance and neglect, many of which chance and energy may yet combine to
fill. As an achievement of human society, poetry has had scant
attention; and the present work is intended, in however modest and
imperfect performance, to supply material and make an outline for such a
study.

With such an object in view, and in such a spirit, what is the method by
which one is to come at the beginnings of poetry, and what material is
one to employ? Literature itself, and the comparative, historical
method, are indicated by the very terms of the quest; but what of other
aids? There is no doubt that science has opened mines of research
unknown to a former generation of scholars in poetics; what have
zoology, physiology, psychology, ethnology, anthropology, sociology, to
say to the beginnings of rhythmic utterance? From the study of those
animals which stand nearest to man in intelligence and social instincts
there should come in course of time a better knowledge of the physical
conditions under which primitive folk essayed their earliest poetry; but
it is conceded that the present state of these studies, even in obvious
cases like the singing of birds and the social dances and amusements of
sundry animals, offers scant help to the student of poetry, and often
leads him into absurdities. Darwin’s suggestion that the lyric poem
might in some way go back to the call of the male _homo_ to the female
at mating time, induced Scherer to put the origins of poetry in general
upon this purely biological basis;[12] but Scherer’s enthusiasm has met
no hearty response and seems to fly in the face of certain important
facts. The book of Groos, to which further reference will be made, gives
a better series of analogies with the subject in hand, but is not to be
used in any positive or conclusive way.

Help of a more substantial kind can be found in the researches of modern
psychology; and indeed, when these shall have been put in available
form, they will greatly increase the materials for a study of the poetic
process. To what extent the study of the poetic product, however, may
use such aids, is a quite different question. For example, there is one
doctrine, which, if it were established upon an absolute and universal
truth, could be applied to the problem of primitive verse with such
success as to throw a bridge over the chasm between what is recorded and
what is unrecorded, and so lead one cannily into the midst of the
unknown. The theory was laid down by Haeckel[13] that “ontogenesis, or
the development of the individual, is a short and quick repetition”—or
recapitulation—“of phylogenesis, or the development of the tribe to
which it belongs, determined by the laws of inheritance and adaptation.”
Schultze, in his excellent book on fetishism,[14] uses this law, if law
it be, in determining the mental state of primitive folk; “what is true
of the child is true of the wild man, whose consciousness is in the
childish embryonic stage,” and who has reached the fetishistic epoch of
mental growth. A savage who gets a clock wants to wrap it in costly
furs; so does a child. Professor Baldwin, too, accepts the principle as
a guide in working out analogies between the development of the child
and the development of the race, of society.[15] For example, the
consciousness of the “I” in children seems analogous in point of
development to the individual consciousness of primitive man; and it is
evidently of value to the student of early poetry to find his conclusion
that such poetry is mainly impersonal backed by testimony from those who
have studied the inner life of infants and children to the effect that
fear, anger, likes and dislikes, are emotions that precede perception of
the subject’s own personality. A. W. Schlegel used this analogy a
hundred years ago;[16] and, before him, Gottsched, who had far keener
historic sense than one would suppose, explained early epic by the
curiosity which children show in their demand for tales of every sort,
adding that “primitive folk were exactly like these little creatures,
who have no experience and such store of curiosity.”[17] In fact, as is
so often the case with a new exact theory in science, the general idea
has been a commonplace time out of mind. Shelley, declaring that “the
savage is to ages what the child is to years,” is echoing
eighteenth-century thought, with its idea of humanity passing from
childhood to riper growth; and Turgot and Condorcet[18] only added the
notion of human perfectibility and infinite development to an analogy
which was first made, so it would seem, by the Italian Vico. The
parallel is everywhere; Macaulay uses it in his theory of poetic
degeneration, Peacock in his _Four Ages_, and Victor Hugo in the preface
to _Cromwell_. Not as an idea, but as a formula, Mr. Spencer makes the
biological doctrine of recapitulation a part of his sociological system.
Professor Karl Pearson appeals to the same doctrine when he wishes to
say a word for the matriarchate;[19] in the life of the child, he notes,
“the mother and the woman play the largest part; and so it is in the
religion and social institutions of primitive man.” Thus a child’s world
reproduces the primitive world; and the _märchen_, where witches are
still powerful though hated and malignant beings, show what is really
the priestess of early matriarchal cult fallen into disfavour under
patriarchal conditions. Or, finally, to choose an unexceptionable case,
Professor Bücher,[20] noting that long-continued and laborious activity
is easily kept up provided it pass as play and not as labour, takes the
dances of savages, and the games of a civilized child, as analogous to
the efforts of earliest man. It is true, too, that savages, and
presumably early man, are like the child in quick alternations of mood,
in the possibility of laughter and tears at once, in many traits of the
kind; so far Letourneau[21] is perfectly right in his parallel. Now all
these cases, in varying degree, are meant as arguments from analogy,
and, as is usual when one deals with analogy, may be regarded as more or
less desirable aids to evidence that is direct. By itself, however,
analogy must not be conclusive; in the matter under consideration it
cannot be regarded as proof; and alone this rule of ontogenesis and
phylogenesis is not enough to bridge the chasm and allow one to describe
prehistoric poetry.

Such, however, is precisely the task that some bold pioneers have
essayed. Letourneau, indeed, is hardly to be placed in this category,
although he upholds the doctrine and puts it to use;[22] for his
conclusions are invariably fortified by facts from ethnology and
literature. But the author of a book on primitive poetry,
Jacobowski,[23] belongs here; freed from all obligations of research,
all study of actual facts, he trips jauntily into the unknown, hand in
hand with this omnipotent theory as guide. True, he affects the
scientific habit of mind, and once refers the reader, for further light
on some difficult problem, to “my little essay on the Psychology of a
Kiss”; for he is by way of being a lyric poet, and seems of the tribe of
him whom Heine described as “personal enemy of Jehovah, believing only
in Hegel and in Canova’s Venus,” save that one must here make the easy
substitution of Haeckel for Hegel. So, too, Jacobowski is a
statistician, an observer, as witness that work on the kiss, evidently
in no spirit of Johannes Secundus; and he gives incidental notes on the
poetic process which have a very scientific ring. “I know a young poet,”
he says in a burst of confidence, and perhaps remembering Goethe’s fifth
Roman elegy, “who actually makes his best poems in the very ecstasy of
wine and of love.” He draws a diagram, like those convincing charts in
history and political economy, to illustrate the “hunger-curve” and the
“thirst-curve,” and to answer the question why there is so much poetry
that deals with drinking and so little that deals with eating. Here and
there a savage tribe is named, a traveller is invoked; but Jacobowski’s
main trust is in the human infant and in his own poetic self. That the
book has been taken seriously is perhaps due to the only part of it
worth considering, which traces the origin of poetry to cries of joy or
of pain. This, of course, in great elaboration; by the ontogenetic
method one may study poetry, that is, emotional expression, in the
modern infant, and then by a simple phylogenetic process “transfer the
result to humanity.” Rid of all friction from facts, literary and
sociological, the pace of proof is breathless, and pampered jades of
investigation are left far out of sight in the rear. What was the first
poem?—A cry of fright. Why?—All observers agree that the first emotion
noted in a child—as early, says Preyer, as the second day—is fear. Watch
by the cradle, then, and note the infant’s gasps, cooings, gurglings,
cryings, grimaces, gestures; these will give in due succession the
stages and the history of literature. In this attitude, too, Jacobowski
watches for the “primitive lyric.” He quotes Preyer’s account of a baby
which, on the day of its birth, showed pleasure at the presence of light
and displeasure at relative darkness. There follow more statistics of
the same sort, “lyrical sounds of delight,” heard from another baby for
the same reason. Now, says the author triumphantly, “precisely”—the word
is to be noted—“_precisely the same effect of light and darkness must
have been experienced by primitive man_.”[24] It is hardly worth while
to argue against such an extreme of absurdity as this; the lyric
expression of a new-born baby’s pleasure in light and fear of darkness
is no parallel to the lyric and poetic expression of primitive man, not
only for the reason that overwhelming evidence shows all primitive
poetical expression of emotion to have been collective, but because this
emotion was based on very keen physical perceptions. The analogy of
infant growth in expression with the development of primitive man’s
expression comes soon to wreck; who furnished for infant man the adult
speech, gesture, manner, upon which the imitative, actual infant works
in his progress through babyhood? Moreover, the infant individual of an
adult race and the adult individual of an infant race still differ,
_qua_ infant and adult, as human beings. Think of the adult savage’s
activity, his sight, his hearing, his powers of inference from what he
sees; put him with his fellows even into primitive conditions; and then
consider the claim that such a wild man’s earliest poem, a lyric, must
be analogous to the first cry of pleasure or of pain uttered by the
solitary infant on the first dull perception, say of light or of hunger!
Even the biological analogy, pure and simple, will now and then break
down. It has been asserted that the male voice was once far higher than
now in point of pitch, phylogenetic inference from the ontogenetic fact
of the boy’s voice before it deepens; but Wallaschek[25] examines the
facts in regard to this claim, and finds not only adverse evidence, but
a constant tendency to raise the pitch as one passes from oldest times
to the present. There is another law of relativity than that to which
the argument of child and race appeals,—not how primitive poetry
compares with modern emotional expression, but how primitive poetry was
related to the faculty and environment of primitive man. Looked at in
this light, it might well appear that “simple expression of joy,” or
what not, is a gross misrepresentation of the lyric in question, and
that the relative childishness of savages, and, as one argues, of
primitive men generally, is not a positive childishness with regard to
the conditions of their life.[26] In fine, the analogy and the principle
are in the present state of things useless for any direct inference
about primitive poetry. When the sequence of emotions and of emotional
expressions has been established for infant life, it will have an
interest for the student of early literature, and may even give him
substantial help by way of suggestion, corrective, test. But to set up a
provisional account of the origins and growth of infant emotional
expression, and then to transfer this scheme to primitive culture as the
origins and growth of human poetry, is, on the face of it, absurd.

Closely akin to the error which makes unwarranted use of psychological
theories is the abuse of ethnological facts. True, the value of
ethnology to the study of primitive poetry is immense; until one hundred
and fifty years ago,[27] the vital fault of writers on poetry lay in
their neglect of what John Evelyn calls “plaine and prodigious
barbarisme,” and even down to the present, this contempt for lower forms
of poetry vitiates the work of writers in æsthetics; nevertheless, there
is caution to be applied in arguments from the modern savage as in those
from the modern infant. Briefly put, the notion is abroad that the lower
one goes in the scale of culture among living savage tribes, the nearer
one has come to actual primitive culture, to unaccommodated man, the
thing itself, as it was in the very beginning of human life; but, unless
great care be used, one will follow this path to the utter confusion of
progress and retrogression. All would be easy work if one could accept
the statement of Gumplowicz,[28] that “So long as one unitary
homogeneous group is not influenced by or does not exert an influence
upon another, it persists in the original primitive state. Hence, in
distant quarters of the globe, shut off from the world, we find hordes
in a state as primitive, probably, as that of their forefathers a
million years ago.” Surely not as primitive; the very terms of the
phrase deny it; and even in the stagnation of culture, through wastes of
dull and unmeaning ages, man, like men, grows old: _tacitisque
senescimus annis_. Neither individual nor tribal life can stand still.
What one may properly do with ethnological evidence is to note how
certain conditions of culture are related to the expression of human
emotion, and to conclude that the same conditions, for these are a
stable quantity, would affect the emotional expression of primitive man
in a similar way, allowing, however,—and here is the important
concession,—for the different state of the intellectual and emotional
powers in an early and vigorous tribal life as compared with the
stagnant or degenerate life of a belated culture.[29] Two pitfalls lurk
under the analogy. It will not do to argue directly from a sunken race
back to a mounting race found at the same level; again, it will not do
to argue that because the mounting race, when arrived at its prime, has
not a certain quality or function, that it therefore never had such a
quality or function.[30] If one will but look at the thing honestly,
what a brazen assumption it is that this makeshift human creature is
always learning but never forgetting, always gaining but never losing,
and that man of to-day holds fast the unimpaired _x_ of man’s primitive
powers along with all that change and growth and countless revolutions
have brought him! It is a mistake of the first order to assume that a
form of expression now unknown among men must have been unknown to those
who made the first trials of expression as in words and song. One often
hears about the lost arts; it is quite possible that there were arts or
modes of expression used by primitive man for which one can find no
analogy to-day either among men of culture or in savage tribes. There
are rudimentary growths in literature, and these must be taken into
account just as the man of science considers the nails or the hair or
even the often-discussed vermiform appendix. The pineal gland, which
Descartes finally chose as the scene of that mysterious passage between
soul and matter demanded by his system of philosophy, has been recently
explained to be all that is left of an eye in the top of the head. This
may be a true account of the pineal gland, or a false account; but no
competent naturalist will assert that civilized man has all the bodily
functions which he had at that remote period in question. So, too, with
certain possible distorted survivals in poetry of forms of emotional
expression now unknown; it is wrong to deny them, and it is perilous to
assert them unless cumulative evidence of many kinds can establish the
probability. Again, for the first of these two warnings, it is unfair to
set up the Australian black fellow or the Andaman islander,[31] with his
“primitive” tools, dress, habits, and then, by a forcing of the
adjective, bid us look at our primitive ancestor. No one denies the
value of ethnological evidence; Thucydides himself declared that
barbarous nations gave one a good idea of what civilized nations had
been; accounts of savage life have the enormous advantage of coming
close to the conditions of primitive life; but they do not give us the
infallible description of primitive man himself, and it is an illicit
process to transfer a quality from savage to ancestor, to say that man
at the dawn of history was like this belated specimen, and that tribes
from whose loins sprang dominant races, races which fought, and spoiled,
and set up civilizations now vanished from almost every kind of record,
can be reconstructed, in each feature of mind and body, by a study of
peoples long ago shunted upon the bypaths of progress. Mr. Spencer was
one of the first to protest against this abuse of ethnology.[32]
Professor Grosse,[33] on the other hand, makes a strong and candid
effort to meet and minimize the objections to an assumption upon which
his whole study of primitive art depends. He asserts that arguments in
opposition rest on the theory of degradation, and he denies that
degradation has taken place, pointing to the remarkable uniformity of
culture conditions in the various tribes which he regards as primitive.
But it is clear that one does not need the theory of degradation to make
good the point which has just been urged. Grant that these savage tribes
have not degenerated; they have certainly failed, in every important
particular, to progress; they are stunted; and they compare with that
primitive being who held the destinies of culture in his hand, who
pressed forward, wrought and fought, and sang the while of what he did,
somewhat as a dwarf idiot of forty compares with a healthy child of
four. More than this. Long stagnation, while it cannot push culture to
new habits, may well complicate and stiffen the old habits to such an
extent that the latter state of them comes quite out of analogy with the
beginnings. For example, the festal dances of the savage are often
intricate to a degree, requiring real erudition in the teacher, and
infinite patience and skill in the disciple. Now it needs no advance in
culture, no change in the form of production, which is Grosse’s test for
culture, to make this dance progress from wild rhythmic leapings in a
festal throng to the rigid form it has found under the care of certain
experts. The earliest dancers and the latest dancers, communal and
artistic, may have lived the same tribal life and got their food by the
same kind of hunting, the same rude gathering of plants. In fact,
startling as the assertion may seem, and however it may run counter to
this convenient law that the degree of culture depends on the form of
production, and that the work of art depends on the degree of culture,
it is nevertheless highly probable that a certain combination of dance
and song used among the Faroe islanders about a century ago, and
recorded by a Danish clergyman who saw it, is of a far more primitive
type than sundry laborious dances of savage tribes who are assumed to be
quite primitive in their culture.

Granted the need to use the analogy with caution, it is well to note how
wary one must be in dealing with the evidence itself. The warning may be
brought home by an illustration somewhat out of the beaten track of
ethnological material.[34] Nearly a century ago, Dr. Samuel L. Mitchill,
United States senator from New York, was “a sort of permanent chairman
of the committee on Indian affairs”; and he gives an account of a song
“in the Osage tongue,” which was sung at his house in Washington,
“translated into French by Mr. Choteau, the interpreter, and rendered
into English immediately, January 1, 1806.” It is well to see what came
of this process in the shape of the song “On War.”

Say, warriors, why, when arms are sung,
And dwell on every native tongue,
Do thoughts of Death intrude?
Why weep the common lot of all?
Why think that you yourselves may fall,
Pursuing or pursued?

There is more in the same pensive but smooth and elegant vein; and one
regrets to learn that this excellent Wanapaska, who would have pleased
Chateaubriand, “died suddenly ... a few nights after having sung this
song to the translator,”—who, however, unblushingly lived on. But he
could be truthful on occasion, this translator, and he tells the truth
about two Cherokee songs of friendship which may not have seemed capable
of conversion into tender English monody. Here is silly sooth. The
songs, one is told, “consist of but one sentence each with a chorus.
Nothing of greater length seems to exist among” the Cherokees. “They
repeat the song and chorus until they are tired. The words of both were
written for me[35] by Mr. Hicks, a Cherokee of the half blood, with his
own hand, both original and version.... _Neither among the Osages nor
the Cherokees could there be found a single poetical or musical
sentiment founded on the tender passion between the sexes._ Though often
asked, they produced no song of love.”[36] The two songs follow,—they
have the same chorus and belong together,—with interlinear translation:—

Can, nal, li, èh, ne-was-tu.
A friend you resemble.
_Chorus_—Yai, ne, noo, way. E, noo, way, hā.

Ti, nai, tau, nā, cla, ne-was-tu.
Brothers I think we are.

And the chorus, as before. Now even the humblest student of poetry can
sift all this evidence, on the face of it equally valuable throughout,
and find that a part of it is worse than worthless, while another part
is of real value; in many cases, however, the task is difficult, and
this for two reasons. Either the missionaries, explorers, travellers,
give only a partial account, or again, they give accounts of a
misleading sort, if not actually untrue. For the former case, we may
take Ellis and his description of a New Zealand dance.[37] “Several of
their public dances seemed immoral in their tendency; but in general
they were distinguished by the violent gestures and deafening
vociferations of the performers.” And that is all. It is enough for the
purposes of the book, but it is not enough for the student of poetry.
Worse yet is the tendency to state savage thought, savage habits, in
terms of civilization, and so give a notion never true and often false.
When, for example, one is told[38] that in the South Sea islands there
are poets who retire at certain seasons from the world in order to live
in solitude and compose their poems, one is surprised at this notion of
poetical composition among races where the great mass of evidence is for
improvised songs of a line or two, with eternal chorus—savage pattern
everywhere—and with accompanying dance. However, here is the evidence,
and it must be taken with the rest. Presently comes an actual song,[39]
a pensive song, by one of these bards and akin to the Osage outburst
translated by Dr. Mitchill:—

Death is easy.
To live, what boots it?
Death is peace.

Is this a Fijian Schopenhauer, or rather Leopardi; or does it mean
contact with civilized thought and with Christian hymns? Before one
accepts this as outcome of “primitive” poetic conditions, one must bring
it into line with the poetry from such sources on which all evidence is
agreed; at once the bard and his ditty fall under strong suspicion.
Witty proverbial verses found in half-civilized tradition, say among the
Finns,[40] get the same label of “primitive,” until one appeals to the
chronological sense of fitness, and to other kinds of evidence:—

Praise no new horse till to-morrow,
No wife till two years are over,
No wife’s brother till the third year,
Praise thyself not while thou livest!

At this rate the letters of some Lord Chesterfield to his son will yet
be reconstructed for the epoch of our hairy ancestors on the tree
platform. It is clear that the great body of ethnological evidence,
unequal in its parts, and in sad need of sifting and revision, has
something of that uncertain quality as an ally in argument which Tom
Nash imputed to “law, logic, and the Switzers.” They could be hired to
fight, he said, for anybody.

Safety lies in making one kind of evidence control another kind, and in
reckoning only with the carefully balanced result. What evidence is
there that can control the evidence of ethnology? Philology, despite its
overweening claims, is said to be unavailing; it may reveal verbal
processes which belong to prehistoric times; but, as J. F. McLennan[41]
remarked, “in the sciences of law and society, old means not old in
chronology but in structure.... The preface of general history must be
compiled from the materials presented by barbarism.” Yet McLennan
himself declares that “a really primitive people nowhere exists,” and so
puts a great restriction on the use of the material he has just praised.
Can history be of help? “The study of the science of art,” says
Professor Grosse,[42] “should not turn to history or to prehistory.
History knows no primitive peoples.” Archæology, he thinks, is as
powerless; the sole refuge is in ethnology, for it shows us “a whole
series of primitive peoples in the full light of the present.” But this
full light, now and then, has blinded even Professor Grosse; and there
is a kind of history, not direct, indeed, not a matter of clear record,
but still often as valuable as ethnological evidence, which has help of
its own for the student of primitive institutions both by way of control
and by way of suggestive facts. One of the first men who went about the
reconstruction of prehistorical times by a sober application of the
“known principles of human nature” to the facts offered by ethnology and
sociology, sciences then unknown by name, was Adam Smith; in the highly
interesting account of him written by Dugald Stewart and published as
introduction to the Essays,[43] the name of “_theoretical_ or
_conjectural history_” is given to “this species of philosophical
investigation which has no appropriated name in our language.” Stewart
is speaking of Smith’s essay on the origin of speech,[44] and compares
it with the famous pioneer work of Montesquieu and others in a related
field of study, remarking on the way in which “casual observations of
illiterate travellers and navigators” are combined into “a philosophical
commentary on the history of law and of manners.” These “casual
observations” have risen of late to almost absolute power, and “known
principles of human nature” are out of office. Now it is true that one
must be chary in the application of such “known principles” to the facts
from which one has to construct one’s idea of human nature itself, a
process close to the vicious circle; but there are, nevertheless,
certain general controlling ideas to which appeal should be made when
one has to set a value on a given bit of evidence. A controlling idea of
this sort is the sense of literary evolution, an idea based on known
literary facts, and quite valid as test for alleged facts which are
brought forward as evidence in questions of prehistoric stages of
poetry. This sense of literary evolution, moreover, need be no whim or
freak of one’s own judgment. It is not merely that one feels the
absurdity of those jingling platitudes which Dr. Mitchill fathers upon
the lorn Wanapaska; it is the sense of evolution in the expression of
emotion and of thought, a sense based on experience and due to a
competent process of reasoning, which tells any person of information
that savages do not make such a song. True, if a mass of such evidence
lay before one, and it proved to be of the trustworthy sort, then the
controlling idea would be driven off, and the old sense of evolution
would be so modified as to conform to the new facts. But this is not the
case.

The controlling idea, the sense of evolution, should be an object for
the scholar in more limited fields than heretofore have been chosen for
his work. It will be found wise, henceforth, to select a narrower path
but a more distant goal, a smaller subject and a larger method, to run
down a single clew, and to run it, if possible, to the end. Works on the
History of Human Thought, on the History of Literature, of Religion, of
Civilization, on Primitive Culture, were great in their day,—and
probably no one book, apart from Darwin’s, has had such a wide and
wholesome influence as that masterpiece of Dr. E. B. Tylor; they
initiated, fixed the general direction, were the doing of genius. But
the day of discoveries has gone by, and colonization, a slower process,
is rather an affair of hard if intelligent work. Histories, if the term
will pass, are needed for the different functions of human expression
and human emotion itself. The whimsical Nietzsche[45] has called for
histories “of Love, of Avarice, of Envy, of Conscience, of Piety, of
Cruelty”; but apart from his notions, and for sober purposes of literary
study, there is need for such work as a history of sentiment, and this,
of course, should be followed back on its different lines of expression.
Two striking passages in Mr. Thomas Hardy’s _Return of the Native_ may
be cited here as bearing on possibilities of investigation which need
not be regarded as fantastic or absurd. In describing the face of his
hero, as one that bore traces of a mental struggle, a half-formed query
in regard to the value of existence, Mr. Hardy contrasts this face, so
common now in every walk of life, with the countenance preserved by
sculpture from an age when no such questions haunted the brain, and
when, to use his phrase, man “could still revel in the general
situation.” Even more suggestive is the other passage, which treats the
change of sentiment in regard to what are called “the beauties of
nature.” Much has been said and investigated of late on this attitude,
ancient and modern, toward nature;[46] but there is metal more
attractive in Mr. Hardy’s introduction of Egdon Heath as a sort of
tragic character in his story, and in his remark that with the saddening
of life men have turned more and more from mere gardens and green
meadows, and have sought wild, rugged scenes; in days to come, indeed,
they may turn even from the barren coasts of the sea, from bleak
mountains, and seek stretches of absolute desolation, forbidding,
featureless, dead, to suit their mood and give them rest from the stress
of life. These are hints, false or true, only hints; but if they can so
stir one to look into the seeds of time for the sake of mere prediction,
is there not sober gain in a reversal of this process and in a study of
the conditions and expressions of sentiment as far back as one can
follow them? It is said that the absence and the presence of personal
sentiment respectively condition the poetry of France that precedes
Villon and the poetry that comes after him; what of the larger field,
poetry itself, with regard to this important quality in emotional
expression? Can one do for poetry what a recent writer[47] has done for
civic life? Speaking of altruism, and noting the original absence of
sentiment, he constructs a curve, or, as he calls it, a gradation, “the
first word of which is selfishness and the last public sentiment.” What
curves, now, can be constructed in poetry which shall prove of value as
showing a controlling idea and warranting a sense of evolution? Clearly,
these controlling ideas in a history of literature must stand chiefly
upon the facts of literature, and the sense of evolution must be based
upon a study of literary changes and growth, the play and result of such
elements as have just now been described. The sense of evolution in
literature is akin to the genealogical point of view lately urged upon
critics by M. Brunetière,[48] but it is not the same thing; with him the
doctrine of evolution is applied to literature or to art as a safe guide
through its chronology, as a clew to its progress and retrogressions, as
a discovery of the relations which a genius bears to those who went
before him and to those who follow, and as a test of the valid and the
permanent in art. The application of the sense of evolution now to be
considered has a far wider range and must lead in time to wider
conquests. For example, if one will choose some particular
characteristic of human nature and will essay, by the aid of literature
and the arts, to follow back the manifestations of it to a point where
all records and traces of it cease, one will have a history of this
characteristic,—and one will have something more. There will be not only
the actual record made up from a series of observations which form a
dotted line from furthest historical past to present, but the dots of
this line, the line itself, will often form a curve which points either
to a general gain or to a general loss of the characteristic in
question. Or, if it is a case where one cannot speak with exactness of a
loss or a gain in the characteristic itself, the curve will show loss or
gain in any given form by which this characteristic has made itself
known. Here, in other words, is a curve of relative tendencies; and the
knowledge of such a curve not only gives us that sense of evolution to
which reference has been made, but justifies us, after careful study and
testing of these dotted facts, in a bold leap from the known to the
unknown. If the characteristic in question, from the point where it
comes into view at the beginning of records, shows a constant curve of
increase or of decrease, one is justified in making a fairly definite
statement about it in prehistoric times. Now this is not the
evolutionary doctrine championed by M. Brunetière in literary research,
for the reason that it is not dealing with poets and poems, but with
poetry, or rather with the elements of poetry. To give a practical
illustration, it is found that ethnological evidence puts in strong
relief the almost exclusive and certainly overwhelming frequency of
choral singing among rudest savage tribes. If, now, one takes a modern
popular ballad and seeks to follow it back in such a way as to join it,
as the end of a long line of survivals, to these primitive choral songs,
one falls at once into confusion and halts sooner or later before
insuperable barriers. Apart from the controversy about artistic or
communal origin, apart from the theories of the epic, of the
_cante-fable_, what not, it is out of the range of possible things to
trace ballad or folksong, as such, back to a primitive form. Yet it
seems to have occurred to no one that the way to treat the ballad for
historic, comparative, and genetic purposes is to separate it into its
elements, and to follow these elements back to the point where they
vanish in the mists of unrecorded time. Such elements—and, unlike the
ballad itself, they can be traced—are the fact of singing, the fact of
dancing, the fact of universal improvisation, the fact of a predominant
chorus or refrain. Are these elements, as far back as one can trace
them, stronger, more insistent, as one approaches primitive conditions?
What is the curve of evolution? Add to it the evidence of ethnology, and
the conclusions of sociology, in regard to the composition and character
of the early social group: here are materials which are solid enough to
bear the weight of certain and definite conclusions in regard to the
communal element in earliest verse. Again, there is another curve to
consider. The poem of our day is mainly individual and artistic; how far
back, and in what degree, waxing, waning, or stationary, can these
elements be traced, and with what ethnological and sociological facts
can they be confronted? The differencing characteristics of the poetry
of art, and those of the poetry which is rightly or wrongly called
communal, must be studied for themselves and traced back in their curves
of evolution in order to ascertain what part they played in the
beginnings of the art. And thus, too, the question must be answered, a
question neither idle nor without wide sweep of interest, whether poetry
has been one and the same element of human life from the outset, under
varying circumstances, indeed, but under fixed conditions and with
stable elements, or whether the conditions and the elements are now
different from those which obtained at the start.

The method, then, of this attempt to study the beginnings of poetry is
not to transfer outright the facts and conditions of savage life, result
of ethnological investigation, to primitive song, not to take a supposed
“popular” or communal poem of modern tradition and essay a somewhat
similar transfer, but rather to use the evidence of ethnology in
connection with the progress of poetry itself, as one can trace it in
the growth or decay of its elements. The facts of ethnological research
have been largely digested and can be easily used. The elements of
poetry, in the sense here indicated, and combined with sociological
considerations, have never been studied for the purpose of determining
poetic evolution; and in this study lie both the intention of the
present book and whatever modest achievement its writer can hope to
attain. Before, however, this actual study is begun, two propositions
must be established: the writer must prove that what he takes as poetry
is poetry in fact; and, as was hinted just above, he must show a clear
title for his use of the terms “communal” and “artistic.”

CHAPTER II

RHYTHM AS THE ESSENTIAL FACT OF POETRY

For the purposes of this book, poetry is rhythmic utterance, rhythmic
speech, with mainly emotional origin. One must not write a book on
poetry without essaying that _iter tenebricosum_ of a definition—a
definition, too, that will define, and not land the reader in a mere
maze of words. “Rhythmic speech” is a short journey, puts one on solid
ground at the end, and brings about no doublings and evasions in the
subsequent path of investigation. It says what Robert Browning says in
his summary of his art:—

“What does it all mean, poet?—Well,
Your brains beat into rhythm....”

By rhythmic must be understood a regular recurrence which clearly sets
off such speech from the speech of prose; and by speech is meant chiefly
the combination of articulate words, although inarticulate sounds may
often express the emotion of the moment and so pass as poetry. The
proportionate intellectual control of emotion in this utterance is a
matter of human development, and largely conditions the course of poetry
itself. We agree, then, to call by the name of poetry that form of art
which uses rhythm to attain its ends, just as we call by the name of
flying that motion which certain animals attain by the use of wings;
that the feelings roused by poetry can be roused by unrhythmic order of
words, and that rhythmic order of words is often deplorably bad art, or
“unpoetic,” have as little to do with the case as the fact that a
greyhound speeding over the grass gives the spectator quite the
exhilaration and sense of lightness and grace which is roused by the
flight of a bird, and the fact that an awkward fowl makes itself
ridiculous in trying to fly, have to do with the general proposition
that flying is a matter of wings. A vast amount of human utterance has
been rhythmic; one undertakes to tell the story of its beginnings. With
such a definition the task is plain though hard; let go this definition,
and there is no firm ground under one’s feet. The patron and the critic
of poetry, to be sure, must make deeper and wider demands; from the
critical point of view one must find the standard qualities of
excellence to serve as test in any given case, one must ascertain what
is representative, best, highest; poetry for the critic has its strength
measured by the strongest and not by the weakest link in the chain. From
the æsthetical point of view, again, poetry must be defined in terms of
the purely poetic impulse. On the other hand, any comparative and
sociological study must find a definition wide enough for the whole
poetic product, whether of high or of low quality, whether due to this
or to that emotion. It needs a simple and obvious test for the material.
Now as a matter of fact, all writers on poetry take rhythm for granted
until some one asks why it is necessary; whereupon considerable
discussion, and the protest signed by a respectable minority, but a
minority after all, that rhythm is not an essential condition of the
poetic art. This discussion, as every one knows, has been lively and at
times bitter; a patient and comprehensive review of it in a fairly
impartial spirit has led to the conclusion, first, that no test save
rhythm has been proposed which can be put to real use, even in theory,
not to mention the long reaches of a historical and comparative study;
secondly, that all defenders of the poem in prose are more or less
contradictory and inconsistent, making confusion between theory and
practice; and thirdly, that advocates of a rhythmic test, even in
abstract definition, seem to have the better of the argument. Indeed,
one might simply point to the actual use of the word “poetry,” and be
done. However the student and collector may proclaim the rights of prose
to count as poetry, his history, his anthology, shows no prose at all,
and he meekly follows in practice the definition against which, in
theory, he was so fain to strive and cry. Of this, one example, but a
very remarkable example. Baudelaire, in the preface to his _Poems in
Prose_, speaks of one Bertrand[49] as his master in this art, and of a
book, _Gaspard de la Nuit_, as its masterpiece. This book,[50] praised
highly by Sainte-Beuve, this _fantaisie à la manière de Rembrandt et de
Callot_, as its subordinate title runs, makes occasion for a very bold
assertion, and apparently for a great innovation, by one of the editors
of a collection of French poetry.[51] “To admit a prose writer,” he
says, “into a poetic anthology needs to be explained. It is certain
there are poets in prose just as there are prosers in verse,”—the dear
old cry, the dear old half-truth! Now Bertrand is “poet not only by his
sentiment, not only by the pomp and sublimity of his thought, ... but by
the very art itself” which he lavishes upon this poetic prose. True, he
wrote verses also in his _Gaspard_; but his main work is an artistic
marvel of prose. “Louis Bertrand prosodie la prose....” Well, a fine
defence for the prose-poet; and one turns to the selections for an
example of the poetic prose, not only “main work,” but very rare work of
the writer, whose book is most difficult to obtain. And what are the
selections from the prose-poet? Two poems in the most incorrigible
verse! A sonnet, a _ballade_:—

“O Dijon, la fille
Des glorieux ducs,
Qui portes bequille
Dans tes ans caducs,”—

a kind of refrain, and with the rime in -_ille_ running through all the
eight stanzas; and there is no prose at all! _Wozu der Lärm?_ Why this
thunder in the index? Why “admit a prose-writer into a poetic
anthology,” with all this ceremony, only to ignore his prose and to
print his verse?[52]

It is to be noted, first of all, that in ignoring the test of rhythm, so
as to admit great men of letters like Plato and Bacon to the poets’
guild, the advocates of prose fail to set up any other satisfactory
test. Sidney and Shelley, Arcadians both who said noble things about
their calling, are reckoned as defenders of the poem in prose. As to the
younger, all men must feel more deeply and more lovingly about poetry,
for the reading of his essay on that art which “redeems from decay the
visitations of the divinity in man,” memorable words indeed; but his
more exact definition declares poetry to be “the expression of the
imagination.” Nothing is said here of rhythm, for the good reason that
while rhythm can be praised in its own place, it must not be a bar to
claims which Shelley and his fellows deem important. Yet how tender and
how inconsistent is his rejection of the rhythmic test! Rhythm is
“created by that imperial faculty whose throne is curtained within the
invisible nature of man”; and “the language of poets has ever affected a
sort of uniform and harmonious recurrence of sound, _without which it
were not poetry_.”[53] Well, is this not to set up rhythm as a test? No,
for Bacon, as well as Plato, is to be counted with the bards; and how
shall this be done save by condemning “the distinction between poets and
prose writers as a vulgar error,” and by a widening of rhythm, so that
it shall have no bounds, no necessary “traditional forms”? Thus Plato
and Bacon come in, and all hope of a definite, working test of poetry
goes out. Sidney, again, had in his day this mingled tenderness and
contempt for rhythm. “Rhyming and versing” no more make a poet than a
long gown maketh an advocate; but the “senate of poets _hath chosen
verse as their fittest raiment_.” Presently, however, the exquisite
reason for prose in poetry is clear, when Sidney calls Xenophon’s
_Cyropædia_ “an absolute heroical poem.” So, too, there is a saving
clause, which, by the way, nobody denies in its simple form, in Ben
Jonson’s well-known deliverance; a poet “expresses the life of man in
fit measures, number, and harmony,” yet “not he that writeth in measures
only, but that feigneth and formeth a fable and writes things like the
truth.” Now the test of rhythm, which Ben does not really deny, will
work in practice; the test of imagination will not work. Shelley,
putting Plato with the poetic sheep, thrusts Cicero, disciple of Plato,
among the goats of prose. Sound criticism, perhaps; but what is the
formula? And when one is asking, not whom one shall regard as a
poet,—that is, a great poet,—but what one shall regard as poetry, as
material to include in a survey of the rise and progress of poetry at
large, then the test of imagination fails utterly. Sidney was defending
his art; “we are not mere rimers,” so he seems to say, “the root of the
matter is in us, and we are kin with the gods.” J. C. Scaliger, who
insisted on the test of rhythm, and was called many a pretty name for
his pains, had a science of poetry in mind, a survey of it, and cast
about for a test that would work on earth without reference to celestial
origins. The Abbé Dubos[54] was not willing to think so nobly of verse,
and laid main stress on style,[55]—always granting, to be sure, the
conventional test of “genius.” Only genius can unite in lofty degree
within the limits of one verse that “poetry of style” and that
“mechanics of poetry” which go to make up the ideal poem; however, it is
this style that serves as practical test. In short, put genius, or even
imagination, to the practical trial, and confusion reigns at once.
Shelley and many more make a poet of Plato; Sidney brings in Xenophon.
Coleridge,[56] insisting that all the parts of a poem must support “the
purposes and known influences of metrical arrangement,” thus making
rhythm a test, promptly says it is not a test, after all, for along with
Plato, both Bishop Taylor and Burnet must be counted as of the bards.
Beattie[57] calls _Tom Jones_ and the _Merry Wives of Windsor_ “the two
finest comic poems, the one epic, the other dramatical, now in the
world.” Emerson[58] thinks Thomas Taylor the Platonist “a better poet,
or, perhaps I should say, a better feeder to a poet, than any man
between Milton and Wordsworth,”—excellent second thought. Sir Thomas
Browne he regards as a poet. Brought face to face with rhythm, Emerson
hedges; as, indeed, all these good folk do. Goldsmith,[59] for example,
in an unacknowledged essay, calls versification “one of the criteria
that distinguish poetry from prose, yet it is not the sole means of
distinction.” The Psalms of David, and certain Celtic fragments in
prose, “lay claim to the title of poetry.” Hazlitt,[60] speaking of
“poetry in general,” seems favourable to rhythm as a test. Poetry
“combines the ordinary use of language with musical expression”; and
“there is a near connection between music and deep-rooted passion. Mad
people sing.” Then the fear of simplicity gets hold upon him, of
postman’s rimes and the posy in a ring; “all is not poetry that passes
for such,” verse is not absolutely the test; and he stops short of the
inconsistency by saying there are three works “which _come as near to
poetry as possible without absolutely being so_; namely, the _Pilgrim’s
Progress_, _Robinson Crusoe_,[61] and the _Tales of Boccaccio_.” Such
works are “poetry in kind, and _generally fit to become so in name by
being ‘married to immortal verse.’_” Bagehot[62] is quite as cautious;
“the exact line,” he says, “which separates grave novels in verse like
_Aylmer’s Field_ or _Enoch Arden_ from grave novels not in verse like
_Silas Marner_ and _Adam Bede_, we own we cannot draw with any
confidence.” This is to be deplored, perhaps, from Bagehot’s point of
view; but _Adam Bede_ remains prose, and _Enoch Arden_ is commonly set
down as poetry, and there an end. Why, too, should Boccaccio’s Tales, or
the _Pilgrim’s Progress_, be married to immortal verse? Jeremy Taylor’s
beautiful bit of prose about the lark is as satisfying in its own way as
Shelley’s verses are; they are different ways, and one wishes as little
to turn one into verse as to turn the other into prose. Dr. Johnson, who
recognizes no poet till “he has ... distinguished all the delicacies of
phrase and all the colours of words and has learned to adjust their
different sounds to all the varieties of metrical modulation,” yet
concedes that “perhaps of poetry as a mental operation metre or music is
no necessary adjunct,” brings out, with his sturdy common sense, the
clash of theory and practice. _As a mental operation_, that is, as the
poetic impulse and as a matter of theory, poetry is not tested by
rhythm; “it is, however, by the music of metre,” he goes on to say,
“that poetry has been discriminated in all languages,”—in other words,
metre will serve as a practical test. Now this hedging, this confusion
of ideas, this facing one way in theory and another way in practice, is
due partly to a shame and partly to a tradition. Where is the dignity of
the art, if any Bavius can pin this facile badge of rhythm to his coat
and strut about a bard in good standing? Ronsard had this scruple on his
mind; so had Sidney, so even comfortable Opitz, so, in spite of his own
definition, the elder Casaubon. Tradition of the humanists, of days when
poetry held in fee all science, all the gorgeous east of wisdom itself,
rules to this day, and keeps men groping for a subtle and esoteric
definition. Hence, too, a series of futilities and contradictions in
dealing with rhythm as a component part of poetry.

So one comes to the second argument for rhythm as the test of poetry.
Not only does the test of imagination fail to work, but all the
defenders of prose poems fall into contradiction and confusion so soon
as they abandon the other test, so soon as they undertake to put their
ideas into any but a protestant and academic form; moreover, this
protest nearly always rises from the wish to count as poetry some
masterpiece of prose. Take a few typical writers on the theme.
Baumgarten, the founder of æsthetics, wrote[63] an essay in which he
undertook an exact definition of poetry, and finally summed it up as
_oratio sensitiva perfecta_, speech that is both concrete,—calling up in
the mind a distinct picture,—and perfect. A few years later, in his
_Aletheophilus_, he returns to the quest, and asks what a poem really
is. A poem, he answers, is speech so charged with energy that it demands
metrical expression. Yet the more he ponders over the quality of rhythm,
which in the actual definition seemed imperative, the less he feels
inclined to insist upon such a test; at last comes the inevitable
concession of theory, and a piece of prose—here it is _Télémaque_—is
suffered to pass as a poem. After all this conjuring and throwing about
of Latin, one looks for results and finds instead confusion. But
Baumgarten was a dull pedant; set genius to work; call up Friedrich
Schlegel, who is said to have been the first critic to study the “poem
in prose” as it deserved, and whose own performances in _Lucinde_ made
more than one of the judicious grieve. Poetry, he says in one place,[64]
demands rhythm; for only that uniformity which lies in the corresponding
succession of tones can express the uniformity needed in all true art;
yet again,[65] wishing to put Tacitus as well as Plato among the poets,
he makes his wise Lothario say that “_any art or science_” which uses
speech as its expression, works for its own sake, and is at its best,
must be counted as poetry. But let this, too, pass as eccentricity of
genius; call upon some one who has both genius and method,—say
Schleiermacher, who lectured on æsthetics in 1819,[66] and undertook to
reduce to system and clarity this matter of poetry in prose. To help
matters, the subject is halved; drama and epic are “plastic,” and can
dispense with rhythm, while lyric is “musical” from the start. How came
rhythm, then, into drama and epic? Chorus explains the drama, but epic
rhythm cannot rest on any such original union of music and words; there
must be an “inward” reason. Why does “free” productivity in speech seek
after musical form? So one comes back to the difference between poetry
and prose, explained by the nature of human speech; one draws a long
breath and sets upon another exhilarating run round the circle. Two
extremes of speech are possible,—when no syllable is accented at all,
and when all syllables are accented alike; this, of course, will not
differentiate poetry from prose. But speech alternates accent and
no-accent, arsis and thesis; done for logical reasons this alternation
makes prose, for musical reasons, verse. In languages like the
classical, where rhythmical accent utterly neglects logical accent,
there can be little interference of prose with poetry; while in tongues
like the Germanic, where verse-accent and word-accent tend to agree, it
is easy for poetry to pass into prose. Doubtless this is keen thinking;
it explains in some degree why imaginative prose is absent from the
classics as compared with modern drama and romance. But it will not do
for a definition, and Schleiermacher begins a subtle but ineffectual
analysis of poetry old and new. In a Greek drama there was mingling of
measures, now more and now less musical; in modern drama this difference
appears as a mingling of verse and prose. But if one thinks of the
greater musical element in classical verse, then the modern difference
between poetry and prose[67] “_is not much greater than the difference
in classical poetry between epic and dramatic measures_.” Now what has
Schleiermacher really done for the matter in hand? For comparative
literature he has done a distinctly brilliant piece of work; but, even
apart from the fact that no really clear idea of poetry in itself has
been gained, the difference between poetry and prose, and the function
of rhythm, have not been elucidated. It has not been shown, after all,
whether rhythm is or is not a necessary part of poetry. So one turns to
the modern scholar, to the student of poetry as an element in human
life, to one who studies it in the light of psychology; but here is the
same contradiction. Guyau, who thinks this distinction of poetry and
prose a problem of high importance, is in one place[68] quite confident
that “poets” like Michelet, like Flaubert,[69]—he who first of
Frenchmen[70] tried to give to his words an echo of the sensations
described, a vague onomatopœia, and the wider hint of a general
situation,—and like Renan, “have been able to dispense with rhythm.” But
verse, he thinks, is permanent; it will be “the natural language of all
great and lasting emotions”; while in another book,[71] this excellent
and lamented writer not only assigns to rhythm an _importance capitale_,
but calls it “the very mainstay of poetic speech.” And here again is
intolerable confusion.

Into this pit of contradiction have fallen even sane and capable critics
like A. W. Schlegel, and sober philologists like Wilhelm von
Humboldt.[72] Nobody could be more distinctly an advocate of the test of
rhythm than the elder Schlegel was in certain Letters, widely read in
their day, on Poetry, Metre, and Speech;[73] if it be objected, he says,
that outpourings of a full heart ought not to be hemmed by rule, it is
answer enough to say that they always have been under this control, and
that, whatever the possibilities of the case, poetry is and has been
governed by rhythm. Rhythm is born with poetry, and “whether by Ontario
or by the Ganges,” where poetry is, there too is rhythm. As for “the
so-called poetic prose,” Schlegel is very bitter; it “springs from
poetic impotence,” and it “tries to unite the prerogatives of prose and
poetry, missing the perfection of both.” Elsewhere,[74] in an amusing
little dialogue, he sets Grammar and Poetry talking after this wise:
“You speak so simply!” says Grammar. “I must,” answers Poetry, “in order
to distinguish myself from Poetic Prose!” And again,[75] he likens
prose-poetry to the ostrich, which has a gait half flying, half running,
and wholly awkward. Even the dialogue of the drama needs rhythm; for,
thinks Schlegel, its style demands measured and regular movement of
verse. Master of translation, like Herder before him, he is against the
translation of verse save by verse itself; and the context shows that he
is looking upon verse as an indispensable condition of poetry.

When, however, in the lectures at Berlin Schlegel begins to define
poetry and to theorize about it, holding as he does a brief for the
romantic school, for those doctrines of freedom which could not away
with any sovereignty of measured speech over the play of fancy and would
have no set paths through the “moon-flooded night of enchantment,” he
turns squarely upon the test of rhythm.[76] It is a crude notion of the
philistine, he declares, _eine bürgerliche meynung_, that whatever is in
verses is a poem. Nor is much mended by saying only that can be called
poetry which ought to be and has to be composed in verse; of late a kind
of poetry has come to the fore which rejects verse entirely,—the
romance, the novel. And where is yesterday’s scorn for the poem in
prose?[77]

This study of contradictions could be carried into many another field;
but it is time to consider a third point,—that in actual argument
defenders of the test of rhythm seem really to come off better than
their foes. These opponents start in a fog, and fog besets them all
their way. The main authority to which they appeal is Aristotle; but
over certain passages[78] in the _Poetics_, their point of departure,
hangs a haze of uncertainty if not of contradiction. It is doubtful
whether Aristotle really meant to say what champions of poetry in prose
declare him to have said; moreover, these brave texts must be taken
along with a brief but pregnant passage in which he looks at origins and
beginnings of poetry, a passage which lends itself less readily to the
purposes of those who would sweep rhythm from the field. Indeed, sundry
say that this is not Aristotle’s meaning in the brave text itself.
“Language without metre,” observes Whately,[79] is a bad translation; it
should be “metre without music.” Twining,[80] one of the best
commentators, refers to that other passage, where one is told that
“imitation being natural to us, and ... melody and rhythm being also
natural, ... those persons in whom, originally, these propensities were
the strongest, were naturally led to rude and extemporaneous attempts,
which, gradually improved, gave birth to poetry.” Twining makes a
judicious comment. “In this deduction of the art from the mimetic and
musical instincts, Aristotle _includes verse in his idea of poetry_,
which he at least _considered as imperfect without it_. All that he
drops, elsewhere, to the disparagement of metre, must be understood only
comparatively: it goes no further than to say that imitation, that is,
fiction and invention, deserves the title of poetry, or making, better
than verse without imitation.” Elsewhere, too, as Twining shows,
Aristotle puts verse among the requisites of poetry.[81] A good
Aristotelian, J. C. Scaliger, a greater man, by the way, than modern
criticism concedes, who first in his time undertook a science of poetry
and not a mere guide to the art, who broke new ground, and who had at
least the instincts of historical and comparative method, is squarely
for the test of verse.[82] Poetry is imitation in verse. In the opening
sections of his work[83] he calls the poet not so much a maker of
fiction as of verses,[84] defends rhythm almost in Hamann’s phrase as
the mother-tongue of man, derives poetry from singing, and, with a touch
of psychological method, makes appeal to the child who must go to sleep
with song.[85] In the later sections,[86] he vigorously attacks the idea
of poetry in prose. He is followed by another pioneer of the historic
treatment of dogma, G. J. Vossius, who, tossing to the winds any notion
that verse itself makes the poet, declares that verse is nevertheless
condition of the poetic work.[87] For poetry was meant to be sung—the
genetic consideration has a strong and wholesome influence upon these
men—and how can that be sung which has no rhythm? Or take the rhythm
from the Iliads; they turn to mere “fabulous stories.” Briefly, while
metres without the aid of diction and genius can make no poem,
fiction—Aristotelian imitation—is powerless without the help of verse.
To the same purpose and earlier, Isaac Casaubon; the test of poetry is
rhythm, and any utterance which comes under metrical laws is so far a
poem.[88] Scaliger, Vossius, and Casaubon are “good”; and their credit
comes down to them from their betters. Petrarch, with Latin so at his
heart, could never confuse poetry and prose. Dante’s definition[89] is
cold comfort for the heretic about a rhythmic test. Of the smaller fry,
Ronsard certainly cleaves to this test of rhythm in poetry.[90]
Gascoigne, as the title of his little treatise shows, assumes with his
teacher Ronsard that verse is the condition if not the essence of the
art; and Puttenham, Webbe, Campion, Daniel, Harvey, even Spenser,[91]
lean the same way. Sidney, it was shown above, is no real opponent.
Bacon himself, quoted so often to sustain the cause of poetry in prose,
should be read more carefully;[92] he really tosses to the winds all
question of form, and turns to poetry as “one of the principal portions
of learning.”

So the great age thought of poetry; and so the balance inclines as one
comes nearer to our own days. Isaac Vossius, in a curious work[93]
published without his name, holds to his father’s view of the case.
Shaftesbury[94] is peremptory for “metred prose,” but, as both a lord
and a wit, disdains to give his reasons; while another person of
quality, Sir William Temple[95] indeed, regards metred prose as a
monstrosity. Trapp, in his Oxford lectures,[96] is squarely for the
rhythmic test, and will hold it in the teeth of all Aristotelians; so
will another professor of poetry, Polycarp Leyser,[97] of Helmstadt, a
rationalist in his day, who thinks it high time to have a modern system
of poetics not drawn altogether from the ancients.

Across the channel, meanwhile, relations of poetry and prose had been
discussed, now as an eddy in the maelstrom of argument about ancients or
moderns, now as a question for itself. The _Télémaque_ of Fénelon was
defended as a great poem in prose; to the objection that it was not
written in verse, came answers in abundance. One of them, for example,
calls upon the ancients;[98] Aristotle, Dionysius, Strabo, said that
verse is not essential to epic poetry. “One may write it in prose, as
one writes tragedies without rime.” And the old saw—“one can make verses
without poetry, and be quite poetic without making verse”—is followed by
a definition of the whole matter; what constitutes a poem is “the lively
plot, the bold figures, the beauty and variety of the images; it is the
fire, the enthusiasm, the impetuosity, the force, a _je ne sais quoi_ in
the words and in the thoughts which only nature can give.” So run a
dozen other elaborate pleas for prose in poetry; but the arguments
usually end in contradiction, and nothing is brought forward that really
sets aside the feeling long ago expressed by Tom Dekker[99] in his
sputtering, pamphleteer style, that “poetrie, like honestie and olde
souldiers, goes upon lame feete unlesse there be musicke in her,” and
that both poets and musicians are children of Phœbus: “the one creates
the ditty and gives it the life or number, the other lends it voyce and
makes it speake musicke.”

Even those great changes which the second half of the eighteenth century
brought about in the making and in the judging of poetry, left this
matter of prose and verse in its old estate. Whenever the critic has a
writer to set up, a writer to pull down, this test of verse will be
thrust aside; and it is no surprise to find men who belong to the same
literary creed—say Warton and Lowth—failing to see eye to eye in this
one article of faith. Joseph Warton,[100] in his guarded attack upon
Pope, is working slowly to the inference that it is not genius, but a
vast talent, shiftiness of phrase and smoothness of verse, that must
explain Pope’s overwhelming success. Hence Warton, in a reaction from
this polished and accurate rhythm,[101] is sure that real poetry does
not depend on verse. The sublime and the pathetic “are the two chief
nerves of genuine poetry.” Lowth,[102] on the other hand, though quite
in line with the new critical movement, setting about his great work,
and undertaking to make his audience feel and know the Hebrew scriptures
to be poetry, puts metrical questions in the forefront of his study and
will prove that these poems are in verse. He would fain shun this path,
thorny as it is and full of snares; but it is a necessary part of his
journey, for he is sure that poetry is not to be considered apart from
metrical form, and it ceases to be poetry when it is reduced to
prose.[103] Here Lowth and Warton clash not only on the main point, but
on this subsidiary matter of translation. Warton said that by no
“process of critical chymistry,” such as dropping the measure and
transposing the words, can one disguise the _Iliad_, say, or the
_Paradise Lost_, and “reduce them to the tameness of prose.” Reduced to
prose, says Lowth, poetry does cease to be poetry. It is strange to see
how both sides of the controversy in this matter of verse and prose
appeal to translation, and it is mournful to note the unstable character
of what ought to be firm and fundamental facts. A. W. Schlegel, one
remembers, stood for translations in verse. So Whately, following
Lowth’s opinion, appeals to translation for proof that to break the
verse is to shatter the poem;[104] Racine,[105] on the other hand,
appealed to a translation of Isaiah to fortify exactly the opposite
opinion. Or will it be said that Goethe has settled this question in
favour of Warton’s view? Every critic knows the oracle from Weimar which
declared the best part of a poem to be whatever remains when it is
translated into prose; every critic, however, is not at pains to quote
the entire passage, with its important concession to verse and its
reason for the statement as a whole. “I honour,” says Goethe,[106]
“rhythm as well as rime, _by which poetry really comes to be
poetry_;[107] but the thorough and permanent effect, what develops one
and helps one on one’s way, is that which is left of the poet when he is
translated into prose. Here is nothing but the contents pure and
simple,—otherwise often concealed, or, if absent, replaced by a fine
exterior form. _For this reason I think prose translations better than
poetical in the early stages of education._” He goes on to recommend a
prose version of Homer, to praise Luther’s Bible; but it is clear that
the whole extract is no argument against the test of rhythm. Not to
insist on Goethe’s concession that it is rhythm which makes poetry to be
poetry, one may note how little prose translation does for a lyric,
which, after all, is the poet’s poem. What would be left in prose, any
prose, of Goethe’s own _Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh’_? The heart of
poetry is another matter, its spirit, its informing life;[108] the
historian meets it in terms of its bodily appearance, and must have a
concrete test. There is no valid test for the historian save this test
of rhythm. Particularly as sociological and historical responsibility
begins to weigh upon the critic, he finds that such a test is demanded
by his work. Adam Smith[109]—Blair[110] is almost with him, but slips in
a plea for Ossian—is distinctly on the side of verse. So is
Monboddo,[111] a pioneer in anthropology, keen, observant, who did his
thinking for himself, and condemned “all that has been written of late
in the rhapsody style, or measured prose,” declaring that “poetry is
nothing more than measured rhythm.” Sensible things, too, were said on
this matter by men who have left no traces in criticism; one of these
sayings seems to be a pretty conclusion and summary of the whole debate.
Dr. Thomas Barnes, a Unitarian clergyman now forgotten, but one of the
founders of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester, an
interesting group of men, read, in December, 1781, a paper[112] “On the
Nature and Essential Character of Poetry as Distinguished from Prose.”
He turns to origins, and refers to “the common remark that the original
language of mankind was poetical”; he turns to ethnological hints, and,
following Dr. John Brown, speaks of “Indian orators at this day”; then,
summing up the case, he charges for rhythm. “To finished and perfect
poetry, or rather to the highest order of poetic compositions, are
necessary, elevation of sentiment, fire of imagination, and regularity
of metre. This is the summit of Parnassus. But from this sublimest point
there are gradual declinations till you come to the reign of prose. _The
last line of separation is that of regular metre._” Dr. Thomas Barnes is
forgotten; but his statement of the case is memorable above a host of
admired and often quoted deliverances on poetic art.

As one steps into the modern world, one finds the controversy in its old
estate, getting no help from new methods and ridiculous enough, by this
expense of motion without progress, in contrast with the gain made by
sciences of every other sort. Does Coleridge,[113] master of rhythm,
reject rhythm as a test, Poe[114] comes forward to declare it an
essential condition, and to announce “the certainty that music, in its
various modes of metre, rhythm, and rime, is of so vast a moment in
poetry as never to be wisely rejected.” Carlyle himself, reckoned by
sundry critics as a poet in prose, names the “vulgar” definition of
verse only to approve it. Germans, he says,[115] have spoken of
“infinitude” as differencing true poetry from true speech not poetical;
“if well meditated, some meaning will gradually be found in it. For my
own part, I find considerable meaning in the old vulgar distinction of
poetry being metrical, having music in it, being a song.” And he really
adopts the test,—of course, with characteristic riders. “Observe,” he
says, “how all passionate language does of itself become musical ... all
deep things are song.... Poetry, therefore, we will call _musical
thought_.” So, again, the vague and passionate protests of Stuart Mill
beat in vain against such a temperate statement as Whately made in his
_Rhetoric_.[116] “Any composition in verse (and none that is not) is
always called, whether good or bad, a Poem, by all who have no favourite
hypothesis to maintain.... The title of Poetry does not necessarily
imply the requisite beauties of Poetry.” Such a test, cried Mill,[117]
is vulgarest of all definitions, and “one with which no person possessed
of the faculties to which poetry addresses itself can ever have been
satisfied.” This “wretched mockery of a definition” is more than
inadequate; for poetry may exist in prose as well as in verse, may even
do without words, and can speak through musical sounds, through
sculpture, painting, and architecture. It is strange to hear Mill making
a serious formula out of phrases to which one is indulgent enough when
they come in half playful guise.[118] Apart from the uselessness of such
a formula,—fancy the historian of poetry opening a new chapter with “We
will now consider the Parthenon!”—it has no theoretical value, as is
easy to see when Mill begins to run his division lines. Two definitions
of poetry please him, one, by Ebenezer Elliott, that it is “impassioned
truth,” the other, by a writer in _Blackwood_, that it is “man’s thought
tinged by his feelings.” But these “fail to distinguish poetry from
eloquence,” and Mill goes on to say that eloquence is “something heard,”
while poetry is “something overheard.” Something overheard? I mean, he
explains, that “all poetry is in the nature of a soliloquy,” is “the
natural fruit of solitude and meditation.” Now this is sheer nonsense,
although more than one critic has hailed it as an oracle; of that which
comes down to us as poetry, a good part is anything but soliloquy or the
fruit of solitude. “Read Homer,” cried out Herder, perhaps at the other
extreme, but certainly with better reason than Mill, “as if he were
singing in the streets!” It will be shown how vast a proportion of
poetry, too, that belongs to the higher class, was made and sung in
throngs of men. Poetry is a social fact. Mill’s own words defeat him.
“Whosoever writes out truly any human feeling, writes poetry”; and “what
is poetry but the thoughts and words _in which emotion spontaneously
embodies itself_?” A few pages before, it was “the fruit of solitude and
meditation,” a test that would make poetry of Kant’s categorical
imperative, refusing the title to Luther’s outburst at the diet,
although this at once becomes poetry if one accepts the later definition
in terms of emotional spontaneity. And that wrath at the “vulgarity” of
a rhythmic test is nothing more than the old mistake; because, forsooth,
colours and lines fail to account in themselves for the grandeur of
painting, one jumps to the assertion that paintings need not have
colours and lines. Let us cling to vulgarity, if leaving it means to
assert that the Parthenon is a poem, and, by implication, that a sigh is
a statue.

One of the most consistent expositions of poetry is that given by
Hegel.[119] Here is a careful abstract of propositions as carefully
formulated and proved. He has ruled out the “poetic sentence.” Specimens
of the sublime, like that _Let there be light, and there was light_
which Longinus[120] admired, are not poetry. History, too, is excluded,
Herodotus, Tacitus, and the rest,[121] as well as eloquence, and not as
Shelley rejects Cicero, on personal grounds, but because of the law in
the case. Yet this summary is still inadequate as a practical test, and
with it the historian is in a plight no better than when with Sidney or
Coleridge he was including whatever piece of writing seemed certainly
though indefinitely poetic. In the latter case he steered by a compass
which was at the mercy of unnumbered hidden magnets; in the former case
the signs on the card are blurred.[122] But Hegel does not leave the
matter here; purposely or not, he gives a clear test for the historian
when, twenty pages later, he comes to speak of versification. Professors
Gayley and Scott[123] point out that the present writer has made too
much of this concession; instead of saying that verse is “the only
condition absolutely demanded by poetry,” one should say that Hegel
makes verse indispensable. But this is quite enough for the purpose. The
passage in question runs thus: “To be sure, prose put into verse is not
poetry, but simply verse, just as mere poetic expression in what is
otherwise prosaic treatment results only in a poetic prose; _but
nevertheless, metre or rime, being the one and only sensuous aroma,[124]
is absolutely demanded for poetry, and indeed is even more necessary
than store of imagery, the so-called beautiful diction_.” And now for
Hegel’s reason, which quite agrees with the historian’s demand for an
available test. He goes on to say that the fact of verse in any piece of
literature shows at once, as poetry indeed demands there should be
shown, that one is in another realm from the realm of prose, of daily
life; this constraint, if one likes to call it constraint, forces the
poet outside the bounds of common speech into a province wholly
submitted to the laws of art. That poetry has to be something more than
this, that there are other canons, nobody denies; but the first step for
a poet is into this realm of verse where he must prove in sterner tests
and by other achievements whether he is citizen or trespasser.

Hegel, it might be said, is in the clouds; he is out of touch with
science, and with that logic of facts which rules investigations of the
present day. But the same way of thinking holds with a practical
Englishman like Mr. Edmund Gurney,[125] whose feet are planted very
firmly on solid ground, who is distinctly hostile to the poem in prose,
that “pestilent heresy,” as Professor Saintsbury has called it, and
whose idea of art, which always includes an appeal to the sense of form,
demands in poetry a definite metre or rhythm. And the same way of
thinking holds with a student of modern psychology, M. Souriau,[126] who
undertakes to define poetry in terms of science. Poetry itself derives
from music and prose,—presumably he means by prose the speech of daily
life, and not what Walter Pater means in his essay on Style when he
makes “music and prose literature ... the opposite terms of art”; poetry
might therefore be called musical speech.[127] To show how much depends
on the music, M. Souriau turns to translations from foreign poetry into
prose vernacular. “The more poetical this original text, the more it
loses in the change.... This depreciation is due to the change of
process, and not to the change of tongue, for the translation of a piece
of prose would not show these faults.” On the other hand, now, take an
irreproachable piece of verse, with this superiority just shown to be
due to its rhythm, and look at it with regard to logical worth. How
unsatisfying, how “thin,” is the thought in it! Change again the point
of view, and study poetry for its music; one will be no better pleased
than when one hunted for its thought. The rhythm would be intolerably
monotonous in a piece of music. The sonorous words, taken as sound, are
not really pleasing to the ear. Rime, if one will look at it this way,
is a _procédé enfantin_. In sum, poetry is logically inferior to prose,
and musically inferior to pure melody,—and what, then, is its own charm?
It pleases us, not by either one of these elements, but by their
combination; it is harmony, but in a peculiar sense. “It is not the
harmony of thought, logical system, and order, not the harmony of sounds
or musical system, but the harmony between sounds and thoughts. _One
loves to feel the idea bending and adjusting itself to the rules of
verse, and the verse yielding to the demands of the idea._”[128]

It is time to close the poll. For poetry in prose no one has spoken in
such a temperate and yet forcible fashion as Mr. Frederic Harrison,[129]
though his arguments are by no means new. Nothing but “poetry,” he
asserts, can serve as the word to express what one finds in Malory’s
_Death of Arthur_, in chapters of Job and Isaiah. But arguments such as
he makes with energy and eloquence lose their force when confronted with
the cool reasoning of Mr. Bosanquet,[130] who shows clearly that poetry,
whatever else it may be, must be rhythmic utterance. Even in the clash
of opinion between these modern writers, one finds what is to be found
throughout the entire controversy, down from the days of the early
renaissance, that the advocates of a rhythmic test for poetry have the
better of the argument. It has been shown that there is no other test
for the historian of poetry as a social institution; and whenever
another test has been set up, its own advocates have not only abandoned
it in practice, but even in theory have obscured it with a mass of
contradictions.[131]

There remains, of course, the _ambulando_ argument; the champion of
poetry in prose points to the work which passes under this name. A book
could be written on the long series of concessions in matter of
territory which verse has made to prose; but no sensible critic will
allow these transfers to prove that poetry has ceased to be rhythmic
utterance. The most obvious transfer, of course, is translation; is not
the English Bible as noble poetry, one asks, as can be found in any time
or clime? Mr. Theodore Watts[132] is sure of the rhythmic test until he
faces the claims of this noblest prose. Yet surely what appeals to us
here is not poetry, but the genius of the English tongue at its greatest
and best,[133] flinging its full strength upon a task which at the time
lay close to the heart of the English people. The Bible is not the
masterpiece of our poetry, but of our prose; it beats not only with the
divine pulse of its original, but also with that immense vitality and
energy of English religious life in days when to many Englishmen life
and religion were identical. That does not make it poetry. One must not
open the gates of poetry to this or that passage of prose, and shut
them, through whim or shame, upon a thousand other passages.[134] Let in
that great chapter of Job, and anon _Werther_ is there, _Silas Marner_,
_Tom Jones_,—we have marshalled this rout already. No, if the Bible be
poetry, it is because it is rhythmic utterance, not because it is
sublime. That tremendous reach of emotion borne on the cadence of a
style majestic and clear, the voice of a solitary desolation crying to
the desolation of all mankind, the wail of an eternal and unanswered
question—

Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery,
And life unto the bitter in soul?

—is not this a poem? It is almost certainly a poem in the original; it
might be a poem in English, provided the rhythm of the lines, printed as
they now are, with parallelism and cadence properly brought out, seemed
to the reader to have a recurrent regularity which could take it into
the sphere of rhythmic law; otherwise it is prose, the prose of great
literature, indeed, but prose. It must be granted, too, that the latter
view is preferable. As great literature, the book of Job belongs with
Dante, and Milton, and with a few passages, where Goethe touches the
higher levels, in _Faust_; but it is not poetry in the sense that Dante
and Milton and Goethe impress upon one when one reads their great
passages. Longinus writes on the sublime in literature, and he is within
his rights when he puts Thucydides and Homer and Moses upon one plane;
but it is the plane of sublimity in thought and phrase, and it is not
the plane of poetry. Poetry has no monopoly of the emotions; a line that
stirs the heart is poetry when it belongs in a rhythmic whole, and is
prose when it does not. _Tendentesque manus ripae ulterioris amore_ is
Vergil’s verse; “the future balances and the hieroglyphic meanings of
human suffering” is De Quincey’s prose. Carlyle says of his murdered
Princess de Lamballe, “She was beautiful; she was good; she had known no
happiness,”—anvil-strokes as strong as the strongest in English speech.
Webster, over his murdered Duchess of Malfi, makes the brother cry out,
“Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young.” What have phrases
like “poetic prose” to do with great literature of this sort, and how
will one distinguish between these two isolated passages, both throbbing
with an intensity of expression which breaks out in the three short
clauses? Well, the rhythm of one comes to its rights in the full poetic
period where Webster, rough as his verses are, infused a noble harmony;
while the cadence of the other falls naturally into the sweep of
Carlyle’s prose. Dryden, indeed, with his wonted critical felicity,
gives the key of the whole matter. “Thoughts,” he says in his preface to
the _Fables_, “thoughts come crowding in so fast upon me, that my only
difficulty is to choose or to reject, to run them into verse, _or to
give them the other harmony of prose_.”

Since Turgot[135] told France and the world that a new kind of poetry
had come in the guise of Gessner’s prose idylls the poem in prose has
made many claims for Parnassian recognition. At Bertrand we have glanced
already; his scholar Baudelaire[136] made as bold essay; and so, in
quite recent times, the Swede Ola Hansson;[137] all these are Werther
with a difference, and in the last case with a dash of Nietzsche. He,
too, wrote a dithyrambic prose for his hysterical but noteworthy
Zarathustra; yet who does not feel the passage, as into another realm of
art, when one suddenly comes upon that powerful lyric in verse,[138] _O
Mensch, gieb Acht?_ Nietzsche, to be sure, had something to say; but
with the little men these dithyrambic phrases threaten to turn into mere
raving, and often carry out the threat. What saves a poet from this
danger, and the great poets know it, is the dignity, the self-restraint,
and the communal human sympathy of rhythm, which binds one, as in that
old consent of voice and step, to one’s fellows, and checks all
individual centrifugal follies; there are no bounds, no laws, there is
no decorum, in such whirling words, until they whirl in ordered motion
and until cosmos is where chaos was. “Slaves by their own compulsion,”
these sensual and dark things rebel in vain against the laws of poetic
form; pastels and whatever else, they have not even the dignity of truly
great prose. They are out of their sphere; to adapt a line from the
_Dunciad_, prose on stilts is several degrees worse than poetry fallen
lame.

Poetry, then, is still rhythmic utterance, though it has lost great
stretches of territory to prose. Prose, to be sure, makes a tempting
proposition to her impoverished friend. “Let us call ourselves by one
name,” she says, “unite all our power, and so make front against
science.” Such a union has long appealed to the French. Fénelon, one
knows, sought thus to revive the epic; and many pens were set scratching
for or against the _Télémacomanie_. Chateaubriand[139] tried a cadenced
prose in his _Martyrs_, by way of putting new life into sacred poetry.
Flaubert[140] and sundry of his school, above all, the Italian
D’Annunzio, annex poetry to the prose romance, and not poetry as an
informing spirit simply, but the cadences, the colour, the very
refrain.[141] Maeterlinck uses the poetic device of repetition—say in
the _Princesse Maleine_—to the verge of regular rhythm. Rime itself is
not excluded; witness this from D’Annunzio’s novel:[142] “rideva,
gemeva, pregava, cantava, accarezzava, singhiozzava, miniaciava; ilare,
flebile, umile, ironica, lusinghevole, disperata, crudele.”[143] Is
poetry, then, fallen by the wayside, and has prose spoiled her of her
raiment, so as to stand hereafter in her stead? No. Whatever Walter
Pater may have done for English or these men for Italian and French,
they have at best set up a new euphemism[144] of no real promise and
permanence. When the final balance is struck, these writers will perhaps
take a place in prose analogous, even if in a contrary spirit, to the
place of Swift in verse. Swift’s “unpoetic verse” is remorselessly
clear, remorselessly direct; one must read his poetry, and in great
measure admire, even like it, for its compelling energy and lucidity of
style. Yet, after all, one feels that these are alien virtues, imported
from the realm of prose; and one reads Swift’s poems much as one listens
to a foreigner conversing correctly, admirably, in one’s own tongue. And
as with Swift’s prose excellence in poetry, so with this poetic
excellence in prose; in the long account, _laudatur et alget_. It makes
the vain attempt to move landmarks set up, not by men, but by man, by
human nature itself.

So much for the theories; but it must now be proved beyond question that
rhythm is the vital and essential quality in the beginnings of poetic
art. Where to draw the line between prose and verse, between the
recurrence which is regular and which is called for our purposes rhythm,
and the recurrence that is not regular, is hard indeed; but perhaps a
satisfactory rule may be given in the words of Professor Budde, a
distinguished student of that Hebrew poetry to which so many advocates
of the prose poem have made appeal. “The fundamental law of form in all
poetry,” he says,[145] “by which in every race and at all times verse is
distinguished from prose, is that while in prose the unchecked current
of speech flows consistently as far as the thought carries it, the range
of thought and the length of the sentence changing often and in many
ways, verse, on the other hand, divides its store of thought into
relatively short lines which appeal to the ear as distinct not only by
this shortness, but also by relations determined by laws definite,
indeed, but varying with different races and languages. Whenever the
formal factors of poetry are enriched, these smallest units, the verses
or lines, tend to join, by a new bond, in a higher unit of form.”[146]
This formal factor may be now alliteration, now rime; with the Hebrews,
says Budde, it was the thought, which made a higher unit of the short
and separated units of line or verse. Lowth’s _parallelismus membrorum_
does not quite cover the rhythmical structure of Hebrew verse; no matter
if a fixed metre has not yet been found, the rhythm is evident, and its
law is essentially equal length of the verses within the group.[147] For
a test, one must fall back upon that original organ of poetry, the human
voice. Slave to the eye, one often reads as prose what one could read,
or what could be read to one, as poetry.[148] In any case, there will be
debatable ground, perhaps neutral ground; but it is safe to say from
theory, from the practical trial, from arguments of the learned, that so
far the effort to obliterate verse or rhythm as the real boundary line
of poetic territory, has proved a failure, and is likely to prove a
failure as often as it shall be tried. The case must be taken to the
court of human history and human progress; brought hither, all the
arguments for poems in prose lose their power. If, as Bücher says, one
is unwilling nowadays to let rhythmic speech pass, merely in so far as
it is rhythmic speech, for poetry, that is because ages of culture, with
increasing æsthetic demands, have quite naturally added new conditions;
but the beginning of poetry as an æsthetic fact was in the sense of
rhythm. The poem now laboriously wrought at the desk goes back to the
rhythm of work or play or dance in the life of primitive man, and the
element of rhythm is the one tie that binds beginning and end; if poetry
denies rhythm, it denies itself.

This statement itself, however, certain of the learned now vehemently
oppose, and bring reasons for their attitude quite different from such
arguments as we have been considering for the prose poem. Rhythm itself,
they maintain, is the outcome of prose. It is the child, says one bold
German, of grammatical inflections and the stress of oratory. Here is
fine revolution, indeed, if they have the trick to show it. Strabo, in a
classic sentence,[149] laid down the law which writer after writer has
taken without question as undisputed and indisputable authority; poetry
came before prose. “Flowery prose,” he said, “is nothing but an
imitation of poetry,” which is the “origin of all rhetorical language,”
and was at first always sung; “the very term _prose_,” he concludes,
“which is applied to language not clothed in metre, seems to indicate
... its descent from an elevation, or chariot, to the ground.” Hence the
_sermo pedestris_ of Latin writers. Against this, now, come sundry
scattered hints and at least two elaborate arguments. Vigfusson and
Powell,[150] after a consideration of old Scandinavian poetry, are fain
to think that Germanic rhythm was at the start simply “excited and
emphatic prose,” and make rhythm in general not an essential so much as
an accomplishment and aftergrowth of poetry. Finding no metre in this
same Norse poetry, none in Hebrew, Gottsched,[151] while he allowed that
songs were the earliest poetic form, thought them to have been simple
unmetrical chants, as if a child should sing the Lord’s prayer. Many
ballads, even English and Scottish, seem to show with other supposed
primitive traits a rough and faulty structure of verse, so that certain
critics, in their haste, make the lack of smooth metres a test of
age,—an idea which long prevailed in regard to Chaucer’s versification.
It is said[152] that until the beginning of the seventeenth century
Hungarian poetry was “quite without system, without rhythm, full of bad
rimes, and mainly made up of verses joined in long, monotonous rows”;
this, however, as in India, may have been the case not with lyric, but
only with epic. Comparetti thinks that the _Kalevala_ was founded upon
earlier poetic or roughly rhythmic prose,—again a matter of epic; and
earliest Japanese poetry, so far as it has been preserved, “is not far
removed from prose.”[153] Now and then, but not often, one is told that
savage songs have no regular rhythm and no settled order in the verse.
If it be true that mere counting of syllables was the earliest form of
common Aryan versification, it is at first sight not so unreasonable to
assume some sort of excited prose as a common basis for this system as
well as for the systems of quantitative and of accentual rhythm.
Moreover, as will be shown in later pages, there is a feeling abroad
which runs counter to any notion of spontaneity, and insists upon a
process of invention and imitation; this, too, would make against a
natural rhythm,[154] would throw out rhythm as an essential and
primitive part of poetry.[155] So much for scattered hints and
observations; there are more elaborate attacks.

In a treatise by Norden[156] on ancient artistic prose, one has under
one’s hand all the evidence which can be gathered from the classics,
particularly the Greek, for this view of the relations between prose and
verse; here, too, are ranged certain arguments against that old notion
of the precedence of poetry.[157] Musical sense, rhythm, was given to
man with the spoken word itself, as in historical times to the Hellenic
folk, whose melodious sentence is as inaudible as the music of the
spheres to an ear dependent upon modern speech. Now before poetry was
developed, Norden assumes, there was a rhythmic prose distinguished by
some kind of emphasis from the speech of daily life; thence sprang on
one hand the rhythm of regular poetry, and on the other hand a rhythm of
impassioned, oratorical prose. The oratory of Greece was a kind of
chanting, and the gestures that went with it were a species of dance;
but these in no way could be called identical with the singing or
recitation of poetry. Then came confusion. Gorgias began a new era when
he imported certain elements of poetry into his prose; even the rimed
prose of the Middle Ages Norden[158] calls “the result of a thousand
years of development from the time of Gorgias.” The early results,
however, were destructive. Tragedy, thinks our author, was ruined in
Hellas because all barriers were broken down between poetry and prose,
and rhetoric overwhelmed the drama; great epos yielded to great history;
gnomic poetry vanished; epigram supplanted elegy; dithyramb made room
for lofty prose at large.[159] But this is nothing more than a process
in civilized Greece analogous to the process in our own day described a
few pages above. Even the tradition of the classical writers pointed
back to an age of poetry which preceded prose; for while Strabo, in the
passage already considered, and Varro,[160] speak of actual literature
which they had in hand, Plutarch, writing on the Pythian oracle, made
poetry the product of primitive times and prose the outcome of
prehistorical decadence. Against this tradition, which he makes a mere
glorification of the golden age, Norden argues with learning and
acuteness, and from material furnished by Greek literature itself. But
Greek literature is surely no criterion for primitive song; persistent
as this prejudice is,[161] Norden sees that ethnology has better points
of view, and in one or two places he calls upon it for aid.[162] The
distinction between poetry and prose is, for him, “secondary, not
essential,” for the reason that he cannot find this distinction in the
earliest expression of formal or solemn language known to the various
races of man, whether on highest or lowest planes of culture. His
summary may be quoted, temperate and reasonable as it is; it appeals to
ethnological arguments, which would be close upon convincement if they
did not utterly neglect, as nearly all writers on poetry have neglected,
the communal basis of the art, and the fundamental consideration that
earliest poetry is more a social than an individual expression. Norden’s
eye is fixed upon the priest, the poet, the medicine man, the lawgiver;
he forgets the throng, and he forgets that the throng was mainly active
and rarely passive in the primitive stages of poetry. But let his own
summary be heard.[163] The line now drawn between poetry and prose, he
maintains, was unknown to primitive races. Forms of magic, the language
of the laws, ceremonial religious rites, were everywhere made in prose;
not, however, in the prose of daily conversation, but in a prose removed
from common conditions by two factors: first, it was spoken in measured,
solemn tones, and so became rhythmical,—not the regular rhythm of song,
but a sort of chant or recitation,[164] so that one may figure the early
priest like his modern brother, the snowy-banded, delicate-handed one,
at his intoning; and, secondly, it was furnished, for emphasis and for
the help of memory, with certain vocal expedients, such as alliteration
and rime, which are inborn alike in the most civilized and in the
wildest races. This kind of prose existed before there was any artistic
poetry. Norden would like to see more work done in the field of early
legal and religious forms; old Latin prayers, old Germanic laws, for
example, have been coaxed or bullied into some metrical scheme, and made
to pass as poetry. Elsewhere he takes the case of that prayer to Mars
which Westphal and Allen called Saturnian verse; by Norden’s reckoning,
this is mainly alliterative, rhythmic prose; only the second half can be
called metrical; and he is convinced that Saturnian verse itself is
nothing but the later metrical equipment of what was once rhythmic prose
solemnly spoken with two sections to the line. _Carmen_, he goes on to
say, is originally any solemn formula whether spoken or sung, whether
rhythmic prose, even simple prose, or verse;[165] that is “settled.” It
is a clever suggestion, too, that rhythmic prose belongs with what one
now calls the loose sentence, while artistic prose, contemporary with
artistic and metrical poetry, came into prominence with the periodic
structure;[166] so the tale, like Grimm’s familiar “There was once a
king’s son, and he was very beautiful ...,” in its uninvolved,
consecutive phrases, would give one an idea of the early rhythmic prose.

All this is useful and suggestive; but it by no means does away with the
fact of regular rhythmic utterance for primitive times. Who, for
example, is going to believe that rime and alliteration were developed
before regular rhythm,—regular rhythm, as will presently be shown,
standing out as the one fact about savage poetry to which nearly all
evidence of ethnology gives assent? Who will deny that quite as early as
any priest recited his prayer or buzzed his magic in solemn prose, there
was a throng of folk dancing and singing with a rhythm as exact as may
be? Did the priests, even, recite in “irregular rhythmic prose” that
repeated _enos Lases juvate_ of the Arval rites, sung as they beat the
ground in concerted measure of the dance? “So long,” says Usener[167] in
his book on old Greek verse, “so long as human societies turned in
solemn and festal manner to the divinities, so long they made petition,
thanks, laud, in measured and rhythmic verse, and the words were
inseparable from singing and the steps of the march.” For purposes of
this kind, and such purposes are the very soul of primitive social life,
chanted prose is out of the question. An excellent authority in musical
matters, Dr. Jacobsthal,[168] points out that the rhythm, if one may so
call it, of the chant stands to real rhythm as prose stands to verse,
and that the song to which a throng must dance, as in primitive times,
_can “in no case” lack the regular rhythm_. Who, moreover, that has read
Bücher’s essay can overlook the fact that primitive labour must have
begotten an exact rhythm, and very early must have given meaning to this
rhythm by more or less connected words? The proof, offered not only by
Norden but in those scattered hints already noted, breaks down when
confronted with hard facts. Ballad metres are often rough in the copies
which have come down to us, but a hundred considerations show this to
have been the fault of the copy itself, not of the makers and
singers,[169] and to have been due to the transfer from oral to written
conditions. There seems to be no reason why a letter should not be
quoted which the late Professor Child wrote in 1885 to the author of the
present book; “any _volkslied_,” he said, “shows as good an ear as any
Pindaric ode by Gray or whomever else.” It is the sense of complicated
metres which is due to culture and intellectual development, and not the
sense of exact and simple rhythm. As regards that protoplasmic prose of
the popular tale, which Norden calls “the essential test of primitive
speech,” how can he prove that it is the essential test of primitive
song? How different Bruchmann, who admits early prose narrative, but
says distinctly that early poetry, lyric outpouring of emotion, was
song; “the earliest of all poetry” for him is communal song, _gesang in
gemeinschaft_, golden words indeed! Grosse is to the same effect. Who
denies the tale, the loose prose style in short sentences verging on
rhythmic effects? Of course the entertainer told his tale betimes; but
earlier than this tale, the dance of the throng, as well as the labour
of daily life, had from the very beginning mated sounds and words with
rhythm, precise rhythm, as a festal and consenting act. A mass of
evidence, soon to be considered, is overwhelmingly for this state of
things. Norden appeals for the form of the tale to Radloff, a great
authority; let us do the same for the form of the song. In an article on
poetic forms among the Altaic Tartars,[170] Radloff remarks that in
these isolated tribes popular literature, without even the faintest
influence from the lettered world, has been developed in a quite natural
way. Especially worthy of note, he says, is the strictness of metrical
form in their poetry. He notes, moreover, the inseparable character,
under such conditions, of poetry and song. The specimens which he gives
are anything but rhythmic prose, and the rhythmic law is anything but
loose. The tales on the other hand are quite different; “these are not
sung,” he says, “but recited,” although now and then the reciter sings a
verse or so. Which came first, the entertainer and his audience, or the
festal, singing throng? Evidence of ethnology and conclusions of
sociology certainly put the singing, dancing throng as a primary social
fact, and the relation of audience to entertainer as a secondary social
fact. Mr. Joseph Jacobs[171] has hailed the _cante-fable_ as protoplasm
alike of the metrical ballad and of the prose tale, one omitting prose,
the other omitting verse; and while this does not really help Norden’s
claim, it is worth the while to note how it assumes a development which
is counter to all the facts. Even on its chosen ground of Celtic tales,
this theory meets indications that the verse is original and the prose
of later date.[172] The _cante-fable_ seems like a late form, a device
of the entertainer; the scraps of verse are survivals, just as the
chorus in a Greek drama is the survival of a drama in which all took
part, with no division into actors and spectators. In the Chinese
drama[173] an Occidental ear is offended by a remarkable confusion of
speaking and singing; even a single sentence in the dialogue is so
divided that part is spoken and part is sung. This is no primitive and
protoplasmic state; it is rather the confusion of contraries, than the
germ of related and naturally developed forms of art. Poetry and prose
in historic times have been approaching each other, not diverging, and
the curve of evolution would indicate a wide distinction at the start.
Mixture of prose, as Professor Sievers sees it, is a sign of decay in
the _Muspilli_, in the Hildebrand Lay.[174] On the other hand, in
vigorous poetry like the Roumanian ballad there is no mixture of prose,
while the Roumanian popular tale is sprinkled with verses; yet here is
precisely where the protoplasmic state ought to be found for both arts,
since the poetical style is “simple as possible,” has often no relative
clauses for whole pages, and is full of repetition.[175] Under simple
conditions, poetry often breaks up into prose, but prose is not found in
its transition to poetry; for proof it is enough to quote a recent
writer on German ballads.[176] “More and more,” he says, “the ballads
disintegrate into prose, a process which has been noted for Spain,
Sweden, Scotland, Portugal, and is also known in Germany.”[177] He gives
quotations and references to support his assertion, going on to name
several well-known ballads which began as such and then, in the guise of
prose tales, won as wide and as great a vogue as the originals had
enjoyed before. Perhaps in the case of poetic composition at a time when
intellect has mastered emotion, prose may be the basis of poetry, but
this case has no bearing on primitive conditions. Whether a poet
nowadays conceives his work in prose, as Goethe did in the _Iphigenie_,
or begins with the “brains beat into rhythm,” is an individual matter.
“When Gautier wished to do a good piece of work, he always began in
verse,” say the Goncourts.[178] Tradition makes Vergil write out his
_Æneid_ in prose and then turn it into verse; Vida[179] commends this
method for the prentice in poetry. There is a curious passage in
Goethe’s letter to Schiller of 5 March, 1798, about renewed work on
_Faust_. “Some tragic scenes were done in prose; by reason of their
naturalness and strength they are quite intolerable in relation to the
other scenes. I am, therefore, now trying to put them into rime, for
there the idea is seen as if under a veil, and the immediate effect of
this tremendous material is softened.” This, however, has nothing to do
with primitive conditions of poetry; the simplicity of modern prose is
an effort of art, and belongs with the intellectual empire, while
rhythm, particularly in its early form of repetition, is the immediate
and spontaneous expression of emotion, and likely to be more pronounced
and dominant the nearer one is to the primitive state of things.

What Norden really does is to scour away accretions of silliness,
romantic and sentimental phrases, which are too often held as part and
parcel of a sensible belief about poetry in its early stage. Granted, as
it is to be hoped the reader will ultimately grant, that singing and
dancing wax in importance as one traces back the path of the arts,
granted that verse and song covered a far greater field of activity in
the beginning than they cover now, the notion that men with language in
a fluent state, and on intellectual topics, sang instead of talking,
that primitive life was like an Italian opera-stage, that the better
part of man’s utterance was given over to lyrical wonder at the sunset
and the stars,—these ideas, even when hallowed by great names, must be
tossed to oblivion. But such a jettison by no means involves the sinking
of the ship itself; to change the figure, gentlemen who have overthrown
a minor idol or so must not loudly proclaim that they have razed the
temple and rooted out the faith. For example, Grimm of old and Kögel of
late[180] were too fond of poetic laws; the former confounded quaintness
with beauty, and the latter discovered too much rhythm. The Frisian
code, Kögel seems to have thought, was composed and recited as poetry,
as alliterative verse. Well, this is perhaps Frisiomania of a dangerous
kind, and Dr. Siebs[181] is within his rights in preaching another
sermon on the old but dubious text of _Frisia non cantat_. The laws, he
says, were indeed alliterative; but they were neither rhythmic nor
poetical. So far, so good; the advantage seems to be on the side of
Siebs; the idol totters and possibly falls. But now to pull down the
temple! Whence came this alliteration? Like rime, it is a product of
prose, declares the iconoclast, “having, in the first place, nothing to
do with poetry,” and probably rising in answer to a demand of the
language of trade, which needed to lay stress on the emphatic parts of
one’s plea for a good bargain. That is, the mainstay of all Germanic
rhythm is a “drummer’s” device, and begins in the shifty phrases of the
early Germanic _hausierer_. This is a world of broken hopes. Norden for
rime,[182] and Siebs for alliteration, which is only rime of another
sort, have entered a terrific _caveat_ against the historian of
primitive song. Is rime, then, the fine flower and outgrowth of a
stump-speech, and is alliteration, poor changeling, unmasked in these
latter days as an intruder and an alien in poetic halls, a by-blow of
the primitive bagman? No, the temple is not pulled down. The rhythmical
or unrhythmical character of Frisian laws is one thing; the origin of
rime, the functions and progress of it, cannot be even guessed on the
basis of such studies.

Two attempts, however, to prove the priority of prose, not by the
classics, not by folklore alone, not by alliterative laws, but by
ethnological facts and by comparative methods, may now be considered.
Poetry as a whole, says Professor Biedermann,[183] and regarded in the
genetic way, was not originally bound up with song, not even with
rhythm. Song, he says, does not make poetry, but breaks it, disturbs and
corrupts it. Maori and Malay, he points out, simply recite their legends
and poems; in the old Persian, as in the old Japanese poetry, there is
no rhythm to be found; and he assures his reader “that attempts to prove
the original unity of poetry, music, and rhythm have come to wrack,”—a
statement which needs great store of assurance when one considers it
after reading the book under review. Biedermann’s own theory is offered
in a nutshell. Poetry began as mere repetition, without music or rhythm,
a parlous and naked state indeed; the taste for music is simply a
chastened love of noise;[184] while rhythm is the result of concerted
labour. That in after ages the three wanderers now and then met and
passed the time of day, Biedermann is generous enough not to deny.

More weighty objections are to be found in an article by R. de la
Grasserie.[185] Spoken words, he says, fall into prose as expression of
thought, and into poetry as expression of sentiment; prose is
fundamental, while poetry gets its material from prose, and follows it
in point of time, although it is conceded that the full development of
poetry precedes the full development of prose. At first it would seem
that the author regarded verse as essential to poetry; the poet and the
verse-maker, he says, must be united as a single productive power. But
at once he goes on to ask whether verse be the sole poetic expression,
and answers in the negative. Poetry is creation, “subjective discovery”
of any sort, as opposed to the objective discoveries of science, where
nothing is created. Didactic, mnemonic verse is not poetry, for it is
merely the verse that is mnemonic; and the reason why poetry has come to
be confounded with versification is simply that verse was needed for the
recording or memorizing of poetry.[186] This teleological explanation of
rhythm is a very weak joint in De la Grasserie’s armour; it shows how
easily common sense can make itself ridiculous in its excess, a tendency
commonly ascribed to sentimental and enthusiastic ideas alone. Facing
the splendours of rhythm, knowing how it has held itself abreast of the
lordliest doings of poetry, one laughs at the notion that its only
credentials on Olympus should be its mnemonic convenience; and De la
Grasserie thrusts his explanation handily away among the mists of
primitive song. Then he turns to his theory of poetic growth. Poetry
passed through three stages of expression,—first, prose; next, rhythmic
prose; last, verse. How did poetry begin in prose? Well, it was “prose à
courte haleine,”[187] prose with thought-pauses as frequent as rhythmic
pauses, so that there was no distinction between prose and verse,—and no
good reason, the reader is tempted to add, why this same prose should
not be called verse outright. Exactly what thought-pauses have to do
with a period when poetry consisted in the indefinite repetition of a
very short phrase or even of a single word, and when, by all evidence,
the pause is rhythmic entirely, the author does not say; he is dealing
with a theory and not with facts, and so he assumes a majestic periodic
prose as primitive utterance. Next after “prose” came “rhythmic prose,”
and then verse; but the evolutionary process goes on, and from verse, as
in these latter days, one turns back to prose in rhythm, and yet again
to prose outright. If one asks for a bill of particulars, if one asks
how verse came out of rhythmic prose, one is told that two propositions
may have had the same number of words, just as in Arabic, just as in the
_Avesta_,[188]—that the “two propositions” were once mere repetition,
and sung in perfect time is, of course, not noted,—so that the psychic
pause grows to be one with the rhythmic pause. But, accepting the
impossible terms of the case, what proof is offered that word-counting
and syllable-counting are of higher date than actual rhythm? Granting
this, to be sure, the next step is easy; interior symmetry now comes
into play, the measure of feet, the perfect rhythm of Greek and Latin
verse. What cause, then, was at work thus to develop verse out of prose?
Music and singing, answers the ingenious essayist; but the ingenious
essayist has calmly shut out all facts save such as suit his case, and
one is curious to know what he would do with ethnological evidence in
regard to the priority and primacy of dance and song. Did man come to
this fine mastery of metres and this subtle sense of quantities before
he had begun to dance to his own singing?

If M. de la Grasserie were right, if Professor Norden were right, in
this plea for prose as the parent of verse, a work on the beginnings of
poetry could have nothing to do with verse, and only a little to do with
rhythmic prose. Barring the way to their conclusions stand two facts.
Rhythm is the prime characteristic, the essential condition, of the
dance, and oldest poetry is by common consent found in close alliance
with dance and song. Secondly, as the brilliant essay of Bücher has made
more than probable, backed as it is by evidence of a really primitive
character, and not by theories based upon a highly developed literature,
poetry in some of its oldest forms, older indeed than that supposed
period of earliest prose which M. de la Grasserie assumes for the start,
was not only the companion but the offspring of labour. In postponing
rhythmic utterance to the third great period of the development of
poetry, the champion of prose origins is running counter to tradition,
counter to the consent of science, counter to a formidable array of
facts. It is quite wrong, too, to say[189] that rhythm nowadays depends
upon music to keep it sound and alive; the rhythm of Tennyson’s _Bugle
Song_, of Kipling’s _Recessional_, of any haunting and subtle lyric, may
stir the composer to set it to music, but in no way depends upon music
for its charm. It is quite as wrong to say that rhythm is less effective
now than it has been; a century that knew Goethe, Heine, Shelley,
Tennyson, not to leave Germanic bounds, has no concessions to make in
this respect. Moreover, the account which the essayist gives of Arabic
verse, as developed from prose, is good until another account turns
up,—say that of M. Hartmann,[190] where rhythm is beginning and end of
the matter; and it happens that this account is by an Arabic scholar of
repute.

Considered in all fairness, these attacks have not shaken the belief in
rhythm as something that lies at the heart of poetry. They may well
brush aside some absurdity of romantic origin, but they fail to make
probable or even possible a theory which would overthrow a settled
literary tradition touching all quarters of the globe. It cannot be said
that Norden has proved the growth of poetry out of prose even in the
rhetorical clauses of oratory. From Longinus[191] one learns that an
oration among the Greeks had rhythm, although it was not metrical, and
in its delivery stopped just short of singing; so that one may concede
that the speech of an orator carried to an extreme would give song,
while his harmonious gestures, an art now as good as lost, needed but
little more action and detail to become what the Greeks knew as a dance.
But does any one pretend to say that singing and dancing spring from
individual oratory? Orators now and then still sing or chant in their
speeches. One would like to know more about the sermons which Dr. Fell
preached “in blank verse”;[192] and one is in doubt whether this phrase,
along with Selden’s sneer[193] at those who “preach in verse,” meant a
distinct metrical order of words or only a sing-song of the
voice—literally “cant,” as in the Puritan sermons and in the chant
common not long ago with preachers of the Society of Friends. Any one
who has heard this “singing” of hortatory speech knows that the rhythms
of regular verse, of song and dance, could not possibly be derived from
it. Each form of development must be studied for itself under the
control of ethnological and sociological facts; and the written oration,
with its cadences, goes back to the orator and his listening crowd, just
as the written poem goes back to the improvising poet, and through him
to the dancing communal throng. The attempt to derive exact rhythms of
poetry from loose rhythms of oratorical speech has failed; it remains to
show how these exact rhythms spring from primitive song, dance, and
labour, mainly under communal conditions, and that exact rhythm lies at
the heart of poetry. There are two social situations to be taken for
granted. It is natural for one person to speak or even to sing, and for
ninety-nine persons to listen. It is also natural for a hundred persons,
under strong emotion, to shout, sing, dance, in concert and as a throng,
not as a matter of active and passive, of give and take, but in common
consent of expression. The second situation, still familiar now and
then, is discouraged by civilized conditions, although, as foundation of
social consent, it must have preceded the other situation and must have
been of far greater frequency and importance in the beginnings of social
life. It is this state of things which writers like Norden fail to take
into account; and it is this state of things, with its communal consent
resting on the vital and unifying fact of rhythm, which is now to be
positively proved by the evidence of ethnology, the conclusions of
sociology, and the controlling sense of evolution in poetical as in
social progress.

In treating the positive side of such a subject, one turns instinctively
to the latest word of science; and it would seem that the method which
combines physical facts with psychological processes ought to be an
adequate court of appeal. Dr. Ernst Meumann has undertaken a study of
this sort with regard to rhythm;[194] but his investigations do little
for the historical and genetic side of the case. From his essay, to be
sure, one learns much that is of value, and one is made to see that
certain views of rhythm heretofore in vogue must be considerably
modified; for the main question of primitive rhythm, however, and for
historical purposes at large, one can here learn nothing, since Meumann
uses in his research only that declamatory style of reciting poetry by
which the rhythm is always disguised and usually suppressed.[195] He
denies Paul’s assertion that rhythmic measures in a verse are of equal
duration,—a traditional statement,—because Brücke’s famous experiments,
to which Paul appeals, were made upon folk who “scanned” their verses
and did not recite them. But, for the purposes just named, it is begging
the question when Meumann rejects the scanning of verse as something
“counter to the nature of poetic material.” What is the nature of poetic
material,—essentially rhythmic, or essentially free from rhythm? All
reports of primitive singing, that is, of singing among races on a low
plane of culture, make rhythm a wholly insistent element of the verse;
and when a logical explanation which fits modern facts is at odds with
the chronological course of things, then the danger signal is up for any
wary student. It is easy to see that Meumann could make experiments on
nothing but a modern reading of poetry, and it was natural that he
should choose the sort of reciting most in vogue; his results in such a
case, however, can be valid only for modern conditions. Poetry, for
purposes of public entertainment, is mainly read in the free,
declamatory style. This, to be sure, is not the way in which Tennyson, a
master of poetic form, recited his verses; it is not the way in which
one reads, or ought to read, lyric poems generally, where even the most
ruthless and resolute Herod of “elocution” finds it impossible to slay
all the measures of three syllables and under; and, by overwhelming
evidence, it is not the way of quite savage folk, who dance and sing
their verses. It is not even the way of races in more advanced stages of
culture,[196] who recited their verses with strong rhythmical accents,
using a harp, or some instrument of the sort, for additional emphasis.
Rhythm is obscured or hidden by declamation only in times when the eye
has usurped the functions of the ear, and when a highly developed prose
makes the accented rhythm of poetry seem either old-fashioned or a sign
of childhood. Not that one wishes to restore a sing-song reading, but
rather a recognition of metrical structure, of those subtle effects in
rhythm which mean so much in the poet’s art; verse, in a word,
particularly lyric verse, must not be read as if it were prose. Dramatic
verse is a difficult problem. French and German actors mainly ignore the
rhythm; on the Parisian stage, competent critics say, whole pages of
comedy or tragedy may be recited with exquisite feeling, and yet without
letting one know whether it is verse or prose that one hears. For in
drama one wishes nowadays to hear not rhythm, but the thought, the
story, the point; imagine Sheridan’s comedies in verse! Even in tragedy
dull emotions are now to be roused, not keen emotions soothed; or rather
it is thought, penetrated by emotion, to be sure, but thought, and not
the cadence which once soothed and carried off the emotion,—thought,
indeed, as the comment and gloss on emotion,—in which a modern world
wishes to find its consolations and its æsthetic pleasure. As thought
recedes, as one comes nearer to those primitive emotions which were
untroubled by thought, they get expression more and more in cadenced
tones. And, again, this cadenced emotional expression, as it grows
stronger, grows wider; the barriers of irony and reserve which keep a
modern theatre tearless in the face of Lear’s most pathetic utterance,
break down; first, as one recedes from modern conditions, comes the
sympathetic emotion of the spectators expressed in sighs and tears,—one
thinks of those performances in Germany a century and a half ago, and
the prodigious weeping that went on,—so that the emotional expression is
echoed; then comes the partial activity of the spectators by their
deputed chorus; and at last the throng of primitive times, common
emotion in common expression, with no spectators, no audience, no
reserve or comment of thought,—for thought is absorbed in the perception
and action of communal consent;[197] and here, by all evidence, rhythm
rules supreme. Go back to these conditions, and what have the tricks of
individual accent, the emphasis of logic, the artistic contrasts, the
complicated process of interpretation, to do with social or gregarious
poetry, with primitive song, with the rhythmic consent of that swaying,
dancing multitude uttering a common emotion as much by the cadence of
step and cry as by articulate words? Ethnology will be heard in
abundance; a word or two may be in place from comparative literature and
philology, and a controlling idea, a curve of evolution, may be found in
this way if one takes a long stretch of poetic development in some race
just forging to the front of civilized life. Song, one may assert,
passes naturally into a sort of chant, especially as the epic form of
poetry takes shape, into a saying rather than a singing, and then into
an even easier movement. There seems to be little doubt that the
recitation of classical poetry was a matter of scanning, an utterance
which brought out the metre of the verse; even advocates of prose as the
forerunner of poetry grant that the ancient writers made a careful
distinction between the two, and always recited metre as metre.
Emphasis, moreover, due to the regular steps of the original dance, is
still heard in that popular verse of four measures which long held its
place in Greek, Latin, Germanic, and other languages; once it
accompanied the dancing throng, and by Westphal’s reckoning[198]
consisted of eight steps forward and as many backward, so that the
companion sounds of the voice made two verses with four pairs of
syllables in each verse, right and left in step, with one syllable
bearing the emphasis. Bergk in 1854 assumed that the hexameter is a
combination of two such verses; Usener, correcting Bergk’s details,
added the Nibelungen verse as made in the same way from two “popular”
verses, that is, from the common Aryan metre, and called this a “mark of
the oldest European verse”[199] wherever found, still lingering in the
folksongs of many peoples. Bruchmann, noting its occurrence with Malays,
Esthonians, Tartars, concludes that the verse is thus prevalent because
of its convenience for the breath; it is neither too short nor too long.
If, now, the curve of evolution in Aryan verse begins with an absolutely
strict rhythm and alternate emphasis of syllables, often, as in
Iranian,[200] to the neglect of logical considerations; if the course of
poetry is to admit logical considerations more and more, forcing in at
least one case the abandoning of movable accent and the agreement of
verse-emphasis with syllabic emphasis, an undisputed fact; if poetry,
too, first shakes off the steps of dancing, then the notes of song,
finally the strict scanning of the verse, until now recited poetry is
triumphantly logical, with rhythm as a subconscious element; if,
finally, this process exactly agrees with the gradual increase of
thought over emotion, with the analogous increase of solitary poetry
over gregarious poetry,—then, surely, one has but to trace back this
curve of evolution, and to project it into prehistoric conditions, in
order to infer with something very close to certitude that rhythm is the
primal fact in the beginnings of the poetic art. Such a curve is assumed
as true by two Germanic scholars who differ absolutely with regard to
certain questions of chronology. When did the rhythmic, measured chant
of Germanic poetry pass into free recited verse? Before the date of such
oldest Germanic poetry as is preserved, answers Professor Sievers; not
until later, answers Professor Möller. Sievers, it is well known,
declares the Germanic alliterative verse, as it lies before us, to have
been spoken and not chanted; Möller insists on strophes and a rhythmical
chant. To maintain his view, Möller[201] brings forward certain facts.
Germanic poetry was at first mainly choral and communal song, poetry of
masses of men, the _concentus_, mentioned by Tacitus, of warriors moving
into battle, or of a tribe dancing at their religious rites. A
_concentus_ of warriors in chorus of battle, he notes quite happily, is
meant not so much to terrify the foe as to strengthen and order their
own emotions, precisely, one may add, as the communal songs which led to
the Hellenic chorus, and so to tragedy, were at first a matter of social
expression altogether, and not an artistic effort made by a few active
persons for the entertainment of a great passive throng. So, too, Möller
goes on to remark, song in mass is song in movement; and here a regular
cadence or rhythm must be the first, the absolute condition. “To say
that primitive Aryans had neither poetry nor song—and nobody says
it—would be like saying that they had no speech; to say that their
poetry—and poetry is poetry only when marked by regular rhythm—had no
regular rhythm, is almost as much as to say that their speech did not
go, even unconsciously, by grammatical rules.” So far Möller.

What has Sievers to say against this? Does he prove his _sprechvortrag_,
the declamatory recitation of verse, by assuming with Wilmanns[202] that
Germanic verse is not developed from any common Aryan rhythm, but rather
springs, as Norden asserted that all verse springs, from the
corresponding parts of balanced sentences in prose? By no means.
Wilmanns argues that this “common Aryan inheritance,” the verse of four
accents, has not been proved as a fact, and has been simply set up as a
theory; moreover, if it is proved, then one must assume that the
Germanic lost it, “for the four accents appear only in later
development.” Because the alliterative verse follows forms and tones of
ordinary speech, Wilmanns makes it a modification of that speech, an
outgrowth of prose. But that such a development is unnatural and
contrary to facts as well as to common sense, that song of the masses is
the earliest song, that it must be strictly rhythmic, that it passes
later into rhythmic recitation, and then into free, declamatory
recitation,—all this is so clear to Sievers, however it may seem to work
against his own theory, as in Möller’s argument, that he casts about for
a true explanation of alliterative verse with two accents as the outcome
of that assumed Aryan verse of four accents. On a hint from Saran,[203]
Sievers assumes that Germanic poetry had already made the step from
strophes, which were chanted or sung in half-verses with four accents,
and with a regular rhythm, to continuous or stichic verses with halves
of two accents, and with free rhythmic structure fitted for saying
rather than for singing. So it might well have gone with the hexameter;
two verses with four accents each became one verse of six accents, and
this had the swing and freedom of spoken poetry. Now whether Sievers is
right or wrong in all this is apart from the question in hand; it is
simply a matter of evolution on the lines already indicated, and of the
stage in that evolution to which Germanic verse had come. On the
priority of strictly rhythmic verse[204] sung by masses of men, both
Sievers and Möller are agreed.

Modern individual recitation, then, by this evidence of philology and by
the sense of evolution in poetic form, can be no criterion for primitive
poetry; hence the inadequate character of such investigations into the
nature of poetic rhythm as neglect the facts offered by ethnology and by
comparative literature. One must not neglect choral and communal
conditions when one deals with primitive verse. For a study of modern
epic and dramatic verse as it is read aloud or declaimed, for a study
even of verse on the Shaksperian stage, Meumann’s essay is useful in
many respects; it is useless for the study of rhythm in that larger
sweep of poetic origins and growth.

We must turn, then, to scientific material which deals with primitive
stages of human life. A very primitive, perhaps a pre-primitive stage of
human life is involved in Darwin’s theory, stated in his _Descent of
Man_, reaffirmed briefly in his book on the expression of emotions, and
adopted by Scherer for the explanation of poetic origins, that a study
of sexual calls from male to female among animals might unlock the
secret of primitive rhythm. This, as has been said, will lead to no
good. Love songs, the supposed development of such calls, actually
diminish and disappear as one retraces the path of verse and comes to
low stages of human progress, to savage poetry at large;[205] the curve
of evolution is against recourse to facts such as Darwin would find
convincing; and those “long past ages when ... our early progenitors
courted each other by the aid of vocal tones,” are less helpful to the
understanding of rhythm and poetry, when restored in such furtive and
amiable moments, than when they present the primitive horde in festal
dance and song, finding by increased ease of movement and economy of
force, by keener sense of kind, by delight of repetition, the
possibilities of that social consent which is born of rhythmic motion.
Scherer, indeed, saw how much more this social consent and this festal
excitement have to do with the matter, and undertook to fix the origin
of poetry in an erotic and pantomimic choral, such as one still finds in
certain obscene Australian dances;[206] but the erotic impulse is not
social, save in some questionable exceptions; and social consent, as
Donovan has shown, began rather on public and frankly social occasions,
like the dance of a horde after victory in war.[207]

Sociological considerations, again, have weight with Mr. Herbert
Spencer[208] when he finds, like Norden, but for different reasons, that
rhythm, as used in poetry and in music, is developed out of highly
emotional and passionate speech. This doctrine of Mr. Spencer has been
denied on musical grounds, and must be denied still more strongly on
ethnological grounds. The objections on musical grounds brought forward
by Mr. Gurney,[209] are difficult to answer, and one is bound to admit
that Mr. Spencer has not answered them convincingly in the essay of
1890; moreover, in making recitative a step between speech and song, he
is not only ignoring communal singing, but is reversing the facts of an
evolutionary process. To develop song out of an impassioned speech is
plausible enough until one fronts this primitive horde dancing, singing,
shouting in cadence, with a rhythm which the analogy of ethnological
evidence and the facts of comparative literature prove to have been
exact.[210] In Mr. Spencer’s essay of 1857, the “connate” character of
dancing, poetry, and music is emphasized; but the choral, communal
element is unnoticed. Precisely such social conditions, however,
controlled the beginning of poetry, and the main factor in them seems to
have been the exact rhythm of communal consent. Against the evidence for
communal rhythm little can be urged; and the few cases brought forward
for this purpose by Biedermann not only rest on imperfect observation
but often prove to be contradictory in the form of the statement. So,
too, with other evidence. Burchell, for example, said that the Bushmen
in singing and dancing showed an exact sense of rhythm; while Daumas
said that they never danced except after heavy meals, and then in wild,
disordered fashion, with no rhythm at all. Grosse[211] throws out this
negative evidence as counter to overwhelming evidence on the other side.
Again, one often finds a statement which denies rhythm to savage poetry,
nevertheless affirming most exact rhythm in the songs or cries to which
the savages dance. Here is evidently a confusion of the communal “poem”
or song, and the individual tale or what not chanted in a kind of
recitative. It may be concluded from a careful study of ethnological
evidence that all savage tribes have the communal song, and most of them
have the recitative. Silent folk who do nothing of the sort, tribes that
neither sing nor dance, must not be brought into the argument; if they
do occur, and the negative fact is always hard to establish, they are
clearly too abnormal to count. Human intelligence is not measured by the
idiot. These are decadent groups, extreme degenerates, links severed
from the chain; and no one will summon as witnesses for the primitive
stage of poetry those Charruas of Uruguay, who are said to have no
dance, no song, no social amusements, who speak only in a whisper, “are
covered with vermin,” and know neither religion nor laws,—in a word, no
social existence, and almost no humanity. So one comes back to the
normal folk. East Africans[212] are reported to have “no metrical
songs,” and they sing in recitative; but at once it is added that they
dance in crowds to the rhythm of their own voices, as well as to the
drum, moving in cadence with the songs which they sing: and here can be
no recitative.[213] Moreover, when cleaning rice, they work to the
rhythm of songs, to foot-stamping and hand-clapping of the
bystanders,—in other words, choral dance, choral song, exact time,
rhythm absolute; although, by culling a bit here and there, the theorist
could have presented fine evidence from Bushmen and East Africans that
savages in low levels of culture have no rhythm in their songs, and
dance without consent or time. True, there is the recitative, and that,
as a thing interesting to Europeans, is pushed into the foreground of
the traveller’s account. Yet this recitative of the singer who does a
turn for the missionary or other visitor is not the main fact in the
case, although it is often the only fact of the sort that is set down.
It may be cheerfully conceded that the recitative occurs among savage
tribes throughout the world; but the manner of its occurrence must be
considered. Along with choral singing, in intervals of the dance, some
person chants a sentence or two in a fashion usually described as
recitative. One would like to know more of this chanting; but sometimes
it is without exact rhythm or measure, and will not “scan” in any
regular way. So, too, with music itself; most of the ruder tribes, as
Wallaschek points out,[214] know both systems of music, the rhythmic and
the “free.” On the Friendly Islands natives have two kinds of song,
“those similar to our recitative, and others in regular measure.”
African singers tell a tale of their wanderings “in an emphatic
recitative”; but the choral songs are always sung in exact rhythm to the
dance. Not only, too, with savages; hasty generalizations and inexact
statements due to this double character of singing have robbed more
advanced peoples of the rhythmical sense. A Swedish writer[215] telling
about the Lapps and what seemed to him their lack of any idea of melody,
quotes one Blom, who “denies that the Lapps have any sense for rhythm.”
Why? They cannot keep harmony; of six or eight, no two agree, and each
is a bit above or below the rest,—not a question of rhythm, then, and
alien to the case. Scarcely any savages have the sense of melody and
harmony, although their sense of exact rhythm is universal and profound.

It is not hard to follow so plain a hint as one finds in the
ethnological evidence; and it is clear that recitative is a matter of
the individual singer, while to choral singing it is unknown and from
the nature of the case impossible. As the savage laureate slips from the
singing, dancing crowd, which turns audience for the nonce, and gives
his short improvisation, only to yield to the refrain of the chorus, so
the actual habit of individual composition and performance has sprung
from the choral composition and performance. The improvisations and the
recitative are short deviations from the main road, beginnings of
artistry, which will one day become journeys of the solitary singer over
pathless hills of song, those “wanderings of thought” which Sophocles
has noted; and the curve of evolution in the artist’s course can show
how rapidly and how far this progress has been made. But the relation
must not be reversed; and if any fact seems established for primitive
life, it is the precedence of choral song and dance. An entertainer and
an audience, an artist and a public, take for granted preceding social
conditions; and it is generally admitted that social conditions begin
with the festal dance as well as with communal labour. Indeed, as
Professor Grosse points out, rhythm was the chief factor in social
“unification”; but this was never the rhythm of Norden’s rhythmical
prose, or the irregular measures of a recitative. Where and when the
individual recitative became a thing of prominence, as it undoubtedly
did, is a matter to be studied in the individual and centrifugal
impulse, in the progress of the poet; here it is enough to show that
rhythmic verse came directly from the choral song, and that neither the
choral song, nor any regular song, could have come from the recitative.
The latter, as Jacobsthal assures us, will not go with dancing; and
earliest singing, as is still the case in Africa,[216] must not be
sundered from the dance. Baker,[217] who made a careful study of music
among our Indians, sums up the matter by saying that “the characteristic
feature of primitive song was the collectiveness of amusement,” and that
“recitatives have a flow of words and a clearness of expression which
are both incompatible with primitive song.” They need, that is, a
developed stage of speech when the logical sentence has shaken itself
free, to some extent, of mere emotional cadence and of almost
meaningless repetitions. Here, indeed, begin the orator, the teller of
tales, the artistic poet; but dance, song, and poetry itself begin with
a communal consent, which is expressed by the most exact rhythm.
Emotional speech is an ambiguous phrase. In one sense it is an
individual, broken, irregularly regular sequence of phrases and words;
oratory and oratorical cadences came out of such a chaos, but never the
ordered rhythm of dancing throngs. The emotional speech in which exact
rhythm began was the loud and repeated crying of a throng, regulated and
brought into consent by movements of the body, and getting significance
from the significance of the festal occasion.[218]

Evidence is everywhere for the asking in this matter of communal consent
and choral rhythm; but instead of taking detached and random facts from
many different sources, it will be well to select three groups of facts
which can offer in each case compact and consistent testimony. For the
present purpose one may look at the case of the Botocudos of South
America, a tribe very low in the social scale, as studied by Dr.
Ehrenreich; at the case of the Eskimos as studied by Dr. Boas; and
finally at the case of African negroes in this country, studied by
Colonel Higginson thirty-five years ago, under most favourable
circumstances, and with particular reference to their communal singing.
With all respect for the zeal and truthfulness of missionaries, one will
thus do well to leave them out of the account, and to take evidence
which comes in two cases from a professed ethnologist and in the third
case from an impartial observer.

The Botocudos[219] are little better than a leaderless horde, and pay
scant heed to their chieftain; they live only for their immediate bodily
needs, and take small thought for the morrow, still less thought for the
past. No traditions, no legends, are abroad to tell them of their
forbears. They still use gestures to express feeling and ideas; while
the number of words which imitate a given sound “is extraordinarily
great.” An action or an object is named by imitating the sound peculiar
to it; and sounds are doubled to express greater intensity or a
repetition. To speak is _aõ_; to speak loudly, or to sing, is _aõ-aõ_.
And now for their æsthetic life, their song, dance, poetry, as described
by this accurate observer. “On festal occasions the whole horde meets by
night round the camp fire for a dance. Men and women alternating ...
form a circle; each dancer lays his arms about the necks of his two
neighbours, and the entire ring begins to turn to the right or to the
left, while all the dancers stamp strongly and in rhythm the foot that
is advanced, and drag after it the other foot. Now with drooping heads
they press closer and closer together; now they widen the circle.
Throughout the dance resounds a monotonous song to the time of which
they stamp their feet. Often one can hear nothing but a continually
repeated _kalauī ahā!_ ... again, however, short improvised songs in
which are told the doings of the day, the reasons for rejoicing, what
not, as ‘Good hunting,’ or ‘Now we have something to eat,’ or ‘Brandy is
good.’[220] Now and then, too, an individual begins a song, and is
answered by the rest in chorus.... _They never sing_ _without dancing,
never dance without singing, and have but one word to express both song
and dance._”

As the unprejudiced reader sees, this clear and admirable account
confirms the doctrine of early days, revived with fresh ethnological
evidence in the writings of Dr. Brown and of Adam Smith, that dance,
poetry, and song were once a single and inseparable function; and is in
itself fatal to the idea of rhythmic prose, of solitary recitation, as
foundation of poetry. The circle, the close clasp, the rhythmic consent
of steps and voices; here are the social foundation and the communal
beginnings of the art. Then comes the improvised song, springing,
however, from these communal and choral conditions, and still referring
absolutely to present interests of the horde as a whole. There are no
traditions, no legends, no epic, no lyrics of love, no hymns to star and
sunset. All poetry is communal, holding fast to the rhythm of consent as
to the one sure fact.

The Eskimo,[221] despite his surroundings, is in better social case than
the Botocudo; while the sense of kind is as great, individual growth has
gone further, and song is not limited to festal and communal promptings.
The “entertainer” has arrived, although, when he begins to divert his
little audience in the snow-hut, he must always turn his face to the
wall. Still more, there is no monopoly; as with peasants at the Bavarian
dance, where each must and can sing his own improvised quatrain, so here
each member of the party has his tale to tell, his song, dance, or
trick. The women hum incessantly while at work; but the words are mainly
that monotonous air, the repeated _amna aya_ of the popular chorus.
Individuals have their “own” tunes and songs, which easily become
traditional; but the solitary song is not so much an Eskimo
characteristic as the communal song, for they are a sociable folk, and
never spend their evenings alone. They sing, as so often was the case in
mediæval Europe, while playing ball; but the combination of choral song
and dance is a favourite form, and both singing and dancing have in this
case one name, with features common to the festivity all over the
world,—exact rhythm, repetition of word and phrase, endless chorus, a
fixed refrain,—the _amna aya_,—short and intermittent improvisation by
solitary singers and reciters. The art of these singers and reciters is
in an advanced stage; for they perform alone as well as under support of
the chorus. Three phases of their art may be mentioned. First, there is
the prose tale with songs or recitatives interspersed, a sort of
_cante-fable_. Then there is the tale chanted in a kind of recitative,
which Dr. Boas calls poetic prose. Thirdly, there are “real poems of a
very marked rhythm, which are not sung but recited,” and the reciter
“jumps up and down and to right and left” as he speaks his piece. That
is, here are tales which have come to such a pitch of art that choral
and refrain and repetition of words are a hindrance to the flow of the
story. Still, even here the solitary performances stand out against the
background of choral singing in which they once formed such a modest
part, and on every provocation they slip into it again and are lost in
the old rhythm of emotional repetition and communal consent.

The negro slaves of the South, finally, with their traditional dance and
song, strangely influenced by one of the few elements of civilization
which really came into their life, the religious element, offer another
interesting bit of evidence to show how emotional speech, a rude poetry,
is born of rhythm by consent of a throng. In those so-called
“spirituals” of the negro is the recitative or the chorus to be looked
upon as original? Perhaps Colonel Higginson had as good a chance to
study this communal song as any one could have; in an article[222]
written soon after the war he described the singing of the “spirituals”
by men of his regiment, now in camp, now on the march, now to the fall
of the oars. He speaks of the trait so prominent in all primitive song,
exact and inevitable rhythm, however harsh the voices and however
uncouth the words. “Often ... I have ... silently approached some
glimmering fire, round which the dusky figures moved in the rhythmical
barbaric dance the negroes call a ‘shout,’ chanting, often harshly, but
always in the most perfect time, some monotonous refrain.” What was the
favourite of all these spirituals, “sung perhaps twice as often as any
other”? A song called _Hold Your Light_, “sung with no accompaniment but
the measured clapping of hands and the clatter of many feet;” it
“properly consisted of a chorus alone with which the verses of other
songs might be combined at random.”

Hold your light, Brudder Robert,—
Hold your light,
Hold your light on Canaan’s shore....

For Robert, another name would be given,[223] then another, and so on
for half an hour. This seemed to Colonel Higginson “the simplest
primitive type of ‘spiritual.’” Next in favour was:—

Jordan River, I’m bound to go,
Bound to go, bound to go,
Jordan River, I’m bound to go,
And bid ’em fare ye well,

then with Brudder Robert, Sister Lucy, and so on, the well-known
cumulative refrain. Now if one had only the text of many of these songs,
and knew nothing of the singing and dancing, one would call them
rhythmical prose, recitative; for example, a part of _The Coming Day_.
One is told, however, that this “was a boat-song and timed well with the
tug of the oar.” The fact is that here, as in savage and presumably in
primitive song, movement of body and rhythm of voice are the main
consideration, while the words, on which civilized man imposes
individual and syntactic correctness, are of very subordinate value.
Syllables may be dropped or added at will, but the rhythm must be exact;
and the simplest way to avoid verbal distress is the primitive device of
repetition.[224] When the words, and the thought in them, begin to be of
overmastering importance in poetry, “scanning” acts as deputy of exact
rhythm and song, until at last declamation pushes scanning aside, and
rhythm is reduced to the same ancillary function once assigned to
thought and words.

Here, then, are the vital elements in the discussion. Rhythm is an
affair of instinctive perception transformed into a social act as the
expression of social consent. It has been said that beginnings and not
origins are the object of our quest; how rhythm in poetry may stand to
rhythm in nature, to the breath or the pulse of man, to periodic
movements of tide, of star, and so in vaster and vaster cosmic relation,
or, again, to infinitesimal rhythms in the cell, in the cell of the
cell,—are queries apart from the present purpose. Important, however, is
the doctrine held by modern scholars that poetic rhythm is objectively
an outcome of human activity, and subjectively a process of human
perception.[225] Perhaps the best short study of the wider question has
been made by Wallaschek.[226] Insisting that “rhythm is the form of the
objective movement, time-sense (_mesure_, _takt_) the form of the
perceiving subject-mind,” noting that “the evenness of time-groups in
music arises from the original organic union of dance and music,” he
goes on to point out a fact which seems to be fundamental for any study
of beginnings in poetry as well as in the sister art, although it is
music of which he speaks. Vocal utterance merely as result of “corporal
stimulus,” song like that of birds, is not yet music,—nor, one may add,
is the cry of the solitary infant, individual or racial, to be counted
as poetry. “The peculiar germ which has alone been found capable of the
enormous development actually accomplished in music”—and in poetry—“is
the _chorus_, with its framework, the dance.” A bird’s song or a man’s
cry is merely vent for emotion; but when several persons sing together,
there is more than emotion, there is consent, and consent means that
they must observe, group, and order the tones. “They could not keep
together if they did not mark periods ... for there is no concert
possible without bars. What they perform is rhythm, what they think is
_takt_, and what they feel is surplus of vigour.” There may be some
error in the details of this analysis. Wallaschek has not done justice
to the “genesis of emotion,” as Ribot[227] calls it, through unaided
rhythm; he may not concede enough to the song of birds, and may be wrong
in saying that no one ever heard animals sing in concert;[228] hysteric
cries, which tend to be rhythmic and show a maximum of emotion with a
minimum of purpose, have doubtless more to say in early rhythm—one
thinks of the songs of lament, the _voceri_—than he admits;[229] but his
main point about choral beginnings is of immense importance. Poetry,
like music, is social; like its main factor, rhythm, it is the outcome
of communal consent, a _faculté d’ensemble_; and this should be writ
large over every treatise on poetry, in order to draw the mind of the
reader from that warped and baffling habit which looks upon all poetry
as a solitary performance. The modern reader is passive; even hearing
poetry is mainly foreign to him; active poetry, such as abounded in
primitive life, is to him the vagary of a football mob, the pleasure of
school children; and to such a reader the words of Wallaschek are
salutary indeed, insisting that not the sense of hearing alone is to be
studied when one takes up the psychology of music, but the muscular
sense as well, and that the muscular sense has precedence. “‘Making
music’ means in the primitive world performing, not listening,” a
statement which applies as well to poetry. And what sort of rhythm,
under leave of Norden and the rest, is one to assume for the primitive
consent whether in music or in poetry? Well, earliest music shows “an
unsettled melody, an uncertain and constantly varying intonation, a
perpetual fluctuation of pitch,” but, contrasted with all this, “the
strict and ever prevailing rhythm,” “the precision and marvellously
exact performance of numberless performers.”[230] For two facts, then,
of great moment in the study of poetry, there is universal testimony
from savage tribes all over the earth. Singing is mainly choral and
timed to the dance; and the rhythm, no matter how large the throng, is
amazingly correct.

So much for the savages. Arguments from the study of children, as was
said in foregoing remarks on method, should be applied with great
caution to the history of literary forms. It may be noted, however, that
nothing brought out thus far by such studies has worked against the
assumption of extremely accurate rhythm as the fundamental fact in
primitive poetry. Of course, one must not set a child to tasks that
belong in mature stages of poetry. The early efforts of children to make
a metrical composition[231] are generally rough and only approximately
rhythmic. Repeat a few verses, and ask the child to make verses like
them, giving him paper, pencil, solitude, encouragement, and the promise
of cake, all the known aids by which an adult poet wins his peerage or
the abbey; the child will probably hit a rime or so, more or less
accurate, but the verse will halt. This, however, is easily explained.
Solitary composition, the process of following a set form of sounds by
making sentences of his own to fit the scheme, the combination of
thought with rhythm, is a task beyond his powers, and for an excellent
reason; it was also beyond the powers of primitive man. But let the same
child, with a dozen other children, in an extemporized game, fall to
crying out some simple phrase in choral repetition; the rhythm is almost
painful in its exactness. Repeat to this child rimes of the nursery; he
is sworn foe to defective metre, and boggles at it; indeed, such defects
are hard to find in all the amiable nonsense. The child’s ear for rhythm
is acute; his execution of it in choral, or in verse learned from the
hearing, is precise; his demands upon it are of the strictest; but in
solitary composition, a mental effort, he loses his rhythmic way, and
grows bewildered in those new paths of thought. A teacher of
considerable experience recently made the statement that children in
school will turn loose or defective metre, once the idea of rhythm is
given them, into accurately measured verse. Indeed, it is probable that
the halting verses of an indifferent poet, such as one finds in
newspapers, begin in the maker’s constructive process as correct rhythm,
but lose this cadence in the course of composition.[232] Be that as it
may be, however, the rhythmical sense of children is remarkably exact
for purposes of choral singing and recital.

It is evident that one is not likely to be embarrassed by a lack of
rhythm in early poetry, but rather by a lack of anything else. There is
the danger, when one has made so much of rhythm, that this early art
will be called nothing more than vocal music, and will vainly claim the
title of poetry. Here are dance and music, one is told, and that is all.
Wagner[233] believed in the original union of the three arts; but
Wallaschek[234] separates poetry from music and dance. Unfortunately, he
does not say what primitive poetry could have been; recitative he
rejects utterly; it is clear, however, that he is thinking of a poetry
which no one is disposed to father upon earliest man, that poetry of
thought and syntactic statement familiar to later days. Poetry, he says,
always depends upon the intellect. Far better, because clearer and in
closer accord with ethnological facts, are the brief statement of Ribot
and the elaborate theory of Donovan. Ribot,[235] considering as a matter
of fact how spontaneous movements pass into creative and æsthetic
activity, finds by all evidence at hand that dancing in pantomime was
the “primordial” and universal art, and that it was composite,
“including the rudimentary form of two acts destined later on to
separate in the course of their evolution,—music and poetry. Poor music,
indeed, ... but remarkable for the strictness of rhythm and measure, and
poor poetry, consisting in a short sentence incessantly repeated, or
even in monosyllables without precise signification.” That is a clear
statement; but it takes for granted, in some measure, what Donovan tries
to prove,—the festal origin of speech.[236] Whether Donovan does prove
this or not, he makes it perfectly clear that the vocal music, which
Wallaschek separated from poetry without giving an idea what poetry was
and how it began, was itself poetry, and had functions which expressed
the human emotions of that time as well as the most finished poem
expresses modern emotion and thought. With the philological arguments we
are not concerned, and, indeed, theories about the origin of language
have always been kittle cattle to shoe; we are concerned, however, with
these four elements of a primitive festal gathering: bodily
play-movements, rhythmical beating, some approach to song, and some
degree of communal interest. Of these, the first and the fourth are
fused in dancing, which begins as a celebration of victory, and is found
later in the harvesting of a crop and in the vintage. “Communal elation
following success in a common enterprise” is the earliest occasion for
social consent of the festal type; and it finds expression in imitating
that successful act, along with “rhythmic beating,”[237] and with
excited individual cries which are brought into rhythm with the steps,
the gestures and the “beating” itself. Hence speech and song. In his
second article, Donovan tries to trace the process by which meaning got
into these cries, and how they led to grammatical forms of speech; what
interests us here is the exactness, the prevalence, the dominant force
of rhythm as foundation of consent, and so of social act, dance, song,
word. As with savages now, so with primitive man, however wild and
confused the social mass may be, rhythm is at the heart of their social
life. Here is the point of order in the chaos; and one may safely assume
that such order and precision of mere sounds would be the obvious stay
for all efforts to give them meaning and connection. Language, after
all, is communication. This is probably what Donovan means when he makes
rhythm the prime social factor, the bridge from merely animal to human;
rhythmic forms, he says, are “witnesses of a lower stage of progress
than any yet known to anthropological records,”—the “stage of the
passage between brute and man”; and he gives modern philology food for
thought when he declares that many facts and considerations “run counter
to the notion that song, or rhythmical and poetical forms, must be
supervening embellishments of speech which imply a certain height of
civilization.” A chapter in his earlier book[238] goes more into the
details of communal poetry under primitive conditions, and answers
objections which might be made to this poetical function of the throng.
A happily chosen verse from Horace enforces the deprecation of that
habit which now makes a poet’s muse the poet himself or else an amiable
fiction. The earliest “muse” was simply that “music” or rhythm of the
throng which held up the singer’s tottering personality in his first
steps over the burning marle of individual expression before the throng
itself—still a nervous matter!—and prompted or sustained his
improvisations; for primitive man this muse was the cadence of falling
feet, rhythmic cries, social consent. And how came those “higher
artistic interests connected with speech out of the pantomimic and
choral dance?” Direct evidence, Donovan remarks, is meagre; but of
indirect evidence there is a “mighty mass.” Hindu words for the drama go
back to the word which means to dance. Hellenic drama has an even more
definite development of the same sort. European lyric poetry grew out of
the choral dance; and folksongs which sprang directly from “the
spontaneous elation of the crowd,” though rare, still occur even now in
Greece, Italy, Russia, Hungary.[239] Accentual verse is “the natural
inheritance of poetry which grew from the fusion of rhythms and tones
and words. The words uttered by a rude people spontaneously, and during
the elation produced through following the movements of the dance and
listening to the accompanying tones, were obliged to assume the natural
impulsive element of rhythm.” Horace, in a familiar passage, tells how
the artist began his work with this choral and communal material[240]
now unknown except in survivals like the refrain of harvest songs:—

per audaces nova dithyrambos
verba devolvit,

new words, that is, instead of the old choral repetitions. That these
communal songs, however, were poetry in themselves seems sufficiently
proved. The objection urged by Wallaschek, that rhythmic sounds were
inadequate to the demands of poetry, falls flat for the negative reason
that nowhere else can poetry be found under primitive conditions, and
for the positive reason that these rhythmic sounds were unquestionably
full of communal significance and may well have served as the raw
material of speech itself.

So far the theory of social consent as the basis of rhythm and the
foundation of poetry has been supported mainly by the dance. This
play-theory, this festal origin, may be accepted as probable; but it
must leave room and verge enough for the part played by labour. Human
society was organized in the spirit of a grim struggle for life; and
human labour under social conditions is a main part of the struggle.
Professor Karl Bücher’s essay on Labour and Rhythm[241] is meant in part
as a sociological study of the beginnings of poetry; it has been greeted
everywhere as an important contribution to our positive knowledge of the
case; and a summary of it is unavoidable for the matter now in
hand.[242] His argument is clear. Fatigue, which besets all work felt as
work by reason of its continued application of purpose, vanished for
primitive man as it vanishes now for children, if the work was once
freed from this stress of application and so turned to a kind of play.
The dance itself is really hard work, exacting and violent; what makes
it the favourite it is with savages as with children? Simply its
automatic, regular, rhythmic character, the due repetition of a familiar
movement which allows the mind to relax its attitude of constant
purpose. The purpose and plan of work involve external sources and
external ends; rhythm is instinctive, and springs from the organic
nature of man; it is no invention.[243] The song that one sings while at
work is not something fitted to the work, but comes from movements of
the body in the specific acts of labour; and this applies not only to
the rhythm, but even to the words.[244] So it was in the festal dance.
That primitive man was less impeded in bodily movements than is now the
case, and that these movements were more marked; that the rigorously
exact movement begat a rigorously exact rhythm, to which at first half
meaningless sounds and then words were joined, often lingering in later
days as a refrain of field or spinning-room—witness the pantomimic
action which goes with the words of that New Zealand planting-song, and
a host of similar survivals; that poetry and music were always combined
by early man, and, along with labour, made up the primitive
three-in-one, an organic whole, labour being the basal fact, with rhythm
as element common to the three;[245] and that not harmony or pitch, but
this overmastering and pervasive rhythm, exact, definite, was the main
factor of early song,—these are conclusions for which Bücher offers
ample and convincing evidence. In particular we may look, first, at his
conclusion against unrhythmic poetry, then at his theory of rhythmic
origins, and finally at his study of individual and social labour. For
the first, he remarks, as all students of ethnology have remarked, that
primitive folk care little for melody; the main, the only musical
element in their songs is rhythm. Rhythm is not bound up with speech as
speech, and must come to it from without; for mere observation and
development of the rhythmical tendencies inherent in language could not
have led to the fact of rhythm as known to primitive man. The main
external source of rhythm, then, is the habit of accompanying bodily
movements with sounds of the voice, and these bodily movements were
primarily movements in man’s work. Taking such songs of labour as still
remain, Bücher finds that the more primitive these are, the closer
relation they have with the labour itself. The rhythm, too, is fixed by
the movement; words change at will and are mostly improvised. Briefly,
Bücher adds one more answer to that old question about the origins of
poetry, and finds them chiefly in the labour of primitive man, where
energetic and continual movements of an instinctively rhythmic nature
begat “not only the form but the material” of poetry. The same rhythmic
succession of rise and fall is common to labour and to verse; and as for
the words, these came not from bodily exertion, but from the sounds
produced by the work itself, sounds like the noise of the feet in
treading, like the blows of a primitive implement, which irresistibly
provoked accompaniment by the voice. That these sounds had a meaning
vague at first, then sharper, clearer, and connected with the cause,
conditions, and purpose of the work, is lawful inference. Words that so
took their places in the regular and inexorable rhythm of work or dance
must share in that regularity; recitative, or the rhythm of easy prose,
has no place under such conditions, and Bücher rejects it utterly.
Again, all human work began with movements of arms and legs “which
instinctively move in rhythm.” With Bücher’s further development of this
theory, that beating and stamping, earliest forms of work, plus the
human voice which followed the rise and fall of the labour, are the
basis of metrical “feet”; that iamb and trochee are stamping measures,
spondee a measure of striking or beating, still easy to note where two
hands strike in rhythm; that dactyl and anapæst can be heard at the
forge of any blacksmith whose main blow on the iron is either followed
or preceded by two shorter, lighter blows,—with these attractive but
minor considerations one may agree or disagree, but the vital fact of
rhythm as the pulse of earliest human labour and play, of earliest
poetry, of earliest music, is vastly strengthened by the evidence and
the arguments set forth in this admirable essay.

For the matter of individual and social[246] labour, Bücher has
inference and hints, but hardly a developed theory. It is easy, however,
to infer that stress is to be laid on the social rather than on
individual conditions. In play and the dance this is everywhere
conceded. To tread the winepress alone, however the instinctively and
unavoidably rhythmic movement might provoke one to song, was a small
factor in rhythmic development when compared with the consent of many
feet treading in joy of the vintage.[247] For individual labour, songs
of women grinding at the mill, once a most wearisome task, are the best
example; and hints of these, even scraps of actual song, are found in
plenty.[248] But two women and more were often to be found grinding
together, and the social consent of such songs must have been at least
as frequent as the lonely voice. Bücher points out, moreover, how the
solitary act of labour, particularly with heavy tools, tends to be
uncertain and unrhythmic, and how the addition of a second workman, say
at the forge, or in threshing or in ramming stones, at once induces an
exact rhythm, the rhythm born of consent. This is a primitive process
and most important. The idea of savages as capricious, and therefore not
acting in concert, is a hasty inference, true only to a certain point;
for it is civilized folk who work independently, and it is the
uncivilized who must cling to rhythm both in work and in play, since
nowhere else are men found so dependent on concerted automatic work as
in savage life. A man of advanced culture thinks out his own labour, and
does it in his own way; his concert of work with other men is a higher
synthesis of individual performances which is unknown to the savage. All
this opens to our eyes the spectacle of a long evolution, at one end of
which, the uncertain, tentative beginnings of social life, we see human
beings acting, alike in the tasks and in the pleasures of their time,
with a minimum of thought and a maximum of rhythm; while at the hither
end is a highly developed society, where the monotonous whir of
machinery has thrust out the old cadence and rhythm of man’s labour,
where strenuous and solitary wanderings replace the communal dance, and
where every brow is marked with the burden of incessant thought.

The threads of evidence, then, all end in one point close to that
blackness of thick darkness which veils the life of earliest man; at
this point, the point of social consent, work is not far from play, and
art is still in solution with practical life. The arts of movement, of
music, dance, poetry, are in evidence only along with the arts of
subsistence and tribal life, with the labour, actual or reminiscent, of
primitive social conditions; while the arts that take permanent form,
such as sculpture and painting, appear only in the results of this
labour as rude forms of ornament. What holds together these
heterogeneous elements is rhythm, “the ordered grouping of movements, as
they occur in temporal succession,” so Bücher defines it; and it is
rhythm which must count, by his reckoning, as one of the greatest
factors in social development, a function, too, not out of date even
under existing conditions of life.

So much by way of proof, and it seems conclusive, for rhythm as the
fundamental fact of poetry. True, it is not the fundamental fact for
modern consideration, which goes below the surface and seeks a deeper
meaning, asking for the nobly imaginative and for that mingling of the
emotional and the intellectual which submits “the shows of things to the
desires of the mind”; it is not even the overwhelming element in modern
poetic form. Naked limbs no longer move unimpeded in the dance, no
longer stand out free and bold as they tread the winepress; naked and
insistent rhythm, too, is, for the most part, so hidden by draperies of
verbal expression, that one is fain to call it no essential factor in a
poetic process. Modern art, deliberate and intellectual, turns in scorn
upon that helpless poetry of the horde, as Prospero upon Caliban:—

I pitied thee,
Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour
One thing or other: when thou didst not, savage,
Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like
A thing most brutish, I endow’d thy purposes
With words that made them known.

Imperious thought is ashamed of this mere regularity, this recurrence,
this common gift; where is the art in it? Art, said Schiller, must have
something in its work that is voluntary, fresh, surprising; the voice,
he said, may be beautiful, but there is no beauty in mere breathing. Has
not poetry, then, it may be asked, gained in meaning for mankind, in
nobility and dignity, precisely as it has loosed the bands of rhythm,
forsworn this ignoble and slavish regularity, receded from the throng,
spurned the chorus, turned to solitary places, and cherished the
individual, the artist, the poet? Granting the throng, the dance, the
rhythm, the shouts, is not all this but poetry in the nebular state, and
does not real poetry begin where Aristotle makes it begin, when an
individual singer detaches himself from the choral mass, improvises and
recites his verses, and so sets out upon that “mindward” way which leads
to Sophocles and Dante and Shakspere? We do not dance Shakspere’s
poetry, we do not sing it, we hardly even scan it; why then this long
pother about a lapsing and traditional form?

Well, in the first place, rhythm is there in Sophocles, Dante,
Shakspere; it was sung to large extent in the drama of Sophocles, and
even with Dante and Shakspere it is subconsciously present in the mind
of every sympathetic reader who accepts the verses by those poor
deputies of aural perception, the eyes. Not the least of artistic
triumphs in poetry are concerned directly with rhythm. Those lines of
_Hamlet_,—

Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,—

are poetry through their harmony of rhythmic adjustment, and if divorced
from rhythm cease to be poetry. Every good lyric, even in modern times,
fairly trembles and prays to be sung, at least to be taken in its full
rhythmic force; the “pastel in prose” only serves to send us back to
genuine lyric with a new love of rhythmic regularity. In modern
dramatic, epic, and incidental poetry, the case is different; but this
difference brings no loss to the cause of rhythm. One does not wish to
read _Under the Greenwood Tree_ in verse any more than one wishes to
read _As You Like It_ in prose. Meredith’s _Egoist_, an epic prose
comedy of modern life, is as satisfactory in its way, barring the
comparisons of genius, as _Twelfth Night_ or _Much Ado_, the dramatic
comedy in verse. It is our keen thinking, fastened upon a character like
Sir Willoughby, like Malvolio, that is in question; and those soothing
cadences which appeal to the consciousness of kind and set the solitary
in sympathetic throngs, as in a lyric, we do not need. Satire of
emotional traits, to be sure, may require the exaggeration of verse as
in _Jump-to-Glory Jane_; but verse is not degraded by this, any more
than it is degraded in helping one to remember the number of days in a
month. The hold of rhythm upon modern poetry, even under conditions of
analytic and intellectual development which have unquestionably worked
for the increased importance of prose, is a hold not to be relaxed, and
for good reason. The reason is this. In rhythm, in sounds of the human
voice, timed to movements of the human body, mankind first discovered
that social consent which brought the great joys and the great pains of
life into a common utterance. The mountain, so runs a Basque proverb, is
not necessary to the mountain, but man is necessary to man. Individual
thinking, a vast fermentation, centrifugal tendencies of every sort,
have played upon this simple and primitive impulse; but the poet is
still essentially emotional, and just so far as he is to utter the great
joys and the great pains of life, just so far he must go back to
communal emotions, to the sense of kind, to the social foundation.[249]
The mere fact of utterance is social; however solitary his thought, a
poet’s utterance must voice this consent of man with man, and his
emotion must fall into rhythm, the one and eternal expression of
consent. This, then, is why rhythm will not be banished from poetry so
long as poetry shall remain emotional utterance; for rhythm is not only
sign and warrant of a social contract stronger, deeper, vaster, than any
fancied by Rousseau, but it is the expression of a human sense more keen
even than the fear of devils and the love of gods,—the sense and
sympathy of kind.

CHAPTER III

THE TWO ELEMENTS IN POETRY

The study of rhythm threw one fact of primitive life into very strong
relief,—the predominance of masses of men over individual effort,[250]
and the almost exclusive reign of communal song as compared with poetry
of the solitary artist, with that poetry which nowadays makes sole claim
to the title. Does this point to a fundamental dualism? Are there two
kinds of poetry, communal and artistic; or must one say that the choral
throng and the reading public, the improvising singer and the modern
poet, are convertible terms, with refrains, repetition, chorus, as a
negligible quantity? Is the making of poetry really one process under
all conditions of production; or does the main impulse, in itself
everywhere invariable, undergo enough change in its outward relations
and conditions to warrant the division of its product into two kinds?
Goethe is thought to have answered this question in his discussion of
certain Lithuanian popular songs, when he wondered “that folk make so
much of these ballads of the people, and rate them so high. There is
only one poetry, the real and the true; all else is approximation and
show. Poetic talent is given to the peasant as well as to the knight; it
depends whether each lays hold upon his own condition and treats it as
it deserves, in which case the simplest relations will be the best.” And
there an end, cries the critic; what more is to be said? Nothing, if one
is discussing poetry merely as an impulse to emotional expression which
springs simple and distinct from the heart of man. But there is more to
be said when one treats poetry not as the impulse, but as the product of
the impulse, a product falling into sundry classes according to the
conditions under which it is produced. Setting theory aside, it is a
fact that critics of every sort have been fain to look upon the product
of the poetic impulse as something not simple, but twofold.

As was the case with rhythm, where a tradition of the priority of verse
compared with prose led to extravagant theories of early man as singing
instead of talking, and realizing generally the conditions of an Italian
opera stage, so with this dualism now in hand; extravagant theories of
folk-made epics and self-made songs, have brought it into a discredit
absolutely undeserved. In some form, to be sure, this dualism of the
poetic product pervades the whole course of criticism, and varies from a
vague, unstable distinction to a definite and often extravagant claim of
divided origins; its differencing factor now sunders the two parts as by
a chasm, and now leaves them with only the faintest line between.
Always, however, this differencing factor is more than an affair of
words. It has nothing to do with classification of materials or of form,
as when Schleiermacher opposes the epos and the drama as “plastic” to
the purely lyric or “musical.” It is not the dualism of high and low
implied in Fontenelle’s delightful “Description of the Empire of
Poesy,”[251] with its highlands, including “that great city, epic,” and
the “lofty mountain of tragedy,” burlesque, however, in the lowlands,
and comedy, though a pleasant town, quite too close to these marshes of
farce to be safe. It is not the antithesis of definition, not a mere
exclusion,—poetry against science, pleasure against truth, imaginative
verse against unimaginative, emotional against practical and didactic;
not a separation of cheap, shabby verses from the poetry which Ben
Jonson thought perfect, and fit to be seen “of none but grave and
consecrated eyes.” In a loose application, this twofold character of the
poetic product takes the form of an antithesis between art and nature, a
vague contrast, with terminology yet more vague; and here, again, it is
not the rival claims of art and nature in any one piece,—whether

Natura fieret laudabile carmen, an arte,

or in any one man,—“the good poet’s made as well as born”;[252] but it
is the contrast shown by poetry that is essentially “natural” in origin,
over against the rival sprung from art. Often it is impartial: Jonson’s
learned sock, or the wild wood-notes of Shakspere,—“with Shakspere’s
nature or with Jonson’s art,” is Pope’s echo of Milton; but Milton’s
nephew, Phillips,[253] pits “true native poetry” against “wit,
ingenuity, and learning in verse, even elegancy itself,”—Spenser and
Shakspere, that is, against his moderns. So one comes by way of these
great “natural” poets to the rural muse herself, who has always been
lauded and caressed when eulogy was safe. If mediocrities are versing,
“Tom Piper makes us better melodie”; and this is Spenser’s honest view,
not his “ironicall sarcasmus.” Back to the shepherds, says poetry, when
it is tired of too much art; rustic and homely and unlettered, is
opposed to urban and lettered and polite, song of the fields to verse
that looks across an inkstand at folios of the study. But this tendency
in criticism to rebuke poetry of the schools, its rouge and powder, by
pointing to the fresh cheeks of unspoiled rustic verse, is hardly to the
purpose.

Passing from this loose and popular account of the dualism, one finds
the contrast, still mainly unhistorical, but stated with precision, in
the æsthetic realm. Schiller, one of the masters in that school which
combined metaphysical theory with critical insight, divided poetry
into the naive and the sentimental; his famous essay, however, should
be read along with his poem on the _Künstler_, and with A. W.
Schlegel’s review of the poem; unsatisfactory as Schiller thought his
verse, it gives a historical comment on his theory, and he used the
idea of it for his Æsthetic Letters. It shows how art,—thought and
purpose, that is,—slowly took the place of spontaneity, and so it
gives a better because a historical statement of the dualism in hand.
Still, the phrase of naive and sentimental passed into vogue; this is
almost as much as to say objective and subjective; and one knows what
riot of discussion followed. Ancient was set against modern, the old
dispute, realist against idealist, classic against romantic,
conservative against radical; add short and pithy phrases from Goethe,
dithyrambs on “om-mject and sum-mject” from Coleridge; drop then, a
nine days’ fall, to the minor treatises in æsthetics: the thought of a
century has been ringing changes on this dualism. They are not to be
noted here, and are seldom to the purpose. Moses Mendelssohn’s
division into the “voluntary” and the “natural” looks at first sight
like an oracle from Herder; but it must be borne in mind that
Mendelssohn refused to regard as poetry those waifs and strays of song
which Herder praised. Masing, in a dissertation[254] of considerable
merit, divides into poetry of perception, which is rimeless, answering
to the classical or the objective, and poetry of feeling, which is
rimed and includes Christian, individual poetry: but there is no great
gain in this. Mr. E. C. Stedman[255] thinks poetry is “differentiated
by the Me and the Not Me,” and thus he obtains his two main divisions
of the poetic product. So run some of the purely theoretical
contrasts; without stay in historic study, their distinctions are
based upon the poetic impulse, and there is of course a far clearer
case when one considers poetry in the light of those conditions under
which it is produced. Æsthetic writers who apply the tests of
sociology, for example, have made a vast gain in their method of
treatment and in their results. Poetry to them is no vague, alien
substance, a planet to be watched through telescopes; it is an outcome
of the social life of man, and social facts must help to explain it.
Critic, historian, psychologist, all put new life into the æsthetic
discussion; and the artist himself is at hand. Earlier than Taine,
Hennequin, and Guyau, and along with Sainte-Beuve, Richard
Wagner,[256] in a practical purpose, and full of the ideas of 1848,
tried to bring the conditions of artistic production into line with
the study of society. It is not nature, he thinks, but the opposition
to nature which has brought forth art; man becomes independent of
climate; and social, human struggle is the making of this new man,
this “man independent of nature,” who alone called art into being, and
that not in tropical Asia, but “on the naked hillsides of Greece.”
Primitive man, dependent on nature, could never bring forth art, a
social product made in the teeth of adverse natural conditions.[257]
Wagner, however, goes further. Such is the history of art; but what of
its future? Art, literature, have become a solitary piece of
performance and of reception. The lonely modern man, pining for poetic
satisfaction, has but a sad and feeble comfort in the poetry of
letters. Back to social conditions, back to the old trinity of song,
movement, poem; back to the _ensemble_, the folk-idea, the poetry of a
people; let Shakspere and Beethoven join hands in the art that is to
be and that must spring, as it once sprang, from no single individual
artist but from the folk![258] Dithyramb apart, here is a theory of
social origins with a definite though curious dualism of art and
nature; Wagner talks _Jacob-Grimmisch_, it is true, and raves as
Nietzsche raved afterward; but he has sociological hints for which one
searches the school of Grimm in vain. Even in Victor Hugo’s fantastic
but suggestive phrases,[259] the new science, the agitation of St.
Simon and his school, may perhaps be found; and there is no disguise
of any sort in the sociological æsthetics of Guyau,[260] who repeats
Hugo’s notion in scientific terms, and so gives a precise expression
to the dualism once so vague. Primitive art, according to Guyau, is a
waking vision, and what we now call invention was at first nothing but
a spontaneous play of fancies and images suggesting and following one
another in the confusion of a dream. Real art begins when this pastime
comes to be work, when thought and effort seize upon the play of
fancy.[261]

These were mainly critical and æsthetic views. Of greater interest and
importance is the dualism as it took shape under the hands of that
historical school which had the great democratic movement in literature
for its origin, Herder for its prophet, and A. W. Schlegel for its high
priest. Here the dualism concerns not so much nature and art, uncertain
terms at best, but the body of people, the folk, the community, nation,
race, as contrasted with the individual artist, the “man of letters.” It
is poetry of the people over against poetry of the schools. Conditions
of this sort had been noted by earlier writers of what one may call the
scientific bent, that is, by men like Scaliger, who in this respect was
following Aristotle; not, of course, by those who looked upon the oldest
poet as divine, a prophet and a seer, the view taken by Platonists like
Spenser[262] and Sidney, by the early renaissance, by Ronsard, and by
belated followers of Ronsard. He, for example, not only says that
earliest poetry was allegorical theology, to coax rough men into ideas
of the divine,[263] but, in his preface about music,[264] written for a
collection of songs and addressed to the king, he holds to the idea of a
spontaneous and sacred perfection in this primitive verse. Later, so he
explains in his Poetics, came “the second class of poets, whom I call
human, since they were filled rather with artifice and labour than with
divinity,”—nature and art, again, in pious antithesis. It is different
with the scientific school. Scaliger, following Aristotle’s hints about
the origin of the drama, is for a normal process from the natural to the
artistic. Dante had made dualism a matter of rank, of merit, setting the
_vulgare illustre_ apart from the _humile vulgare_, and bidding
spontaneous, facile poets beware how they undertake the things that
belong to art;[265] Scaliger is not only historical but comparative, and
in the right fashion, assuming, at least for origins, no gradations of
rank. He is not for degeneration but for development; instead of
dividing the sheep from the goats, he regards nature and art as two
phases of the poetic conditions. Looking at the three forms of primitive
life,[266] he gives the parentage of verse to the pastoral; hunters were
too mobile, and ploughmen too busy, while shepherds had not only leisure
for meditation but the songs of birds as lure. In this earliest stage
Scaliger assumes two kinds of poetry, which he calls the solitary and
the social; and again in the second division he makes a further contrast
of the artless or natural,—not, he warns his reader, not to be classed
as vulgar,—and the more artistic, such as those amœbean forms which are
found in later pastoral verse. In other words, Scaliger hints at a
fundamental dualism; and his account of the matter, modern in spirit
despite its conventional style and its appeal to the ancients, is better
than Herder’s cloudy enthusiasm in all respects save one, and that, of
course, an exception of vast importance: Scaliger failed to put the
rustic and communal verse of Europe on a par with “natural” and social
songs of the prime.

This distinction of art and nature as a theory of origins, and with a
touch of the historical method in its treatment, is found again and
again in treatises on poetry from the renaissance to our own time.[267]
It is by no means confined to the brilliant and epoch-making writers.
Who was farther removed from Herder, so far as notions about poetry are
concerned, than Gottsched? But Gottsched, dull dog, as Dr. Johnson would
have called him, makes a clear distinction between natural and artistic
verse;[268] more than this, he backs his theory of origins by referring
to those “songs of the hill folk,” heard in his own day, which still
show characteristics of primitive poetry. Earlier yet, in the remarkable
work of Morhof[269] one finds use of the comparative method and a keen
sense of historic values; here is investigation, not theory outright, as
with the younger Racine,[270] or mere chronicle, as with M. de la
Nauze.[271] It is curious, too, that from the clergy came some of the
most rationalistic accounts of the dualism of nature and art, in
opposition to the divine and human idea of the renaissance. One must not
forget Herder’s cloth; Lowth took Hebrew poetry, as poetry, quite out of
the supernatural; and Calmet,[272] whose work on the Bible was once
valued by scholars, comments at length on the dualism as natural and
artificial, not as human and divine. Improvisation seems to be his test
for the natural sort, submission to rules and deliberation, his test for
artificial verse; and in the first case it is wrath, joy, sorrow, hate,
love, some natural outburst of passion, which is poetry by the mere fact
of its utterance. Moreover, this poetry of nature is found in every
clime;[273] and inseparable from it, in early stages, is the natural
music, song, which itself in course of time must be tamed by art. Like
Budde in our own day, Calmet points out “natural” songs in the Bible. It
was left, however, for Herder to bring forward all natural, artless
poetry not as a regret but as a hope, or rather as a disinherited exile
come back to claim his own; how the German pleaded for his client, and
with what success, is matter of common fame. At the historical school of
which he is the conspicuous exponent in matters of poetry we must give a
closer look.

Herder, in point of fact, was before a larger tribunal than that of
poetry, and in his plea for communal verse he was joining the great
democratic movement which ran through European thought at large, no less
active because less conspicuous in science, art, letters, religion, than
in affairs of state. A passion for democracy had gone from literature
into politics and again from politics into literature, begetting this
notion of creative power in the people as a whole; about the time that
philosophers discovered the people in politics, Hamann and Herder
discovered the folk in verse. The earlier eighteenth century, like all
the preceding Christian centuries from the time of St. Augustine,[274]
when saint or prophet or king was the embodiment of progress, still
turned history into biography, and human development into a series of
individual inventions; any movement in social life, whether of war or of
peace, was due to the great man,—general, king, orator, poet,—who began
or led the movement. Pascal’s pleasantry about Cleopatra and her nose
became a serious system of history and philosophy. Even as late as
Turgot,[275] for example, one pinned one’s faith to great men, to
genius, for the advancement of mankind. The seventeenth century had
asked for _raison_; the eighteenth sought _esprit_.[276] Genius was
already a watchword when the democratic movement began, and it was not
discarded by the new school; the Rousseaus and Herders clung to genius,
but with a new interpretation of the word, and added that larger idea of
“nature.” Critics are apt to forget that the return to nature was
preceded by a return to genius. The next step was to substitute natural
genius for the great man, to separate genius from the individual; and
here the democratic movement found help at hand in the progress and
gains of science. Science was now clear of the church, and began to work
into the domain of law, causes, force; it sought the impersonal both in
natural and in supernatural things. Cold and analytic in the earlier
decades, science in the later eighteenth century grew emotional,
synthetic, romantic, and full of zeal for what the Germans call
“combination.” What a change from the earlier mood, represented, one
might say, in Shaftesbury’s letter on enthusiasm! “Good humour,” he
writes in 1707,[277] “is not only the best security against enthusiasm,
but the best foundation of piety and true religion.” Even as late as
1766, when the spirit of enthusiasm was again abroad, aristocratic
Horace Walpole sounds the old note against the new communalism in his
account of a sermon which he heard Wesley preach at Bath; the preacher
“exalted his voice, and _acted very ugly enthusiasm_.” Enthusiasm,
however, was now rife in science itself; still blocked on the
theological side, it turned to nature and what lay undiscovered in her
domain. No talk as yet of a struggle for existence, no distinct lapse of
faith in humanity as main object of cosmic solicitudes; but a
disposition to find in the sweep and conflict of natural forces
sufficiently good answer to any question about the history of man, and a
tendency to force upon individual men a transfer of values to the race.
Not the individual, but the mass, and behind this mass the currents of
life at large, were to interpret history. The great man disappeared, or
else served simply as mouthpiece for the national and popular genius;
and it was at this point that Herder appeared with his _Thoughts for the
Philosophy of the History of Mankind_,—thoughts that here and there
foreshadow the doctrine of evolution. Down to the extreme theories of
Buckle, this point of view was taken by historians and philosophers.
True, much is said of the individual; Rousseau, Goethe in his _Werther_,
Herder, even, and Hamann, all glorified the free, individual man; it is
not individual man in the old sense, however, but rather man himself as
type of the human brotherhood, as one of a throng, the “citizen” whether
high or low. More than this, it was a glorification of primitive man
himself without the differencing and individualizing work of culture;
the eighteenth century, and not merely in Rousseau’s sentimental
fashion, discovered the savage on one side, and, on the other side,
unspoiled men of the prime. In literature there was an outbreak of
gentle savages and a very mob of Robinson Crusoes; while for philosophy
and science, the alchemy of human perfectibility, a desire to
reconstruct society by the elixir of primitive life and a study of man
as he ought to be, preceded the chemistry of modern anthropological and
sociological researches, which aim at an analysis of earliest social
conditions and the science of man both as he was and as he is.

This democratic thought of the eighteenth century had an outer and an
inner circle, answering in great measure to the notion of humanity and
the notion of the people or “folk.” It was Vico who put men upon the
first trail, who reformed scientific methods, and who, with all his
antiquated theories, is often so surprisingly modern. He bade men look
for the mind of humanity, the soul of it, as revealed in history,
poetry, law, language, religion. He traced something of the inner circle
as well, tossing aside Homer’s personality, and saying that Homer was
the Greek people itself as it told the story of its deeds. He set up the
antithesis between imagination and reason, and gave the formula of
culture as a decrease of the one and an increase of the other. Herder
said these things seventy years later, and indeed his mere plea for
humanity and nationality[278] adds little to the ideas of Vico; what the
German added of his own was on the larger scale a substitution of people
for race, and on the smaller scale a plea for the actual folk about one,
the community of rustics, the village throng, not idealized shepherds
and subjects of the Saturnian reign. From Vico to Herder, then,
democracy was in the air, pervading the rationalism that so easily
turned into sentiment and the naturalism that so readily fabled a new
supernaturalism. Particularly in its theories of poetry the eighteenth
century responded to the democratic impulse along three lines, the
scientific, the historical, and what one would now call the ethnological
and sociological.[279] A detailed account of these three currents of
thought in their effect upon the study of poetry would be of interest
and profit in the present work, but demands too much space; it must be
reserved for separate treatment. We must confine our attention to the
movement for communal or popular verse, and even that must be described
in merest outline.

The first man in Europe to recognize poetry of the people, and to make
it a term of the dualism now in hand, was Montaigne. He discovered the
thing and gave a name to it,—_la poésie populaire_; he praised it for
its power and grace; and he brought it into line with that poetry of
savages then first coming into the view of European critics. The
specimen which he gave of this savage verse remained for a long time the
only one commonly known in Europe; in like manner, a Lapland _Lament_,
published in Scheffer’s Latin, came to be the conventional specimen of
lowly or popular song. Montaigne, however, spoke boldly for the critical
value of both kinds, savage and popular, bidding them hold up their
heads in the presence of art. He praises the two extremes of poetic
development, nature and simplicity on the one hand, and, on the other,
noble artistic effort; for what Cotton translates as “the mongrets” he
has open scorn.[280] Along with the savage verses which he quotes in
another essay[281] he makes shrewd comments on the refrain and the
dancing, shows an interest in ethnology, and even names his
authorities,—“a man in my house who lived ten or twelve years in the New
World,” and in smaller degree natives to whom he talked at Rouen. Now
this insight, this outlook, of Montaigne are unique. Sidney, whom a
German scholar[282] praises for catholicity of taste equal to that of
Montaigne and not derived from him, is too academic; he notes the
_areytos_ of America, by way of proof that rudest nations have poetry,
and bursts out in that praise of “the old song of Percy and Douglas,”
only to take away from its critical value by a limitation quite foreign
to the spirit of Montaigne. Neither Sidney nor Puttenham,[283] in their
notice of savage and of communal poetry, came anywhere near the
Frenchman’s point of view.

The catholicity and discernment of Montaigne, the careless approval of
Sidney, the comparative vein in Puttenham, had really no following in
Europe until Herder’s time. Poetry of the people remained a literary
outcast; and as late as 1775 a German professor “would have felt
insulted by the mere idea of any attention” to such verse.[284]
Englishmen, to be sure, began long before this to collect the ballads,
to print them, and even to write about them in a shamefaced way; but
this was eccentricity of the kind for which, according to Matthew
Arnold, continental folk still make allowance. Ambrose Phillips, or
whoever made the collection begun in 1723, is very bold in his first
volume; he “will enter upon the praise of ballads and shew their
antiquity;” in the second volume he weakens, and will “say as little
upon the subject as possibly” he can; while in the third volume he
actually apologizes for the “ludicrous manner” in which he wrote the two
other prefaces. He had suggested that the ballads were really “written
by the greatest and most polite wits of their age”; but nobody in
England paid much heed to the subject of origins, barring a little
powder burnt over the thing by Percy and Ritson; and the making of a
theory, the founding of ballad criticism and research as a literary
discipline, was left to German pens.

It has been said that Herder was the prophet of the faith in communal
poetry. Herder’s “origins,” so far as this doctrine is concerned, are
interesting enough. That the individual is child of his time, child of
his race, child of his soil; that he is not only what “suns and winds
and waters” make him, but what long ages and vast conspiracies of nature
and the sum of human struggle have made him,—strand by strand of this
cord can be brought from Hamann, from Blackwell, Lowth, Robert Wood,
Hurd, Spence, from Condorcet, Montesquieu, Rousseau; but all that does
not make up Herder. It was his grasp of this entire evolutionary
process, his belief in it, his fiery exhortation, in a word, his genius,
that made him the only begetter of the modern science. Full of scorn for
closet verse of his day, he held up the racial or national, the
“popular” in its best sense, against the pedantic and the
laboured,—poetry that beats with the pulse of a whole people against
poetry that copies its exercises from a dead page and has no sense of
race. He sundered poetry for the ear from poetry for the eye, poetry
said or sung from poetry that looks to “a paper eternity” for its
reward. Under his hands, in a word, the dualism became real, a state of
things impossible while one was juggling with an adjective like
“natural” or with a phrase like “naive and sentimental.” He gathered and
printed songs of the folk, as he calls them, or by another title, voices
of the nations.[285] Here, of course, is lack of precision; a peasant’s
song and a soliloquy of Hamlet, one because really “popular,” the other
because really “national,” are ranged alike as folksongs. But the
dualism stands. Oral, traditional, communal poetry, and whatever springs
from these, are set clearly against poetry of the schools. Naturally,
Herder was unjust to the cause of art, or rather he seems to be unjust.
What he does is to bid the artist stand for a community or race and
reflect their life, or else fall, a negligible and detached thing.
Poetry is a spring of water from the living rock of community or nation;
whether Moses, Homer, Shakspere, dealt the unsealing blow, or whether
the waters gushed out of their own force, Herder cared not a whit.

This doctrine of a dualism in poetry was still further elaborated by A.
W. Schlegel, who brought to the task not only his unerring literary
tact,[286] his critical insight, his astounding sympathy for foreign
literatures, but his method of historical and genetic research. In his
early essay on Dante, he broke away from the method then in vogue, and
used historical tests instead of that philosophical analysis so dear to
Schiller. No one has stated the dualism of communal and artistic poetry
so clearly as Schlegel has done;[287] and yet, owing to a curious lack
of perspective in modern criticism, he is credited with the achievement
of crushing the dualism to naught. Leaving the details to another
occasion, we may give a brief outline of this case, which has so
distinct a bearing on the question of poetical origins. In his lectures
and in sundry essays, Schlegel states the historical dualism, and
repeats Aristotle’s account of early communal and improvised verse,
adding, however, what Aristotle refused to give, recognition of this as
poetry and respect for its rude nobility of style. As Schlegel left the
matter in his lectures, there was nothing to which one could raise an
objection; and the same is true of a temperate statement, made by
Wilhelm von Humboldt,[288] which may be quoted here at length. “In the
course of human development,” he says, “there arise two distinct kinds
of poetry, marked respectively by the presence and the absence of
written records. One, the earlier, may be called natural poetry; it
springs from an enthusiasm which lacks the purpose and consciousness of
art. The second is a later product, and is full of art; but it is none
the less outcome of the deepest and purest spirit of poetry.” One sees
it is not the communal bantling that has to be praised and defended
here; not rude, uncivil verse that once found an advocate in Herder, but
now needs no advocate; it is the poetry of art that must be lauded and
protected as even-christian with “natural” verse. Democratic ideas had
put the poetry of nature above all else; the pantheistic doctrines of
Schelling, carrying even Schlegel off his feet, had made a school for
the universal, general, communal, absolute, in verse; and a wholesome
reaction had set in. Humboldt’s modest words could have been signed by
nearly every critical warrior, Trojan or Tyrian, who took up his pen in
the long dispute; the trouble had begun when scholars tried to give
details about the origin of natural or popular verse and essayed to draw
close lines of definition between the people and the artist. Jacob and
Wilhelm Grimm, full of romance, piety, and pantheism, laid stress upon
this kindly word “natural” and dogmatized it into a creed.[289] A song
sings itself; a “folk” can be poet; nations make their own epic; the
process is a mystery: these and like phrases are now regarded by
short-sighted critics as a fair summary of the democratic or communal
doctrine of poetry, and are thought to have been blown into space, along
with the doctrine, by a clumsy jest of Scherer about the Pentecost.
Scherer, indeed, has given a history of this movement, with what seems
to him a closing of the account, in his admirable book on Jacob Grimm;
but neither this nor his jest can be regarded as final. He appeals to
Schlegel as the great literary critic who really killed this doctrine of
the folk in verse as soon as it was born, although the great reputation
of the Grimms gave it an appearance of life and vigour down to the time
say ... of Scherer. Now it is a fact, overlooked by German scholars,
that A. W. Schlegel laid down a theory of communal origins, almost
identical with that of the Grimms, at a time when Jacob was barely
fifteen and Wilhelm fourteen years old. In an essay on Bürger,[290] whom
he loved and admired, Schlegel asks whether this man of genius was
really what he thought he was, a poet of the folk, and whether his
poetry could be called poetry of the people. To answer the question,
Schlegel makes a study of old ballads, and says that these were not
purposely made for the folk, but were composed among the
people,—“_composed, in a manner of speaking, by the folk itself as a
whole_.”[291] This community which made the old ballads was of course
homogeneous; the style of them is without art or rhetoric; they come
spontaneously. In short, “the free poetic impulse did that with ease and
success to which the careful artist now purposely returns.” Here is the
later doctrine of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in a nutshell; how much of it
did Schlegel reject fifteen years later in that famous criticism[292] of
the Grimms’ _Old German Forests_, where he turns state’s evidence
against his fellow conspirators for demos? Simply its extravagances, but
by no means its reiteration of a dualism in the poetic product springing
from conditions of production. That idea stands intact; for all of
Schlegel’s historical studies are based upon it. Moreover, the Grimms
said far more than Schlegel had said, and went into deeper extravagances
of romance. He denied their assumption that the great mass of legend,
song, epic, which one finds or surmises at the beginnings of a national
literature, is the authoritative and essentially true deliverance of the
nation itself. Nor is there a pious mystery—and here Schlegel touches
the quick—in the making of such songs. A poem implies a poet. In brief,
the Grimms were not to furbish up the idyll of a golden age, bind it in
a mystery, and hand it over to the public as an outcome of exact
philological studies. This process, he said in sum, is all theory and no
fact; and here lies the stress of Schlegel’s criticism, which really
involved only a partial and superficial recanting of his own doctrine.
He was always wont to turn from theory to fact, and in the Grimms’ wild
theory he found no facts at all; he protests against the self-made song,
the folk-made song even; but he would have been the first to give ear to
any plea for a difference between songs of art and songs of the people
that was based on facts and that might bring out those social conditions
which determine the poem as it is made. He had himself repeatedly
brought out these conditions, these facts, and he nowhere recants the
doctrine which he founded on them. He unsays, perhaps without
consciousness of any change of opinion, his old saying about the folk as
a poet; he does not unsay his belief in the dualism of poetry according
to the conditions under which it is produced. “All poetry,” he declares,
“rests on a union of nature and art; without art it can get no permanent
form, without nature its vitality is gone.” True; but there is communal
art and there is individual art, or rather there are two kinds of poetry
according as art and the individual or instinct and the community
predominate; and this dualism he had repeatedly affirmed, just as
Aristotle had hinted it long before him. Schlegel does not reduce it to
a mere matter of record,[293] as modern critics do when they seize upon
Humboldt’s saying that the difference between oral and written is the
“mark” of the dualism—he does not say its essence; for it is treated,
even in this critical essay, as a matter of conditions of production.
The scholar who took up poetry on the genetic and historical side, who
followed brutish and uncivil man slowly tottering into the path of art,
is not lost in the critic who simply refuses to see primitive poetry
bursting by miracle out of a whole nation into an Iliad, a Nibelungen
Lay, a Beowulf.

This, then, is particularly to be borne in mind; the dualism of the
poetic product based on the difference between communal and individual
conditions of production does not rise and fall with the dualism as it
took shape in the theory of the Grimms.[294] Aristotle had set aside all
unpremeditated, artless verse of the throng, and had regarded it at best
as mere foundation, no part of the poetic structure. Jacob Grimm went to
the other extreme, and set off from poetry all laboured, premeditated,
individual verse; he accepted modern poetry, to be sure, but explained
away the poet; the superstructure was nothing save as it implied that
unseen foundation. Or, to put it in different phrase, the old doctrine
of imitation as mainspring of poetry had yielded to the idea of a power,
an informing energy; one turned, like Addison, to the imaginative
process, or else to deeper sources. Herder told men to seek this source,
this poetic power, in the people, with their primitive passions and
their unspoiled utterance. Herder was general, often merely negative,
and exhorted; the Grimms were positive and dogmatized, teaching that the
whole people as a whole people once made poetry. But this extravagance
must not drag down in its death those sober facts about which criticism
has always hovered with its hints or statements of the twofold nature of
poetry. Moreover, just as these facts are to be held in plain view, and
not lost in the haze of an impossible theory, so, too, they are not to
be rationalized and explained away into a facile, unmeaning phrase about
the difference between oral and written record. It is a question of the
difference in poetic production due to varying conditions under which
the poetic impulse has to work; and some difference of this sort, not of
mere record, is recognized in the whole range of criticism, mostly,
however, by expressions about art and nature which leave much to be
desired in the way of precise statement. Nature and art are terms of
æsthetics; even when used in a more or less historical sense, the
historical comprehension of them is uncertain; can they not be
transferred then, to terms of sociology, of ethnology, of literary
conditions, so as to correspond with the actual facts of poetry and with
the actual history of man,—transferred in good faith, and for the
interests of no theory, but to provide clear tests for an investigation
which studies communal poetry in order to determine whether it can throw
light upon the conditions of primitive song? There is certainly such a
dualism of conditions apart from the record. Even the most intrepid
monist allows the dualism of the term “mankind” according as one takes
man social or man individual, the solitary man of reflection, ethics,
judgment, and the same man as one of a crowd of madmen—mad for the
nonce, mad gregariously, but mad. M. Tarde has recently drawn this
picture in very bold outlines. There are two men in the juryman,—the
individual and the juryman. Does this, then, hold in poetry? It is a
fact that poetry made by a throng, or made in a throng, or made for a
throng, or made in whatever fashion but finding its way, as favourite
expression, to a throng—and every theory of communal verse may be
referred to one of these cases—is a quite distinct kind of poetry from
that which is made by the solitary poet for the solitary reader.
Nowadays nearly all poetry is written and read, but once upon a time
nearly all poetry was sung and heard; a very hasty glance at this
antithesis will show that it concerns production at least as much as it
concerns the record. It serves as basis for the division of poetry into
one class where the communal spirit and environment condition the actual
making, and into another class where the artist, the individual, has
upper hand from the start.[295] It sets primitive poetry, at least in
some important characteristics, over against the poetry of modern times.
If, then, communal poetry still exists in survival; if the sense of
literary evolution, the facts of literary evolution, the facts of
ethnology, the conclusions of sociology, all assert that primitive
poetry was communal rather than individual in the conditions of its
making; then it is clear that a study of the survivals ought to be one
of the best ways by which one could come to reasonably sure conclusions
about poetry of the prime.

CHAPTER IV

THE DIFFERENCING ELEMENTS OF THE POETRY OF ART

Nobody will deny that the modern man does more thinking and less singing
than the man, say, of Shakspere’s time; and nobody will deny that
thinking needs solitude, while singing—real, hearty singing—asks the
throng and a refrain. Thought, M. Anatole France[296] declares in his
vivacious way, “thought is the acid which dissolves the universe, and if
all men fell to thinking at once, the world would cease to be.” “Lonely
thinking,” says Nietzsche, “that is wise; lonely singing,—stupid.” In
the same fashion, a solitary habit of thinking has made itself master of
poetry, particularly of the lyric; while the singing of a poem is going
fast out of date. Poetry begins with the impersonal, with communal
emotion, and passes to a personal note of thought so acutely individual
that it has to disguise itself, wear masks, and prate about being
objective. For objective and even simple poetry may be highly subjective
at heart; and to define subjective as talking about one’s self, what
Bagehot, in his essay on Hartley Coleridge, calls self-delineation, is
by no means a sufficient account of the trait. When the folksong runs:—

A Nant’s, à Nant’s est arrivé,
_Saute, blonde, et lève le pied_,
Trois beaux navir’s chargés de blé;
_Saute, blonde, ma joli’ blonde_....

and Béranger sings:—

Une plainte touchante
De ma bouche sortit;
Le bon Dieu me dit, Chante,
Chante, pauvre petit!

it is not only wrong to take simplicity as the differencing factor of
the communal song, for Béranger is quite as simple, but it will not do
to fall back on mere self-delineation as end of the matter in art. Half
of the folksongs of Europe are self-delineations of the singing and
dancing crowd, in mass or by deputed “I.” The real difference lies in
the shifting of the point of view; song, once the consolation and
expression of the festal crowd, comes to be the consolation and
expression of the solitary poet. “I do not inquire,” Ribot remarks,[297]
“whether this sort of isolation in an ivory tower is a gain or a loss
for poetry; but I observe its growing frequency as civilization
advances, the complete antithesis to its collective character in the
earliest ages.” To study such a change in the long reaches of poetic
progress would be an almost impossible task even if the material were at
hand; it is best to take a comparatively short range of time and a
definite place,—say the literature of modern Europe from its beginning
in the Middle Ages down to the present time. The extremes are fairly
sundered. Europe had lapsed from civilization to a half barbarous state,
from the height of the Roman empire to the depth of the dark ages, with
a corresponding decline of intellectual power and a great inrush of
communal force. Out of these communal conditions, individual and
intellectual vigour made its difficult way; how difficult, how tortuous
that way, every one knows; and it is along this route, and about the
time of the renaissance, that one may best watch the differencing
elements of artistic and individual poetry as they come slowly into
view.

As the individual[298] frees himself from the clogs of his mediæval
guild, in literature as in life, there begins the distinctly modern idea
of fame, of glory, as a personal achievement apart from community or
state; and there, too, begins the idea of literary property. Fame of the
poet had its classical tradition, and was asserted in a conventional,
meaningless way by mediæval poets, chiefly in Latin; but the market
value of a poem is something new.[299] From this time on there is a
pathetic struggle in the poet’s mind whether he shall regard his poem as
offspring to cherish or as ware to sell. Randolph, writing to his
friend, Master Anthony Stafford, takes the nobler view:—

Let clowns get wealth and heirs: when I am gone ...
If I a poem leave, that poem is my son.

There is pretty antithesis, too, between the director and the poet in
Goethe’s play before the play in _Faust_,—one for his box-receipts, and
the other for the solitudes of poetry and the gods. A happy solution has
been found of late for this dilemma; over the naked contradiction of
love and merchandise one throws the cloak of the artist. The artist
begets in pure love of his art; and he sells for Falstaff’s reason,—it
is his vocation. Until poetry got this market value, however, it was
common goods; poets had written generically, as members of a class or
guild,[300] and any member might use the common stock of expressions and
ideas. A translator was as great as his original.[301] The eighth
chapter of Dante’s essay on composition in the vernacular opens with a
curious discourse about artistic property, as if the new idea and the
new phrase needed a gloss. “When we say, ‘this is Peter’s _canzone_,’ we
mean that Peter made it, not merely that he uttered it!” Such an
explanation, however, seems timely enough if one remembers that “a
mediæval writer held it to be improper to join his name to any literary
composition,”[302] and that Dante, “first of the moderns” as he is, and
personal as his work seems to be, actually names himself but once in the
whole _Commedia_. Here is the dying struggle of that clan ownership[303]
which had ruled from the days of the primitive horde; for it is clear
that intellectual property would be the last kind to be developed, and
even if the poet liked to see his name graven on the colder side of the
rock, this was not an isolated, personal distinction, but was merged in
the register of the guild like the names on a soldiers’ monument.
Horace’s “write me down among the lyric poets” was an intelligible
ambition to mediæval minds; but the purely personal triumph of his _non
omnis móriar_ and its splendid context was alien to their way of
thought. Barring the degree of genius in each, one may say that Dante
and Victor Hugo were equally strong in their intense individuality; here
is a case where Gautier’s phrase holds good that the brain of an artist
was the same under the Pharaohs as it is now; yet that conditions change
the product, that the individual note, piercing in the modern, becomes
almost communal and generic in the older poet, that a distinct curve of
evolution to the personal extreme, even in artistic poetry, can be drawn
between them, is clear to probation for any one who will compare two
famous passages which a hasty inference would probably declare to be on
the same straight individual line. If one looks at the whole passage
where Dante speaks of his poetic achievement,[304] and if one neither
isolates a phrase nor yet sentimentalizes it all to suit modern ideas;
if one notes the satisfaction which the poet feels with his work in and
for the guild, and how he passes the time of day with a brother
craftsman; then one will find in it not only a touch of artlessness, of
what is called, rightly or wrongly, the mediæval, the communal, but an
effacement of personality in the very act of asserting it. He shows, as
it were, his diploma from the guild of poets. To bring this artlessness
into clear relief, one has only to compare the thirty-second of Hugo’s
_Chants du Crépuscule_, where the poet, alone in an old tower, addresses
the bell which hangs there, its pious inscription insulted by the
obscenities, blasphemies, and futilities written over it; he is no
exile, this poet, but proudly and contemptuously isolated from his kind,
whose brutishness he has just deplored; and he speaks thus to the
bell,—of all survivals the most characteristic of mediæval thought, the
veriest symbol of communal religious life:—

Sens-tu, par cette instinct vague et plein de douceur,
Qui révèle toujours une sœur à la sœur,
Qu’à cette heure où s’endort la soirée expirante,[305]

_Une âme est près de toi, non moins que toi vibrante_,
Qui bien souvent aussi jette un bruit solennel,
Et se plaint dans l’amour comme toi dans le ciel?

Then the superb lines of comparison: life has written on the poet’s soul
base and irreverent inscriptions, like those on the bell; but a touch of
the divine, a message, and like the bell, so his soul breaks out into
harmonies in which even the audacities and futilities perforce take
part. Compare all this introspection, this immense assumption of
individual importance, with the objective, communal tone of Dante,
despite that “I am one who sings whenever love inspires me,”—so like
Hugo’s assertion, and yet so different. In each of these passages one
can see artistic individuality; but between them stretches a long chain
of development in which each link is a new emphasis on the individual in
art. One of the earliest and strongest of these links was forged by the
renaissance; although it must be borne in mind that Dante represents not
simply his guild of singers, but behind them a singing community of
peasants, the songs of field, spinning-room, and village dance, still
dominant among unlettered folk and not yet shamed into silence by print
and the schoolmaster.

The change, however, was there; the tide had turned against communal
sentiment, and individuals were feeling a new power. Not only fame and
glory fled from the guild to the great man; individual disgrace, the
lapse, the shortcoming, find a record. Once the flyting was carried out
before the folk, rose and fell with the occasion, and was a thing of
festal origin, like the Eskimo poem-duel, or the earliest amœbean verse,
or the German _schnaderhüpfl_; but Aretino now appears as the father of
journalism in our pleasant modern sense, as the arch reporter, the
discoverer and publisher of personal scandal.[306] In painting, too, one
notes the sudden rage for portraits; and it is the portrait of the
individual for himself, not simply of pope, or of abbot, or of prince,
as the head and type of a corporation, although a trace of this
influence lingers in the setting of the picture, witness one of
Holbein’s merchants, with his bills, pens, memoranda, and a dozen
mercantile suggestions scattered about him. Poetry, of course, felt the
change first of all, both in subject-matter and in form. For the latter,
there is the founding of the sonnet, that apartment for a single
gentleman in verse. One thinks at once of Petrarch, rightly called “the
first modern man,” and deserving the title better than Dante, who was
quite as mediæval as he was modern,[307] while Petrarch belonged to the
new world; besides his sonnets, his correspondence and his confessions
show that he not only felt the need, as none of his predecessors had
felt it, to reveal and analyze his personality, but also recognized an
interest on the part of the public to which these revelations could
respond. The mediæval poet sought his public, did not call the public to
himself; and the artistic form of his poetry is the utterance of common
feeling in a common and often conventional phrase. The May morning, the
vision,[308] the garden and the roses and the blindingly beautiful young
person, the allegorical birds and beasts,—this was the late mediæval
tether; although allegory helped the poet to escape the throng and hedge
his personality with some importance, even allegory is in the service if
not of the throng, at least of the guild. Allegory as a poetical form
mediates between the old communal ballad, or the _chanson de geste_, and
the new lyric of confidences. The modern poet cut loose from it all, and
cast about for the gentle reader, soon to be his portion by the happy
intervention of print. Ronsard strikes this note of separation from an
unappreciative throng, and so does many another humanist; while
Chaucer’s contempt for the masses is not so much artistic as mediæval
and aristocratic. Dunbar, our first really modern poet, the first to
take that purely individual attitude, was also first of our poets to see
his work in printer’s ink. Even when the form of literature demanded
objective treatment, the interest began to be individual. We now laud
our poet or playwright for the fine individuality of his folk, and flout
those masterless tales, songs, ballads, where even the hero is a mere
type, or, worse, a mere doer of deeds. This doer of deeds answered the
desire for poetic expression at a time when an individual was merged in
his clan; the excess of interest in action is proportioned to the excess
of communal over individual importance. As the artist develops, as he
begins to feel his way toward individualism, his genius is spent first
upon allegory, and then, as real life grows more imperious, upon the
type, a compromise between individual and community. Here stands
Chaucer. Like Dante he looks both ways; his squire, for example,
deliciously clear and individual as he seems, has as much reminiscence
of Childe Waters as prophecy of Romeo. It is characteristic of the two
periods in which Chaucer and Shakspere respectively worked, that while
one named his masterpiece, the study of a vulgar woman, “a wife of
Bath,” the other called a like masterpiece “Mrs. Quickly of
Eastcheap,”—a very pretty little curve of evolution in itself; and when
the portrait of the merchant is drawn,—and what a portrait!—that
careless “sooth to sayn, I noot how men hym calle,” as compared with
Shakspere’s treatment of Antonio, is suggestive not only of the
aristocrat, but also of the mediæval point of view. Even the setting of
the Prologue is in point,—these pilgrims, each a representative of his
class or corporation, their common lodging, their association, even if
temporary, as in a guild, their jests, courtesies, and quarrels, all in
the open air. A century later, people had come indoors. Professor
Patten,[309] alert to note the connection between æsthetic change and a
change in economic conditions, points out the alteration thus wrought in
the passage from communal to individual life. Window-glass, the chimney,
bricks, all improvements of the home, changed this home from a prison to
a palace, from something shunned and undesired to the focal point of
happiness. Outdoor communal amusements yielded to indoor pleasures
shared by a few. The dances and the license of May-day, uproarious and
often questionable rejoicings once common to all, were now left to the
baser sort, while quiet, reputable folk turned to their homes. Knight
and prioress, too, no longer rode beside the miller and put up with his
_gros rire_, his drunken antics, and his tale.

The main expression in poetry brought about by that new power of the
individual is the confidential note, the assumption of a reader’s
interest in the poet’s experience, what J. A. Symonds called “the lyric
cry,” begetting on the part of this reader or hearer a sense at first
confined to such mutual relations of the poet and the sympathetic soul
to which he spoke, but spreading little by little until it is now fairly
to be called the medium, the atmosphere, of poetry at large; one names
it sentiment. The history of modern verse, with epic and drama in decay,
is mainly the history of lyrical sentiment. Where does this first appear
in European poetry?[310] Answers to such a question are made with
melancholy forebodings, seeing that a first appearance in literary
annals is as unstable as the positively last appearance of a favourite
singer; but French criticism has pitched, with considerable show of
right, upon that amiable vagabond, Villon. Certainly the _Grand
Testament_ is as familiar in its tone to the modern reader as it is
difficult and obsolete in its speech; and Sainte-Beuve, in a pretty bit
of criticism, has undertaken to show why Villon’s most famous ballade
touches this modern sense, while verses seemingly like it are scorned as
monkish prattle.[311] Throughout the Middle Ages a favourite form of
communal sentiment, or rather of theological and professional
reflection, was to ask where this and that famous person might now be
found. The mediæval poet could string together interminable rimed
queries like these of St. Bernard:—

Dic ubi Salomon, olim tam nobilis?
Vel ubi Samson est, dux invincibilis?
Vel pulcher Absolon, vultu mirabilis?
Vel dulcis Jonathas, multum amabilis?

and so on, with pagans like Cæsar, Tully, Aristotle. A capable Frenchman
traced this sort of poem far back, and on his heels came a tireless, not
to say superfluous, German;[312] but it was Sainte-Beuve who did the one
important thing. He sees in Villon’s queries about those fair ladies
dead and gone little more than the old conventional question, and finds
Villon’s originality in the exquisite refrain, with its light,
half-mocking pathos: _But where are the snows of yester year?_ The Latin
simply failed to add:—

Ast ubi nix vetus, tam effusibilis?

Yet Sainte-Beuve did not quite touch the quick. Even this refrain is no
more original than the queries; for it not only echoes a popular phrase,
and perhaps is itself nothing more than a communal refrain,[313] but it
continues a theme of the mediæval poet even better known than the _ubi
sunt_. The real change is not in words or phrase, but in a shifting from
the professional to the personal point of view. The poet of the sacred
guild could put this fact of mortality either as a question or as an
“example,”—witness a thirteenth-century poem,[314] where the prospect of
dissolution is fortified by the roasting of St. Lawrence, the beheading
of John the Baptist, and the stabbing of Thomas à Becket; while the same
manuscript which holds this “example” has a charming little poem of
questions, the _Luve Ron_ of Thomas de Hales, often quoted as forerunner
of Villon’s ballade. “A maid of Christ,”—and we note this touch of the
guild,—“asks me to make her a love-song. I will do it. But the love of
this world is a cheat; lovers must die, and men fade all as leaf from
bough. Lovers, quotha? _Where, indeed, are Paris and Helen; where
Tristram, Ysolde, and the rest; where, too, are Hector and Cæsar?_ As if
they had never lived at all!” At first sight this lyric of the guild
seems a counterpart to the pagan cry of Villon, as if the latter were a
parody of the old formula without the piety and with a vague touch of
genius in the refrain; but the difference is more than this. Villon
transfers sentiment from the guild to the individual.[315] It is a
supreme and triumphant and epoch-making attempt to do what the
individual poet had always essayed to do and found impossible,—to leap
communal barriers entirely, and tear himself free from the guild. The
monk could not doff his cowl; his face is hidden; his song asks the
organ, the choir, the general confession, the litany, for a background,
even when it seems fairly Wordsworthian:—

Winter wakens all my care!
Now these trees are waxing bare,
Oft I sigh and mourn full “sair,”
When it cometh in my thought
Of this earthly joy, how it all goeth to naught.[316]

Not so with Villon. He knows no guild, save that of the jolly beggars;
and he can do with ease what even Ronsard does only with difficulty, and
leaning on a classical staff:—

Sous le tombeau tout Ronsard n’ira pas,—

paraphrase of Horace. But these ladies pass in line before Villon for
his own whim;[317] they are there to throw a more intense light upon his
own personality; and the cry of the refrain, subtle but absolute touch
of individual sentiment, is the new lyric cry.[318] Across the channel
this cry is echoed in what at first hearing sounds like the veriest poem
of a guild, Dunbar’s _Lament for the Poets_,[319] and in its refrain,
superficially so mediæval, _Timor mortis conturbat me_! But for English
lyric, Dunbar is the first poet of sentiment, in its modern meaning, as
Villon is for the French. In brief, the more one studies these changes,
which could be detailed to the limits of a book, the clearer one sees
that Europe learned from Villon, Dunbar, and their fellows, to take
sentiment[320] instead of the old morality, and to regard lyric verse as
the bidding to a private view of the poet’s mind. The poet now makes
himself the central point of all that he says and sees; he lays all
history, all romance, under tribute to support the burden of his own
fate and frame his proper picture; he is the sun of the system; he
serves no clan or guild, and admits his readers only one by one to an
audience. The advance from Villon’s time is chiefly to add the
intellectual to the individual, an obvious process. Emotion has come so
thoroughly under individual control that the art is now conscious and
the artist supreme, and so thoroughly under intellectual control that
the feelings, however common and widely human their appeal, must own the
mastery of thought. The one involves the other; for consent of emotions
is a far easier affair than consent of opinions and agreement of
reasoning. Emotion is the solvent of early superstition, traditional
beliefs and affections, in a community, as it is in an individual. “I
felt,” says Rousseau, “before I thought; it is the common lot of
humanity.”[321] In societies custom is a consent of instincts, an
unconscious law; legislation, definite and conscious, is a consent of
thinking individuals. A creed has always been easy to change, for it is
matter of thought; a cult, a form, a superstition, communal instincts,
in a word, go not out even with prayer and fasting.

Objections against all this have little weight. One is told that the
renaissance brought uniformity and not diversity of poetic form and
thought. But that rationalism, so called, which then came in, and which
made reason superior to emotion, worked for the individual and not, as
critics say, for the social forces in art.[322] It is true that all this
rational activity, this intelligent study and discussion of the
classics, led to a certain uniformity in poetic work; but every advance
in rationalism really accents the individuality, the artistry, the
intellectual power of the poet, and leads him further from the communal
and instinctive emotional level. Keen emotion brings men closer; keen
thinking separates their paths, even if it leads them to one
destination. Communal emotion is still the mine whence a poet gets his
gold; but where the gold was once current in mere bulk, or at best in
weight, it must now be stamped with the sharpest possible impression of
artistic thought. Or, again, one may be more precise in one’s objection.
Attacking this idea that emotion, or the mass, rules in one age, and the
individual, or thought, in another, as something akin to Comte’s
discredited evolutionary drama in three great acts,—feeling, fancy,
reason,—one may insist on the piercing emotional individualism and
subtle thinking of the church at a time when the communal note is
assumed as dominant in mediæval life. Here again we must protest against
the tyranny of terms. What does Haym mean by the individualism of the
Middle Ages, and precisely what was this individualism of the church?
According as one looks at the church, one may say that it was individual
or that it was communal in its influence. There are really three
elements in the case. The people of the Middle Ages in Europe were to a
great extent organized in a communal system, for the unlettered
community kept many features of the clan, not to say of the horde, and
social growth itself was a matter of the guild. In such relations the
individual had little to say; and it was out of these conditions that
the renaissance, working first through the Italian commonwealths, began
to draw the individual into his new career. Here, then, was the communal
life of the Middle Ages. The second element in the case is the church as
a huge guild, organized for the communal life out of which it grew, and
subordinating individual thought, emotion, will, to the thought,
emotion, and will of this whole body. These two elements, long in
undisputed power, slowly yielded to a third. Within the church itself,
and at first unable to exist outside of it, lay this intellectualized
and individualized emotion which in later times found the church to be
its implacable foe; whether the Hebrew psalms be congregational or
personal,[323] it is certain that the monk in his cell felt them to be
intensely individual, and in the hymns which he wrote, largely by
inspiration of these psalms, one finds much of that spirit which fills a
modern lyric. A hymn has two meanings for the Christian. One is its
communal meaning, as the Scottish kirk could prove; and probably no one
but a Scot, with “the graves of the martyrs” in mind, can fully
appreciate this meaning of a congregational hymn. But to most people a
hymn has the individual note of _Jesus, Lover of my Soul_; this is the
note of early Christian hymns, and is due to a protest against communal
conditions[324] made by that spirit of Christianity which has been its
chief force in modern times, that certification of value given to the
humblest single life, that lifting of the chattel serf into a soul; a
spirit which began and fought the long battle against tradition of race
and clan and guild. De Vigny, in his exquisite _Journal of a Poet_,[325]
points out the importance of the confessional in literary growth, and
derives from this source the “romance of analysis,” with its
exaggeration of the value of a single soul. This new accent upon the
individual, due to the spirit of a new faith, was strengthened in the
Middle Ages by what one understood of the spirit of classic poets; and
when the two forces had worked into the heart of mediæval life, mediæval
life ceased to be; modern life stood in its place, modern art, letters,
statecraft even, all inspired by the individual principle.[326] Now the
mistake made by men who talk of the individualism of the Middle Ages is
that they confuse this germ of intense personal emotion, mainly confined
to the cell of the mediæval monk, with the conditions of mediæval life
at large, conditions, by the way, which had little record in documents.
One forgets that the records, mainly made by studious monks, would give
an exaggerated importance to this personal element, this inner life, and
would ignore to a great extent the life without. Müllenhoff did well to
insist that the Middle Ages neither spoke the speech nor wore the garb
of a monkish chronicle,—still less, it may be added, of a monkish hymn.
With Christianity emphasizing the value of a single soul, with the
emancipation of the individual from state, guild, church, and with the
secularization of letters and art, this habit of referring wide issues
of life to the narrow fortunes of an individual made itself master of
poetry. The emotion of a clan yielded to the emotion of a single soul. A
progress of this sort is seen in _Sir Patrick Spens_, _Macbeth_, and
Matthew Arnold’s _Dover Beach_. Chronology in its higher form makes the
ballad a mediæval and communal affair, the play a thing of art. Each
deals with a Scot as centre of tragedy. In the ballad not a syllable
diverts one from a group made up of the sailor, his comrades, and their
kin. The men put to sea and are drowned; the ladies who will sit vainly
waiting, the wives who will stand “lang, lang, wi’ their gold kaims in
their hair,” give one in belated, unconscious, and imperfect form a
survival of the old clan sorrow, a coronach in gloss. The men are dead,
the women wail, and that is all. But Macbeth, as the crisis draws near,
bewails along with his own case the general lot of man;[327] “der
Menschheit ganzer Jammer fasst ihn an.” Finally, in _Dover Beach_,
modern subjectivity wails and cries out on fate from no stress of
misfortune, but quite _à propos de bottes_ and on general principles.
Subtract now the changes due to epic, dramatic, lyric form; the progress
and the curve are there. The constancy of human nature, yes; but there
are two worlds in which this constant human nature finds varying
expressions: one is the mediæval, where St. Francis can say “laudato sia
Dio mio signore con tutte le creature, _specialmente messer lo frate
sole_” ... and so on, with his joy in nature; and one is the modern,
where Wordsworth must strike that other note, _my heart leaps up_, or
whatever else. Here, indeed, are two distinct worlds, even if it is the
same human heart.

So, too, what one calls objective in modern poetry is not objective in
the communal, mediæval sense; and what one thinks to be sentimental or
even subjective in the ballads or other communal song is not subjective
or sentimental in any modern way. A throng in those homogeneous
conditions was unsentimental in its poetical expression for the good
reason that a throng has emotions distinct from the emotions of an
individual; this, too, is why sentiment and individualism have kept step
in the progress of poetry. Tennyson is objective enough in his verses
about the widow of a slain warrior and her rescuing tears when her child
is brought to her. But this is not really objective, not communal; it is
sentiment, of a high order to be sure, but sentiment. What a different
point of view in the commonplace of the ballads! Was the head of the
house slain and the widow left lamenting, invariably,—

Up spake the son on the nourice’s knee,
“Gin I live to be a man, revenged I’ll be;”

that is true communal and objective emotion. Scott, who was saturated
with ballads and ballad lore, was the last of English poets who could
write in an impersonal and communal way. After him always, as mostly
before him, the subjective and sentimental note came canting in even
where severest objectivity is supposed to reign. If one wishes to feel
this in Scott,—for it is a thing to feel and not to prove by
syllogisms,—one has only to read the final stanza of _Bonnie Dundee_;
not great verse, indeed, but full of a certain unforced simplicity, a
large air, a communal vigour, an echo of unpremeditated, impersonal,
roundly objective song.[328]

There is another process in the poetry of art which serves to disguise
the real tendency toward individual instead of communal emotion.
Communal poetry had a wide, free, outdoor life; the modern poet is
bounded in a nutshell,—but he has his dreams. With intense subjectivity
comes the need to cover a vast range of space and time; in place of the
clan or the community, its grief and joy, set forth by the communal
song, one finds a solitary poet, a sort of sick king in Bokhara, dealing
with the universe, and putting into his lines that quality which is best
expressed in general by the often abused name of _weltschmerz_, and in
particular by those countless passages in modern lyric like the poem
which Shelley wrote “in dejection,” or that verse of Keats which
expresses so admirably the modern lyric attitude in contrast with a
singing and dancing throng:—

On the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone and think.

For this lyric daring, this voyaging through strange seas of thought
alone, this blending of personal reflection with the whole range of
human thought and human emotion, makes poetry cosmic, but does not make
it communal or even objective. The sudden interest in savages, and the
glorification of primitive virtues, even the reasoning against reason
and the emotion for emotion, are part of the subjective process.
Jean-Jacques, Ossian, the _bésoin de réverie_, cosmopolitan sentiment
and sensibility set in vogue by Sterne,[329]—all these details of the
romantic movement need no emphasis; but it is significant that this
subjective search for the objective brought genuine communal poetry into
view, and it is by no means to the glory of the critic that he so often
puts romantic zeal and poetry of the people upon the same plane of
origins. The scientific triumphs of a century and more have added
external nature to the poet’s province; they have put a new sympathy for
natural things along with zeal for humanity and that sense of the
individual and the artist which were due to the renaissance, justifying
to the full Bacon’s definition of art as _homo additus naturae_. Poetry
now means the emotional mood of a thinker alone with his world; we
forget that it ever meant anything else.

The subjective and the sentimental in such excess must each beget a
reaction; they roll back upon themselves, and the shock has two results,
which the critic is tempted at first sight to call objective. One is the
sharp dramatic study, where the poet puts himself into the place of
another person. The second is that great reaction of sentiment which is
called humour. As for the dramatic element, there is no question that a
would-be communal reaction, “the need of a world of men,” follows
naturally upon excess of the subjective note. But the communal reaction
cannot restore communal conditions. The _we_ of throng poetry has
yielded little by little to the lyrical _I-and-Thou_, and finally to the
_I_, pure and simple. An obvious reaction is to put the _I_ into the
personality of another. This device, now so common, began in the early
renaissance by the identification of the poet, not with another person,
but with another class of persons. Burckhardt notes the _Canzone
Zingaresca_ of Lorenzo as “one of the earliest products of the purely
modern impulse to put one’s self, in a poetic and conscious manner, into
the situation of a given class of people.”[330] The “objectivity” of
later poets runs into this mould; it is a conscious process, however
well done, and is quite different from the lack of all subjective
interest which marks early song. One is reminded of the splendid efforts
of Horace to bring back the courage and simplicity and austerity of old
Roman life to the Rome of Augustus. Nietzsche may bid us build our
cities on Vesuvius, and Stevenson may revive that old love for “the
bright eyes of danger”; but it is not the old lover that the Scot
revives, and the _silva antiqua_ is of modern planting. The transfer of
persons brings one no nearer to communal objectivity; it is a reaction
against individual sentiment, which only throws into stronger relief the
prevailing tone of a poetry overwhelmingly lyric, individual, and
sentimental.

Again, growing out of the same change of heart from the communal to the
personal and artistic, is that essentially modern quality of humour,
which really springs from an intensely subjective, not to say
introspective, state; it is sentiment in disguise. One of the surest
tests of communal poetry is the lack of conscious sentiment and of
conscious humour. When we say that a ballad is pathetic, either the
pathos and sentiment are in solution with the material of the ballad, or
else we read them into the ballad outright.[331] So, or nearly so, with
the humour. Communal humour is cruel; as religion, now a matter of love,
began with abject fear, laughter, so unkind scientific folk assert,
began as exultation over the torture of a conquered foe, just as
children are often amused at the suffering of man and beast, until they
take the cue of pity from their elders. Fielding, in his reaction
against overdone sentiment, also went back to the communal idea of
humour. Parson Adams is cudgelled and abused within an inch of his life,
and in _Tom Jones_ bloody heads and broken bones make for merriment on
all occasions. The squire of the picaresque novel,—Lazarillo de Tormes
for an early case, or for a late and trivial example of tremendous
adventures of this sort, Trufaldin in Pigault-Lebrun’s _Folie
Espagnole_—like the poor hero of Cervantes, even like Mr. Pickwick, like
all the breed, may look to bear unmerciful beatings by way of
contributing to the fun. In the later ballads of Robin Hood, tinkers and
beggars trounce the hero again and again; and it is a concession to the
yokel’s point of view when the subtle humour of Falstaff in _Henry IV_
yields to those indignities of pinchings and the buck-basket at which
modern readers boggle in the _Merry Wives_. Burckhardt again lays under
obligation the historian of literature in general, and the champion of
this antithesis in particular, when he points out[332] the clannish and
communal note of what in the Middle Ages passed for humour. It was a
thing not of individuals but of classes, guilds, cities, towns,
villages,[333] countries,—collective altogether. Jests at Scotchmen or
at our own Jerseymen, and the exchange of civilities between rival
colleges, are jaded survivals of this honest but obvious merriment.
Scholars, chiefly Teutonic by birth,[334] have a way of praising this
sort of thing as sound, old, wholesome fun, _derber humor_; but it is an
acquired scholastic taste, and, as a rule, one does not lay down his
Uncle Toby to listen to mediæval banter. If modern humour is an antidote
against modern sentiment, both come from the same source, and _similia
similibus_ was never more true than here; sentiment is individualized
emotion in excess, and humour is the recoil. Walpole had this in mind
when he said that life is a tragedy to one who feels, but a comedy to
one who thinks. The humour which springs from excessive thought, from
sentiment in reaction, is at the world’s end from that rough and
boisterous communal fun; it is equally removed from delight in tragedy,
itself a sign of youth.[335] To trace the course of modern poetic humour
from Chaucer, Villon, Dunbar, down to Heine, who does in verse what
Sterne did in prose, would be “a journey like the path to heaven,” in
whichever sense one chooses to take the comparison,—delightful or
difficult; enough in this place to point out the flickering humour that
plays across the subjectivity and sentiment of Heine’s _Death Bed_,[336]
with its parody of Homer, its scorn for the public, and all the rest.

Such are the chief differencing factors of the poetry of art as they
appear in process of evolution from the Middle Ages to the present time.
They belong to poetic material; a further result of the process appears
in poetic style. Individual and sentimental poetry has developed a
poetic dialect and widened the gap between the speech of a poet and the
speech of common life. This goes deeper than conventional phrases and
epic repetitions, which at first sight induce one to assert precisely
the opposite view and call modern poetry a return from the conventional
to the simple in expression. Emotion, however, that is spontaneous,
communal, direct, and without taint of reflection, will catch the
nearest way and avoid deliberate or conscious figures of speech, the
trope or “turning” peculiar to our verse; and there is a steady progress
in poetry from the simple or natural[337]—which does not exclude the
metaphorical, if only metaphor be the outcome of unconscious processes
of speech—to the tropical; poetry little by little makes its own
dialect.[338] Of course there are excesses and subsequent returns to
simplicity, witness the metaphysical school of poets in England; but the
tendency is always to the individual, which is the unusual and
unexpected, and hence to the metaphorical. Precisely, too, as sentiment
turned upon itself, so the metaphorical turns upon itself and makes a
metaphor out of the literal; for example, Professor Woodberry in his
sonnet on a portrait of Columbus:—

Is this the face, and these the _finding eyes_?

But this simplicity and objective force of poetic language, rarely so
successful as here, and rare in any case, is itself subjective and the
outcome of individual assertion.

It is now in order to look at survivals of communal and primitive verse,
and to learn from a study of their differencing factors no longer what
the beginnings of poetry were not, but what they really were.

CHAPTER V

THE DIFFERENCING ELEMENTS OF COMMUNAL POETRY

Survival of primitive and communal poetry as it can be detected in the
ballads and the popular rimes of Europe, in the songs of those savage
tribes which seem to come nearest to conditions of prehistoric life, and
in the beginnings of national literatures so far as any trustworthy
record remains, must now be studied analytically, not as poems, but
rather with a view to the elements which difference poetry of the people
from the poetry of individual art. That a considerable body of verse,
European as well as savage, represents the community in mass rather than
the solitary poet, is universally conceded; it is generally but not
universally conceded that the making of such communal poetry is under
modern conditions a closed account. If this view is correct, a curve of
decline and extinction can be drawn corresponding to that curve of the
developing artistic and individual type considered above. With this
assertion of a closed account, however, must go a caution of great
weight; the actual traditional ballad of Europe is not to be carried
back into prehistoric conditions. A process of this sort brings ridicule
upon arguments which ought to be made in rational terms; and it is to
the elements of prehistoric poetry surviving in a ballad, and in kindred
verse, that one must look, not to the whole poem, which is a complex of
communal and artistic materials. One may say without fear of a
contradiction in terms that the ballad has in it elements which go back
to certain conditions of poetic production utterly unknown to the modern
poem of art. These elements also occur as fragments in popular rimes;
but the ballad has drawn chief attention because it is a complete and
readable poem in itself.

These ballads of Europe have a large literature both of collection and
of criticism;[339] and in some cases, notably the English, collection of
material has the melancholy advantage of being final. Despite arguments
of Mr. Joseph Jacobs and Dr. John Meier,[340] the making of ballads is a
closed account; that is, a popular ballad of to-day, even if one allows
the term to pass, is essentially different from a ballad such as one
finds in the collection of Professor Child. Conditions of production in
the street, the concert, the _café-chantant_, even in the rural
gatherings[341] controlled by that “bucolic wit,” are different from the
conditions of production which prevailed in a homogeneous and unlettered
community of mediæval Europe. A. E. Berger, in a popular essay[342]
which may go with that of Dr. John Meier as representing an extravagant
rationalism now in vogue about poetry of the people quite as extreme as
the extravagant romanticism of Grimm, limits the difference between this
poetry and the poetry of art to the difference of oral and of written
record; but he quite concedes the closed account. Here, however, the two
rationalists get into a deadlock. Dr. Meier will not allow the closed
account, goes back to Steinthal, and against the modern view asserts
that _dichten des volks_, the ownership of a poem by the folk at large,
who sing it into a thousand changing forms. The process according to
Meier is now what it always has been, first an individual composition,
then oblivion of the individual and popularity for the song, which is
felt by the people—“a necessary condition of folk-poetry”—to be their
own, with manifold changes due in no case to any artistic purpose or
deliberation. Now in all this Dr. Meier puts himself at odds with the
defenders of oral poetry as held apart from written and printed verse, a
distinction which he ignores. He agrees with them that, in the words of
Berger, “there is no organic difference between poetry of the people and
the poetry of art;” but the difference that does exist for Meier
prettily contradicts the difference assumed by the others, Berger and
the rest regarding the ballad, a thing of oral tradition, as now out of
date. Not only does one test neutralize the other test, but both parties
to this deadlock take a point of view fatal to any real mastery of the
subject. They fail to look at the conditions under which communal poetry
was produced, and they fail to study it in its essential elements. From
this proper point of view, however, it is clear that traditional ballads
were not made as a song of the street or the concert-hall is now made,
and it is clear that ballads of that communal kind are not made under
modern conditions. It has just been shown that the difference between
mediæval poetry at large and poetry of the day may be best expressed in
terms of the guild and the community as against the individual and
subjective note. Poetry of the guild, if the phrase will pass, was
composed by poets of the guild and found a record; we are wont to think
that sort of thing made up all mediæval poetry; but the community itself
had a vast amount of song which was composed in public and for the
occasion, found no written record, and is recovered only in varying
traditional forms. The conditions of modern life forbid the old communal
expression, free and direct; but of course the throng is still bound to
voice its feelings, and takes the poetry of art, masters it, owns it,
changes it, precisely as Dr. Meier contends, but with no very edifying
results. Every collection of ballads, even of folksongs, with their
dignity, their note of distinction, compared with sorry stuff of the
streets, bears witness to this difference between old and new.
Landstad[343] in 1848 noted that ballads were fast vanishing from
Norway. Bujeaud[344] complains that in France “new” and fatuous verses
supplant traditional song; and he gives as example a “chanson nouvelle
dédiée à une jeune fille.” Ralston,[345] for Russia, comments on the new
popular verse “laboriously produced in the towns and unblushingly
fathered upon soldiers and gypsies.” Save in a few dialects, the old
runes, and with them the power to make popular song, are dying out in
Finland; communal poetry there is going to pieces, and the process
confirms what was said above about the relations of feeling and thought
in verse.[346] Throughout Germany[347] the current ballads and folksongs
are seldom even traditional; hardly anywhere are they made in field and
spinning-room as they were made half a century ago. At the annual dinner
of the border shepherds, held at Yetholm in the Cheviots, so Sir George
Douglas[348] relates, “there is no longer any thought of native
inspiration; the songs sung after dinner are of the type familiar in
more vulgar localities, and known as ‘songs of the day.’ Even the old
ballads are neglected.” Traditional native songs of the countryside have
vanished from the fields and villages of Europe, and are replaced by
opera airs, sentimental ditties, and the like; Loquin’s attempt[349] to
refer the old songs to similar sources is anything but a success;
indeed, as one hears the new and thinks of the old, one is reminded of
an ignoble analogy in the habit of many farmers here in eastern America,
who sell their fresh fruit and vegetables, or neglect to raise any, and
use with relish and a kind of pride the inevitable “canned goods.” On
many farms the kitchen-garden has vanished like the old songs.[350]
Apart from these base respects, however, it is clear that the throng is
powerless to revive even mediæval conditions; and the traditional
ballad, as every competent editor either asserts or implies, is no
longer to be made. Ferdinand Wolf, Grundtvig,[351] Talvj, and a number
of others, declare that the homogeneous and unlettered community, now no
longer with us, is the only source of a genuine ballad. True,
communities can still be found which have something of the old
conditions and of the old power. Mr. Baring-Gould notes that in divers
places English folk still sing, perhaps even make, the good and genuine
song. A correspondent of the _New York Evening Post_, in a pleasant
letter[352] describing the Magyar dance and song, notes that these
people prefer singing to talking, and makes the statement that “there is
scarcely a stable-boy or a kitchen-maid who has not, at some time, been
the creator of at least one song—both words and music. The favourite
time for launching these ventures on the part of the young women is when
they gather to spin in the evenings.” Sir George Douglas, in the note
already quoted, says that ballads of tradition have retreated from
shepherds to “a yet shyer and less sophisticated set of men, to wit, the
fishermen of the smaller fishing towns.” It is said, too, that
conditions quite analogous to those of the old Scottish border, and
ballads of corresponding quality, some of them, indeed, very ancient
ballads of tradition, may be found in the mountains of Kentucky. But
this is all sporadic and dying activity. In favoured places it is still
true, as Professor E. H. Meyer says of Germany, that communal singing
lingers,[353] but even this is moribund; and communal making, so he
admits, is dead.[354] More than this: no modern poet, however great, has
yet succeeded in reviving the ballad in imitation. Scott, not to speak
of the failures of Leyden and Sharpe, made poems in some respects as
good as the old ballads, and made a beautiful bit of verse—_Proud Maisie
is in the Wood_—very like a folksong; but they are not the real ballad,
the real folksong, and Scott would have been first to deny the identity.
As for the street songs and that sort of verse, from the wheezing
sentimental ditties down,[355] one has only to compare them with genuine
old ballads to see how utterly they fail to meet any test of really
communal poetry. Even three centuries ago, when earth was nearer the
ballad heaven than now, broadsides, “garlands,” trash of the street and
the hawker’s basket, all balladry of trade, were sharply sundered from
the good old songs. One knows what Ben Jonson thought of “ballading
silk-weavers” and the rest; one also knows the saying attributed to him
by Addison that he would rather have been author of _Chevy Chace_ than
of all his own works.[356]

A word is needed, however, before one passes from this matter of the
closed account, in regard to a notion that people hold about modern
communal song. It is still made, they say, by the lower classes, but it
is too indecent for currency, and is conventionally unknown. Now it is a
fact which may well get emphasis here, that the real ballad of
tradition, while it never boggles at a plain name for things now rather
understood than expressed, is at a vast remove from the obscene, and
from those hulking indecencies which, along with the vapid and the
sentimental, make up the bulk of modern unprinted and unmentioned song.
Herd printed a few high-kilted ballads,[357] but even age refuses to
lend them the appearance of communal and traditional; and the chasm
grows wider when one deals with an audacious collection like that of Mr.
Farmer,[358] where “high-kilted” is a mild name for nearly all the
specimens. Here, now, are those “songs of Burns”—to which Blémont
appealed for proof that the popular muse is still prolific—running to a
favourite tune, but on the forbidden ground; here are obscenities,
drolleries, _facetiae_, such as grooms and the baser sort still sing
everywhere, and such as the Roman scratched on a wall. Here are the
songs in cold print, and with the label “national”; it is no answer to
ignore them. But when some one nods his head shrewdly, and stands with
arms encumbered, and says one could, if one would, show this same old
ballad still made by bards of the people and sung up and down the land
as aforetime, only it is not fit for ears foolishly polite, and all the
rest,—then, indeed, it is well to bring the matter to book. For these
songs are not really traditional ballads, and never belonged to the
community as a whole; the ballad of old oral tradition did belong to the
community as a whole. Quite apart from ethics, with no rant after the
manner of Vilmar, it is to be remembered that communal poetry, sung in a
representative throng, cannot well be obscene; made by the public and in
public, it cannot conceivably run against the public standard of
morality. Australian songs such as Scherer studied shock the European;
maypole songs of older England were an offence to the Puritan; mediæval
doings on Shrove-Tuesday night were not to edification; crowds as well
as individuals even now like at times to give voice to their belief in
cakes and ale; but notwithstanding all these allowances, it is clear
that a song made and sung by a really communal crowd will give no room
to private vices and to those events and situations which get their main
charm from a centrifugal tendency with regard to public morals. This
hole-and-corner minstrelsy is no part of communal song; for further
proof, one may note the few genuine old ballads, quite free from
indecencies, which Mr. Farmer prints, and which are such a foil to the
superfluity of naughtiness before and after. They are of a different
world. In short, the main thing is to remember the protest made so
strongly by Herder and by Richard Wagner. “Folk,—that does not mean the
rabble of the street,” ran Herder’s formula[359] for the past; while
Wagner[360] describes the united “folk” of the future for whom and from
whom alone art of a high order may be expected. But Wagner’s folk of the
future can never be that homogeneous, unlettered folk of a mediæval
community from which sprang our communal verse of tradition. “Many
epochs,” says Bruchmann,[361] “give one the impression as if in old
times singing and the making of poetry were universal gifts. This is
psychologically conceivable. The more uniform the intellectual life of
individuals ... _the more we may expect uniform utterance of that life.
So the poetry of such a time would be entirely_ _poetry of the people_.”
It is clear that such conditions are far removed from the present,[362]
and that the making of communal poetry in any appreciable quantity or
quality must now be a closed account.

So much for the curve of evolution by which these communal elements of
poetry decline as they approach our time, and increase as one retraces
the path of poetry and song. But one is by no means to suppose that the
ballad of tradition, as it lies before one now, can be taken as an
accurate type of earliest communal song. _Sir Patrick Spens_ and
_Innsprück, ich muss dich lassen_ are not perfect examples of the songs
which primitive man used to sing, not even of the original mediæval
ballad such as the women made about St. Faro in France or as those
islanders made a hundred years ago about the frustrated fisherman.
Improvisation in a throng cannot give the unity of purpose and the touch
of art which one finds in _Spens_; that comes partly from individual and
artistic strands woven in with the communal stuff, and partly from the
process by which a ballad constantly sung in many places, and handed
down by oral tradition alone, selects as if by its own will the stanzas
and phrases which best suit its public. What one asserts, however, is
that in this ballad of _Spens_, although in less degree than with other
ballads, the presence of artistic elements is overcome by the
preponderating influence of certain communal elements. These communal
elements are to be studied in all available material, and consist, taken
in the mass, of repetitions of word and phrase, chorus, refrain,
singing, dancing, and traces of general improvisation; and all these
elements, except for imitative purposes, are lacking in the poem of art,
or if present, are overwhelmed by the artistic elements. Even in the
ballads which have gone on record, and are made artistic to some degree
by this very act,—killed with kindness,—there are still more traces of
the throng than of the individual artist; this transfer from conditions
of communal making and tradition to conditions of artistic record must
always be taken into account. The collector of oral tradition,
particularly ballads, finds it nigh impossible to write them down in
their uncontaminated state; he gathers flowers, but what he puts into
his book is only a _hortus siccus_. Anecdotes in proof of this abound;
one may be quoted from the account given by Hogg[363] of a visit from
Scott in 1802, soon after the publication of the _Border Minstrelsy_,
where Scott printed some ballads which the Ettrick shepherd had taken
down from his mother’s singing. Now the mother was face to face with
Scott, and sang him the ballad of _Old Maitlan’_; delighted, Scott asked
her if it had ever been in print. No, she said; never one of her songs
had been printed till Scott had printed them, and in doing so he had
entirely spoiled them. “They were made for singing an’ no for reading;
but ye hae broken the charm now, an’ they’ll never be sung mair.” And
Hogg adds: “My mother has been too true a prophetess, for from that day
to this, these songs, which were the amusement of every winter evening,
have never been sung more.”—And now to these vanishing or vanished songs
themselves.

We are to examine the European ballad or traditional narrative song, and
compare its elements with such shards of communal verse as are still
found here and there, and with ethnological material; lyric of the
people and refrains for the dance will be studied in another place. The
lyric, though simple and “popular” enough, is mainly an affair of the
lover and his lass, and has the centrifugal more than the communal
tendency even in that jolly little song, now six or seven hundred years
old, which jumps so easily into English, the _Du bist mîn_:[364]—

Thou art mine, I am thine,
Of that right certain be!
Locked thou art within my heart,
And I have lost the key:
There must thou ever be!

Refrains for the dance,[365] of course, are communal and express
communal joy; one of them, with both the interjectional and the full
refrain, leaves no doubt at all; it is a song for the dance of
May:[366]—

A l’entrada del tems clar,—_eya_,
per joja recomensar,—_eya_,
e per jelos irritar,—_eya_,
vol la regina mostrar
qu’el’ est si amoroza.
_Alavi’ alavia, jelos,
laissaz nos, laissaz nos,
ballar entre nos, entre nos._

To these refrains of the dance we shall return in due time; the bulk of
popular lyric is simple, rural, but not communal. There remain the epic
survival, the ballad, and popular rimes. Epic in the larger sense is not
to be considered here; for it comes down to us at the hands of art,
communal as it may have been in its beginnings, and it is not a simple
contemporary note of deeds which have a merely local and social
interest, a stage of development common to most traditional
ballads.[367] One sees, if one will glance at the actual ballad, why
theories of Niebuhr and of Buckle about the foundation of history in
artless chronicles of this communal type must be taken with great
reserve[368] and reduced to very slender assertion. Not in early
history, not even in the great epics, not even by help of the Homeric
question, can one study communal elements to the best advantage, but
rather in simple ballads of tradition, in the communal narrative
song.[369] It is sung, danced,—hence the rhythm of it; it tells of some
communal happening—“the germ of folksong is an event,” says
Böckel,[370]—hence the narrative.

What, now, are the tests and characteristics about which writers on the
ballad are agreed? All agree that it is a narrative song usually
preserved by oral tradition of the people. With few and unimportant
exceptions, it is agreed that a ballad must be the expression and
outcome of a homogeneous and unlettered community;[371] the dispute is
about origins. Grimm and sundry of his day declared that the community
itself made the ballad; Grundtvig said the same thing, and Ten Brink,
following certain modifications of Steinthal, held the people, and not
an individual poet, responsible for the making as well as the singing.
Ferdinand Wolf[372] was sturdy enough in his scorn for the “nebulous
poet-aggregate called folk,” although he clung to the homogeneous
community as absolute condition; and his task was to find a
representative who could make the ballad to express such a community.
Since ballads deal mainly with knights and persons of rank, he
concluded, as Geijer had done, that they were due to “a person of
quality”; Prior, the translator,[373] went even a step farther and was
inclined to think that for Scandinavian ballads, and presumably other
poems of the class, one is indebted “to the ladies.” Prior is
negligible. But Wolf was careful in his statement; and when he noted the
predominance of aristocratic persons in the deeds which these ballads
sing, he knew that it was a common trait in all heroic and early epic.
Germanic poems of this class, the _Béowulf_, the Hildebrand Lay, what
not, regard only such characters and not the common man. As Dr. R. M.
Meyer points out, this is even carried into the lifeless world, and all
things are in superlative; all is splendid, unusual, extreme.[374] Even
Icelandic sagas deal only with the representative man, with
distinguished and notable folk.[375] So Wolf simply said that the ballad
was made in this class of society, in a homogeneous class, a _volk von
rittern_ as he calls it,[376] who mainly “sang their own deeds,”—an
important concession. Even if one granted this, and allowed the court
poet himself to appear in an impersonal way as deputy of the knights in
singing about their deeds, it would still be far from individual and
deliberate poetry of art, but rather poetry of the guild with a definite
theme, traditional form, and recurrent phrases from the common poetic
stock.[377] However, the homogeneous and unlettered conditions of a
ballad-making community are in themselves enough to account for this
preference of rank; the knight, chieftain, warrior, represented his
folk, and was hardly raised above them in any intellectual way. Not only
were all the members of a community consolidated, at first, against
hunger, cold, and hostile tribes, the primitive homogeneity of the
horde, but even later, in mediæval civilization, the same roof often
covered the knight and his humblest retainer, the same food fed them,
and both were marked by the same standards of action, the same habit of
thought, the same sentiments, the same lack of letters,[378] of
introspection, of diversified mental employment. Even in rural England
such conditions lingered long; Overbury’s franklin[379] “says not to his
servants, Goe to field, but Let us goe;” and at the harvest home, where
old songs prevail even in modern times, there is “no distinction of
persons, but master and servant sit at the same table, converse freely
together, and spend the remainder of the night in dancing and singing,
on terms of easy familiarity.”[380] How this state of things is
intensified in the Highland clan, every one knows; and in going back to
the horde there can be no doubt in regard to the sharp curve toward
communal conditions and communal expression. Now as to those
aristocratic personages of the ballad, the canticles of love and woe
which come from such a community would of course put in the foreground
of action persons who actually filled the foreground of its life. The
ballad represented a compact communal life, and this passed into song in
the person of its best representative; hence the panegyric found in all
early poetry, the praise of great men who are made one with “the fathers
who begat us,” not to be explained away as work of Scherer’s primitive
minstrel, liar and entertainer passing about his hat for primitive
pence. It is with modern conditions of life, and with the diversity of
modern thought, that art comes down to the middle classes,—what throes
were needed to bring the domestic or citizen tragedy to light!—then to
the artisan, to peasants, and finally to the outcast, the criminal, the
degenerate, as in sundry clever sketches of Alexander Kielland.
Homogeneous conditions are first broken by cities, and linger longest in
the country; they were particularly strong in primitive agricultural
life;[381] and it is in communities of this sort, remote, islanded in
the sea of civilization, that most of the traditional ballads have been
found. When one thinks of this poetry at its best estate, one must have
the old continent and not these sinking islands before one’s thought.
Nor is the lowest form of culture, degraded and sordid, even when of
this homogeneous kind, to be taken as model for the past. One is loath
to think of the old ballad community in terms of Zola’s _Terre_.

There is, however, another way by which one could account for
aristocratic personages and doings of the ballad; this wayside strolling
muse may be dressed in the clothes cast off by her high-born sisters of
epic and romance. This, as was said above, F. Wolf[382] denied; but J.
F. Campbell[383] defines the ballad somewhat in such terms. Mr.
Newell[384] thinks the folk-tale a degenerate form, in low levels of
culture, of something composed on higher levels and at an earlier time;
as if once D’Urberville, now Durbeyfield. Often true for the material of
an individual ballad, this is not true of its real elements, of the
ballad _qua_ ballad, and of its form and vital characteristics. The
pattern of ballads whence one will;[385] the stuff of the ballad is
communal. If the ballad as a form of poetry were a mere ragbag of
romance, one would find in it tags of old phrases, ambitious figures,
tricks and turns of speech, change in metrical structure, and all manner
of crumbs from the literary table; but these are conspicuous by their
absence. The ballad as ballad is original. Count Nigra[386] gives an
important reason for this point of view when he notes that the materials
of a ballad go anywhere, pass all borders, while metre, rime, and form
in general, are borrowed only from _popoli omoglotti_. The ballads
employ speech at first hand, no borrowed phrases, a simple, living
language; and always the feeling and the expression are coördinate. The
ballad is no foul and spent stream that has turned millwheels, run
through barnyards, and at last found its way to a ditch; it is wild
water, and not far from its source in the mountains. One proof lies in
the drinking of it. Ballads still hold their own as the nearest approach
to primitive poetry preserved among civilized nations, scanty as the
records are; and after infinite discussion of Homeric and other
theories, the ballad remains in its old position at the gates of every
national literature.[387] The farther one comes into the conditions
which made for the ballad, this homogeneous community, this unlettered
and undeliberative habit of mind, so much wider one finds diffused the
power of improvising and singing verses in a style which is easy to
bring into line with the style of traditional ballads. For the ballad in
its purity was always sung, and singing is a primary process; romances
were recited. In other words, power to make poetry of this sort does not
begin with the rich and foremost few, and spread slowly among the lower
classes; it begins, this is beyond all doubt,[388] as a universal gift,
and only with the rise of classes and the diversity of mental training,
lettered against unlettered, is the power restricted to a narrow range.

Well, the ballad as species is no making of mediæval aristocrats, ladies
or knights, no shards of chivalry and romance; but what of the minstrel?
Bishop Percy, Scott, and of late Professor Courthope and Mr. Henderson,
have looked to the minstrel to explain the ballad and all its ways.
Doubtless many a minstrel made ballads, or rather sang them into modern
shape; but the minstrel is merely a link between later artistic poetry
and older communal song. He cannot explain this communal song, for he
cannot explain the elements of it,—festal crowd, dance, singing, rapid
and universal improvisation, repetition, refrain; he inherits what these
leave as they vanish from living poetry; and that is all. He does not
explain them, but they explain him. Professor Child distinguishes
between the “minstrel ballad” and the “popular ballad”;[389] but one is
willing to hand over better stuff to this amiable rover and allow him a
share in many good songs, without prejudice of any kind to the real
communal theory. Gustav Meyer, however, one of the ablest scholars that
modern Germany has produced, puts[390] the wane of balladry at the point
where improvisation by men and women in the fields and round the village
linden ceases, and where the minstrel brotherhood, whether blind
singers, rhapsodes, or what not, begins.[391] The minstrel ballad is
only a stage on that broad road which ends in the stalls; while,
conversely, a ballad of the stalls may often hide real poetry of
tradition under an ignoble garment. It is clear, then, that the “I” of a
ballad ought to disturb the idea of communal origins as little as the
borrowed subject does; but when one forgets the singing, dancing,
improvising crowd, and thinks of poetry only in terms of modern literary
composition, inference is made that ought not to be made at all.
Professor Francke,[392] for example, thinks that the “I” of a German
folksong, or that tag at the end which declares the song to have been
made by a student, a pilgrim, a fisherman, is proof positive that
ballads had individual authorship. The song is a folksong, he says,
simply and solely because folk take it up and sing it; thus the often
quoted _Limburg Chronicle_ noted that “this year” the folk sang
so-and-so, and all men know that in 1898 the American “folk” sang by
preference _There’ll be a Hot Time_. Böhme,[393] indeed, thinks that a
leprous monk[394] mentioned in the _Limburg Chronicle_, whose tunes and
songs had such a vogue five hundred years ago, brings to light the
secrets of the origins of popular poetry. It is odd, however, that Böhme
goes on to show how popular poetry differs from the poetry of art, and
asks, with great _naïveté_, why one should ever ask for the author of a
folksong, seeing that it was never really composed at all! “It was a
masterless and nameless affair,” he says; and proceeds to quote—Jacob
Grimm. But for serious answer, it is plain that folksong is an equivocal
term. Most of the popular songs, by their nature, must be individual;
the universal appeal, the fact that all the world loves a lover, does
not make them communal. It was a lad and a lover who sang _Innsprück,
ich muss dich lassen_; and it needs no signature. But from this _ich_ to
the “I” of the tags which one finds at the end of narrative ballads of
tradition, is a far cry; indeed there is a gulf between them. When one
comes to the refrain, which always expresses or implies a “we,” there is
absolutely no chance for “I”; but writers on ballads give the refrain a
wide berth. However, leave this refrain out of the reckoning; even in
actual ballads the “I” is oftenest a mere recorder’s signature, and
simply mediates between the reader and communal origins. With most
English and Scottish ballads there is no “I” in the case; but even if
one could find for each and all of these ballads signs of such a singer,
editor, recorder, there would still remain behind this “I” certain
facts, certain elements, which demand a totally different explanation.
Let us look at another declaration of authorship. A Breton song,[395]
called _The Good Old Times_ and sung by workingmen, ends with these
verses:—

This song was made on the eve of Lady Day after supper.
It was made by twelve men dancing on the knoll by the chapel.
Three are ragpickers; seven sow the rye; two are millers.
And so it is made, O folk, so it is made, and so it is made, this song!

Suppose, on the other side of the account,[396] one should proclaim this
as a great find to offset the leprous monk; here, by explicit statement,
is a ballad made by twelve labourers of one mind,[397] here is the
communal song,—and so forth! But the statement, interesting as it is,
does nothing for any theory of authorship; what concerns one here is the
evident dance, the folk assembled, the knoll by the chapel, the
repetition, and the refrain, which is more prominent in other parts of
the long ballad: in a word, the communal elements. Let us hear what
these elements really are. “So,” runs Villemarqué’s note to this ballad,
“so the mountain folk sing, _holding one another by the hand, and
continually making a half-circle from left to right, then right to
left_,[398] raising and dropping their hands in concert to the cadence,
and leaping after the fashion of the _ritornello_.” In fact, as
Villemarqué had already said in his preface, “the greater part of these
songs and ballads of the people are made in the same way. Conversation
stirs the throng to excitement; ‘let us make a dance-song!’ cries some
one, and it is done.... The texture, due to the general mood, has unity,
of course, but with a certain variety of parts. Each one weaves in his
flower, according to his fancy, his humour, his trade.” This matter will
be regarded more closely under the head of Improvisation; but the
_gemeinsames dichten_ is a fact, and the communal background is cleared
of at least a part of the haze which hides it from modern view. In any
case, these signatures[399] prove nothing either way; one must go below
the surface and behind the signature, if one will come at the
differencing qualities of communal poetry. Once more be it said that the
present object is not to assert communal authorship, in any literal
sense, for the ballad of the collections, but to show in it elements
which cannot be referred to individual art, and which are of great use
in determining the probable form and origins of primitive poetry. True,
one might go farther; there are some strong statements made by scholars
of great repute which definitely deny individual authorship, in any
modern sense, for the ballad. Böckel,[400] speaking of more recent
ballads, rejects, of course, the theory of Grimm, but makes the ballad
spring from improvisation of a stanza or so in connection with
traditional stanzas of the communal stock. That one ballad has one
author, and is made in the way of modern composition of poetry, Böckel,
who has studied the remains of rustic balladry with great care and
thoroughness, denies again and again. Count Nigra, in the work just
quoted, is very emphatic on this point. “This popular narrative song,”
he says, “is anonymous. _It is not improvised by a popular poet more or
less known._” It requires “a period of incubation, upon which follows a
long elaboration, which goes on with divers phases and changes, until
the song falls, little by little, into oblivion, or else is fixed in the
record.” All popular verse, he declares, like language, “is a
spontaneous creation, essentially racial.”[401] M. Gaston Paris, too,
would not lay much stress upon the “I” of a ballad; early popular
poetry, he asserts,[402] is “improvised and contemporaneous with its
facts”; and such songs[403] are not only “composed under the immediate
impression of the event, but _by those and for those_ who have taken
part in it.” In line with evidence to be set forth below, he[404] cares
little for the professional minstrels as a source of early popular song,
and doubts their existence among the primitive Germans; for the skill to
make and sing verses was as common then as the skill to fight, and
warriors sang the songs which they themselves had made.[405]

But there is not only this negative evidence to dispose of the “I” in
ballads. Hebrew poetry has been thought to touch the highest individual
note in the “I” of the Psalms; but the best Hebrew scholars[406] now
accept to a greater or less extent the notion that in many places, if
not in all, this “I” is communal, and means the house or congregation of
Israel. Smend[407] goes so far as to take the “I” throughout in this
sense, and doubtless he goes too far; Budde[408] is on safer ground. But
the consent of the best scholars is that “I” often means the community,
and this, so Smend insists, not as a deliberate “personification” of
Israel as a church, but in the unconscious and communal spirit of a
homogeneous and intensely emotional body of people. So the Greek chorus,
not simply the leader but the whole chorus,[409] speak often as “I”; and
Smend quotes a stanza to the same effect from Horace’s _Carmen
Sæculare_. It is clear that one is on the traces of a primitive habit
which seems impossible to us only because we have no homogeneous
conditions to bring about such a state of mind. Now and then a hint is
gained from some survival, however faint, of these conditions. It is
said that a Scot of the Border coming home to find his house plundered,
could tell by sundry signs what hostile band had done the deed, and
would invariably call them by the place where they lived: “Ettrickdale
has been here!” One thinks of the tribes of Israel and of the way in
which their names were used. Reuben, runs the text, “Reuben had great
searchings of heart.” But here is theological ground, and we hasten back
to the “I” of folksong. To this subject Professor Steenstrup devotes the
third chapter of his book on Scandinavian ballads,[410] which are mainly
heroic and strongly objective, in contrast to the more subjective and
deliberate ballads of Germany. Now many of the Scandinavian ballads
begin with the familiar phrase, “I will sing you—or tell you—a song,”
and proceed in the second stanza with actual narrative; a comparison of
manuscripts, however, shows that it is mainly late copies which begin
with this “I” stanza, while earlier copies omit it. In English ballads
the “I” is quite as separable and negligible; sometimes, in songs and
catches, it is used for mystification:[411]—

He that made this songe full good,
Came of the northe and of the sothern blode,
And somewhat kyne to Robyn Hood,—
Yit all we be nat soo.

And the refrain follows. In the _Gest of Robin Hood_, and in the other
ballads of this cycle, “I,” that is to say, the singer, now bids hearers
“lithe and listen,” or throws in an aside or a gloss,—“I pray to God woo
be he,” about the “great-headed monk”; with which compare the delightful
ejaculation in _Young Beichan_, “And I hope this day she sall be his
bride,”—now notes the end of a canto, as in the _Cheviot_, “the first
fit here I fynde”;[412] and makes other detached and alien remarks of
the sort. In Russian ballads, as Bistrom[413] points out, the singer
addresses his hearers only at the beginning and at the end, often not at
all. Evidently, here is a mere singer and recorder, a link between the
old singing and dancing throng and the new listening throng; in no case
is he a maker, so far as traditional ballads go, and in Scandinavian
ballads Steenstrup has proved him to be an impertinence.[414] This is
said with due allowance for the functions of a leader in communal dance
and song, where the “I” little by little got his foothold and his
importance; he steps forward with uplifted beaker and begins a new
movement, singing a subjective verse or two, then effaces himself from
the narrative ballad which now goes with the dance.[415] “I bid you all
dance,” he cries, “and we will sing of so-and-so.” This introductory
stanza, of course, has got into the ballad; and the lyric opening of
many a ballad, often touching on the time of year, the place, what not,
and often, too, of great beauty, is in most cases to be referred to such
an origin. When the ballad is recited, the leader turns recorder,
editor, improver, commentator, improvising bard. That damnable iteration
in long-winded epics and romances and in later ballads, “this is true
that I tell you,” belongs to the reciting stage;[416] it is an alien in
balladry. More than this, it is to be pointed out that historical
ballads, meant to be recited and not sung, are no ballads at all in the
communal sense.[417] They are on the way to epic, and no better study of
this process can be made than in the _Gest of Robin Hood_.

So much for the absence of any direct trace of personal authorship in
the ballad. It is strange to see critics going everywhere to fetch a
reason for this fact, except to the most obvious place to find a
reason,—in the singing and dancing throng, where at least the elements
of a ballad were made. The subjective, the reflective, the sentimental,
are characteristics impossible in throng-made verse. Even now when
throngs are to be pleased, say in the modern drama, there is a strange
mixture of communal bustle and “situation” with those sentimental
ditties meant to touch the private heart. Such a play is a monstrosity,
to be sure, sheer anarchy of art; but in its formless, purposeless
racket it hits communal taste and excites the Dionysian sense, until the
crowd is shouting, leaping, and singing by deputy. Going back, now, to
the active throng, and to the ballad which in many ways represents that
throng, let us see what communal elements are to be noted in its
diction, its form, and its surroundings. The diction of a traditional
ballad is spontaneous, simple, objective as speech itself, and close to
actual life. The course of artistic poetry, as was shown in the
preceding chapter, is away from simplicity of diction and toward a
dialect. According to the temper of the time, this dialect of poetry
will be broadly conventional, as with Waller, Dryden, and Pope, narrowly
conventional, as in the puzzle style of the Scandinavian scaldic verse
and in certain mannerisms of Tennyson, or individual, as with Tennyson
in his main style and with Browning; but in any case it will be a good
remove from the speech of daily life. True, certain features of both
primitive and ballad poetry seem to make against this assertion. Dr.
Brinton[418] says that all the American languages which he examined had
a poetic dialect apart from that of ordinary life; but these records are
clearly not of the communal type, not spontaneous, but rather fossil
forms and ceremonial rites. Peasants in France, so Bujeaud notes,
compose few ballads in their _patois_; Hebel pointed out the same fact
for German song;[419] and there is other evidence. But this is no
objection whatever to the theory of ballad simplicity; for as these
writers concede, peasants do make their improvised songs, their
couplets, _schnaderhüpfl_, _rundâs_, songs of labour, songs of feasts,
in their own dialect and in nothing else. The traditional songs are
often retained, as refrains or the like, in incomprehensible or
difficult phrase; but that is another matter, and so far as one deals
with communal elements, so far one finds simple and everyday speech,
entirely different from the conventional or individual dialect of the
poetry of art. Lack of simplicity is held to be a proof of false
pretences, of forgery. More than this. The ballads lack figurative
language and tropes; they rarely change either the usual order of words
or the usual meaning. They lack not only antithesis, but even the common
figure of inversion,[420] the figure which one would most expect to meet
in ballad style. In the ballad itself, inversion is vanishingly rare,
and in the refrain, significant fact, it is as good as unknown. Again,
any wide word, any mouth-filling phrase, even such a term as
“fatherland,” which opens a glimpse into the reaches of reflection and
inference, is alien to the ballad of the throng. Now it is significant
that this lack of tropes, characteristic of ballads no less than their
stanzaic form, sunders them from our old recorded poetry; earliest
English poetry is a succession of metaphoric terms.[421] All Germanic
verse, in fact, laid main stress upon the trope known as “kenning”; the
ocean is the “whale’s bath,” the “foaming fields,” the “sea-street”; a
wife is “the weaver of peace”; so, in endless variation, the poet called
object and action by as many startling names as he could find in
tradition or invent for himself.[422] Like the recurring phrase of the
ballad, these are often conventional terms; but they differ in quality
from it by a world’s breadth. For the mark of this trope, in its
deliberate or conscious stage,[423] is a palpable effort of invention, a
refusal to catch the nearest way; the ballad is rarely figurative. What
figures one does find in it, and they are few enough, are unforced and
almost unconscious. As Steenstrup says, the Scandinavian ballad “talks
like a mother to her child,” and has “scarcely a kenning.” Faroe and
Icelandic ballads, to be sure, have a few kennings, but they are not
frequent. J. F. Campbell[424] speaks of the simple Gaelic ballads as
poor in figures, while the epic made from these lays riots in trope. The
ballad hardly essays even personal description.[425] A modern Greek song
ventures no farther than the conventional comparison of the maiden with
a partridge; and no English ballad undertakes to give a picture of the
heroine,—only a traditional epithet or so. The heroes are fair or ruddy,
have yellow hair; and that is all. There is no realism, as one now calls
it. Minute description of nature increases in direct ratio to the
increasing individuality of the poet; and one distrusts those German
folksongs which bring the sunset, or a fading leaf, or more subtle
processes of nature, into line with the singer’s feeling,—a trait of
German _minnesang_. One will search ballads in vain for a superb touch
like that word for the disturbing sunrise which Wolfram puts into the
watcher’s call to the lovers, “his claws have struck through the
clouds,”—as if a bird of prey to rob them of their love;[426] for in the
ballads nature is a background and rarely gets treatment in detail. Save
in chronicle song like the _Cheviot_, it is spring, summer, evening, it
is the greenwood, no more definite time or place; and so too it is bird
or beast, not a special kind, until conventional rose and lily and deer
and nightingale come to their monopoly. It is not communal verse, but
poetry of art, which, without mythological intent, transfers a
distinctly human motive to nature, as where Romeo sees those “envious
streaks” in the east, or where, in the _Béowulf_, old Hrothgar describes
the abode of Grendel, with that picture of the hounded stag, and with
the “weeping” sky. In the ballads, reference to nature is conventional,
though by no means insincere. Though the natural setting is often an
irrelevancy, as in _Lady Isabel_:—

There came a bird out o’ a bush
On water for to dine,
And sighing sair, says the king’s daughter,
“O wae’s this heart of mine,”—

still, there are touches of nature, sincere and exquisite and
appropriate, to be found in sundry ballads, notably at the opening of
_Robin Hood and the Monk_.[427] However, ballads are mainly for the
action, not the setting of the stage, and a throng of festal dancers
would not care for a bill of particulars. It is the poet, fugitive from
throngs, who turns to nature and studies her charms with a lover’s
scrutiny.

On the other hand, what ballads lack in figurative and descriptive
power, they supply in an excess of iteration, of repetition, of fixed
and recurring phrases. The recurring phrase, along with the standing
epithet, one finds, to be sure, in the great epic as well as in the
ballad of tradition; repetition in the simpler sense, however, is
peculiar to the ballads. Epithets in the ballad are of a modest type;
the steed is “milk-white” or “berry-brown,” the lady is “free,”—that is,
“noble,”—while now and then an adjective cleaves to its substantive in
defiance of fact, as when the “true-love” is palpably false, or when the
newborn infant is called an “auld son.” As for the phrases, when a
little foot-page starts off with his message, when two swordsmen fall to
blows, when there are three horses, black, brown, and white, to be
tested, any reader of ballads can shut his eyes and repeat the two or
three conventional lines or even stanzas that follow. Of course, as
poetry grows artistic, recurring phrases vanish; the artist shuns what
is traditional and evident, seeking to announce by independence and
freshness of phrase the individuality of his own art. Tobler notes that
while the more communal epic of old France used the same terms and the
same general apparatus for a fight here and a fight there, Ariosto
contrives, however one fight is like another, to give an individual
character to each.

To say that these recurring phrases are due to the need of the
improvising singer for a halting-place, a rest, in order to think of new
material, is distortion of facts. Undoubtedly the minstrel used these
traditional passages for the purpose, but they are due to the communal
and public character of the poetry itself, and belong, so far as the
question of origins is concerned, to that main fact in all primitive
song, the fact of iteration. This is now to be studied not so much in
the actual recurrence of identical passages, as in that characteristic
of ballad style which may be called incremental repetition. One form of
this is where a question is repeated along with the answer, a process
radically different from that of Germanic epic, where the zeal for
variation has blotted out this primitive note of repetition, and,
against all epic propriety, forced a messenger to give his message in
terms quite different from the original. Again, each slight change in
the situation of a ballad often has a stanza which repeats the preceding
stanza exactly, save for a word or two to express the change.
Lyngbye[428] found the Faroe ballads so laden with this kind of
repetition that in the record he omitted many of the stanzas, giving
them all only here and there, to show the general style. Side by side
with incremental repetition, which is usually found in sets of three
stanzas, runs a refrain, either repeated at the end of each stanza or
sung throughout as a burden. Moreover, with all this iteration goes a
tendency to omit particulars and events which modern poetry would give
in full, so that a very ill-natured critic might define ballads as a
combination of the superfluous and the inadequate. But these traits can
best be seen in an actual ballad, _Babylon, or the Bonnie Banks of
Fordie_, familiar not only to Britain, but “to all branches of the
Scandinavian race.”[429] It is an admirable specimen of communal
elements and traditional form blended with incipient art:—

There were three ladies lived in a bower,
_Eh vow bonnie_,[430]
And they went out to pull a flower
_On the bonnie banks o’ Fordie_.[430]

They hadna pu’ed a flower but ane,
When up started to them a banisht man.

He’s taen the first sister by the hand,
And he’s turned her round and made her stand.

“It’s whether will ye be a rank robber’s wife,
Or will ye die by my wee pen-knife?”

“It’s I’ll not be a rank robber’s wife,
But I’ll rather die by your wee pen-knife.”

He’s killed this may,[431] and he’s laid her by,
For to bear the red rose company.

He’s taken the second ane by the hand,
And he’s turned her round, and made her stand.

“It’s whether will ye be a rank robber’s wife,
Or will ye die by my wee pen-knife?”

“I’ll not be a rank robber’s wife,
But I’ll rather die by your wee pen-knife.”

He’s killed this may, and he’s laid her by,
For to bear the red rose company.

He’s taken the youngest ane by the hand,
And he’s turned her round, and made her stand.

Says, “Will ye be a rank robber’s wife,
Or will ye die by my wee pen-knife?”

“I’ll not be a rank robber’s wife,
Nor will I die by your wee pen-knife.

“For I hae a brother in this wood,
And gin ye kill me, it’s he’ll kill thee.”

“What’s thy brother’s name? Come tell to me.”—
“My brother’s name is Baby Lon.”

“O sister, sister, what have I done!
O have I done this ill to thee!

“O since I’ve done this evil deed,
Good sall never be seen o[432] me.”

He’s taken out his wee pen-knife,
And he’s twyned[433] himsel o his ain sweet life.[434]

The simple “plot” of this ballad might be wrought into a long romance
after the mediæval fashion, might be made a modern drama, a modern short
story,—Maupassant tells something of the sort in a pathetic but
repulsive sketch; the manner of _Babylon_, however, is all its own,
carrying one miles from romance and drama and tale back into the
communal past. Two stanzas open with the ballad commonplaces,—ladies in
bower, the conventional summons of an outlaw by breaking a branch,
pulling a flower, or otherwise disturbing the peace, and his appearance
on the scene. Then comes swift action; then the lingering, fascinating
incremental repetition; then the crash, and the leap into tragedy. True,
the sudden turns and the lack of connecting and explaining passages are
less marked than in other ballads, say at the end of _Child Maurice_,
where the almost bewildering swiftness, the daring omission, roused Gray
to enthusiasm beyond his wont;[435] but the trait is evident enough and
strong enough, even here, to show that one is far from the garrulity of
the romances,[436] far from the forward-and-back of a Germanic epic. It
is not to be explained by any abbreviation in the record. Zell long ago
pointed out[437] that this habit of leapings and omissions is
characteristic of what may be regarded as the remains of Hellenic
popular verse. Like the ballad repetition, which is incremental, the
ballad omission is progressive, and has nothing of that strain and
doubling which makes Germanic epic, in Ten Brink’s phrase, spend such a
deal of movement without getting from the spot. Yet it is chiefly in the
incremental repetition that the ballad shows its primitive habit as
compared with the merely retrospective repetition of the romances. The
ballad stands close to that spontaneous emotion which rises in a throng
and relieves itself in a common, obvious, often repeated phrase; it
stands close to the event, and hence the abruptness, the process, due to
sight at close quarters, of immediate expression. The æsthetic value of
repetition is high when interest is held and concentrated upon a single
strong situation, as in _Babylon_; its value is low when the action is a
trivial sequence of details, as in a Russian ballad quoted by
Bistrom:[438] “He set up his linen tent; when he had set it up, he
struck fire; when he had struck fire, he kindled [the camp-fire]; when
he had kindled, he cooked the porridge; when he had cooked the porridge,
he ate it: when he had eaten it, he lay down,”—and so on, in the strain
dear to children.[439] Another variety of incremental repetition, which
brings one closer to the conditions under which ballads were made, is
found in the account of Porthan[440] about the singing of Finnish songs
by a leader who improvises, and a second singer, a sort of echo, a
dwindled chorus, who joins him and helps to carry the ballad along its
way. The leader[441] sings a line; but before he comes to the end of it,
his partner catches the idea and joins him in the final measure,[442]—a
word or two; then, while the other is silent, this helper repeats the
whole line, often with a slight change of words, mainly an adverb or the
like thrown in,—“surely,” “in truth,”—and with an even slighter change
of tone; then the leader sings another verse, the helper falls in,
repeats, and so to the end of the song. The two sit face to face with
clasped hands, and round them are the people _arrectis auribus_. It is
fair to conjecture that the folk were not always silent hearers, and
that the helper is deputy of a choral throng which has come to silence
in the enjoyment of a superior art;[443] Porthan admits that all sorts
and conditions of Finns were once able to make these ballads, and he
goes on to tell of the universal custom of the women to improvise little
songs as they grind at the hand-mills. The trick of singing in pairs is
not uncommon, and is seen elsewhere upon a historical background of
choral song; Castrén says that the Samoyedes improvise their magic songs
in the same fashion, a conjurer of the first class beginning the verse,
and joined in the final words by the humbler shaman, who then repeats
the whole alone. The song consists of but a few words.[444] Similar
methods, on a higher plane, are found in Denmark and Iceland.
Ethnological evidence, too, is at hand; in Africa, Captain Clapperton
heard two singers sing an artless ballad, one doing the verses, the
other the refrain.[445] Often two dancers lead a dance.[446] It is only
a step, moreover, from the twain with clasped hands, to the two singers
of a flyting, Eskimo song duels, strife between Summer and Winter,
amœbean verse of all kinds; see, for example, the Carlin and little boy
in the Swedish ballad, or Harpkin and Fin in the English,[447] where one
verse suggests the reply in the next. From these to the _schnaderhüpfl_,
when one after another steps out and sings, and so back to the chorus,
as in Lyngbye’s case of the Faroe fisher, is but another easy inference;
in short, it is clear, by overwhelming proof, that the individual
performers are a survival of the singing, dancing throng with its
infinite repetitions and its unending refrain.

Still another form of incremental repetition will occur to the reader as
based on old custom but bare of all save the rawest æsthetic
ministrations, and nowadays used only for jocose ends. The same line or
stanza is sung indefinitely, with the use of a new name, number, fact,
in each repetition; or else the repetition is cumulative, a test of
memory, somewhat as in “The House that Jack Built.”[448] There is a
German student song, still popular, where the names of those present are
rimed, one after the other, into a fixed formula; while degenerate and
silly verses of one’s youth, nursery songs,[449] counting-out rimes and
the like, will occur to one by the dozen, and seem less negligible, get,
indeed, an æsthetic lift, when one finds in them distinct hints of some
old incantation, some choral song to bless house and field, as well as
echoes from the dance and the labour of primitive man. Counting-out
rimes in Germany are often epic,[450] with a spice of adventure, thus
working into ballad territory; and these, as with children’s games at
large, hold to the dance. F. Wolf sunders the dramatic dances of the
Catalan peasantry, with lives of saints, battle of Christian and Moor,
robber tales, and so on, as their theme, the work of professional
singers, from those simple dances of the country folk and of the
children, some of which are of the type now under discussion. He
gives[451] a pretty little incremental specimen of this latter sort. But
labour is also in the game. In Gottschee[452] there is a ballad of a
servant maid who served one year and earned a chicken; chicken hatched
chickens: served second year and earned a duck; duck stands on big, wide
feet, chicken hatches chickens: served a third year and earned a turkey;
turkey said _Long Ears_, duck stands, and so on: and then lamb, kid,
pig, calf, pony, little man (the husband) who says _Love Me_, and
finally “a youngster” who says _Weigh Me_,—and then back through it all
to the chicken. This is sung of course by the girl; but from the
cumulative song, with more or less refrain, it is an easy step to the
choral song of labour, which is naturally incremental. Such is the
song[453] of women weeding the millet, which combines the old refrain of
labour in the field with the incremental repetition of a hardly coherent
ballad. Prettier is that song[454] which the playmates of a bride sing
during the weaving of her bridal wreath.

To-day a maiden has been joyous,—
Joyous she now nevermore;
Joyous surely she shall yet be,—
But as maiden nevermore.

To-day a maid has handed garlands,[455]—
Hand them shall she nevermore;
Hand them shall she surely yet,—
But as maiden nevermore.

The third stanza simply puts “binding” for “handing.” Here is the
incremental repetition along with the fixed refrain,—not a very
difficult communal feat, by the way, and, as in all these cases, getting
its rhythm from the work or the dance, its meaning from the event or
deed in hand. So, too, when the bride goes away, she is again besung,
and the events are occasion of the quite contemporary words; thus, as
she is lifted upon the husband’s horse,-

She is seated, she has sobbed!
She has ridden away, she laughed![456]

The better known collections are full of these simple cumulative songs,
which it would be superfluous to record. In Algeria women sing an
endless song of the sort with fixed refrain and incremental stanza. A
combination of the counting-out rime and the song of labour is found in
many places, for example, a Gascon ballad[457] sung by women as they
wash clothes and beat the linen in cadence; the feature of dropping a
number with each new stanza reminds one of those _Ten Little Indians_ of
one’s youth:—

Nine are washing the lye,
Nine.
Nine are washing it,
Nine are rubbing it,
Pretty Marion in the shade,
Pretty Marion,—
Let us to the fountain go.

Then “eight are washing,” then seven, and so on, one woman dropping out
at each break. Again, soldiers on the march sing the interminable song
of increments with a refrain:[458]—

Ma poule a fait un poulet,
_Filons la route, gai, gai,
Filons la route gaiment_.

Ma poule a fait deux poulets ...

Bücher[459] traces all these marching songs back to a primitive form
such as one still hears in Africa, where “for hours at a time” the
natives on the march keep singing a half-dozen words or phrases in
monotonous repetition, and with no increments. The development hence
through incremental stanzas up to the Tyrtæan lyric of battle, verses of
the _Chanson de Roland_, and so on, is evident enough. Repetition of the
incremental and cumulative sorts, moreover, is easily connected with
religious rites. “It seems a fair inference,” says Mr. E. B. Tylor,[460]
“to think folklore nearest its source where it has its highest place and
meaning.” At the end of the book of Passover services used by modern
Jews, as Mr. Tylor and others have noted, there is a poem which
curiously resembles the nursery tale of the old woman and her pig; the
angel of death is dignified enough, and is slain by the Holy One, but
cat eating kid, dog biting cat, and so on, are something ludicrous. Mr.
Tylor thinks all this the original of the nursery tale itself. Again, in
the same book there is a solemn counting poem; one is God, two are the
tables of the covenant, and so on up to thirteen, when all is reversed
in order back to one. Watchmen’s songs counting the hours will occur to
every reader. Germanic heathendom, doubtless, had this counting song in
its ceremonial rites;[461] while incremental repetition in the charms,
that oldest form of recorded poetry, is often found, witness the highly
interesting charm against a stitch in the side, or rheumatism, from an
English manuscript of the tenth century;[462] here are not only the
recurring line of incantation, and the epic opening usual in charms, but
a trace of something like the repetition with increments: “There sat a
smith and made a knife,” and again, “six smiths were sitting, warspears
working;” why not _caetera desunt_?

Repetition is not an invention and grace of artistic poetry, as the
books are fond of saying; it is the most characteristic legacy, barring
rhythm, which communal conditions have made to art. Its artistic
expression, in which, to borrow Emerson’s phrase, it comes back to the
passive throng “with a certain alienated majesty,” no longer the simple
iteration of a refrain or an incremental ballad, takes noblest form in
tragedy and monody, shading down into artifice, however effective, in
Maeterlinck’s _Princesse Maleine_ and _Pelleas et Mélisande_[463] where
it almost makes rhythm of the prose, and into clever but legitimate
tricks in Molière’s famous _galère_ passage and in his other passage,
almost as famous, of the _sans dot_. It is used to give simple effects;
probably it constitutes the charm of Hiawatha, as well as of that
imitated ballad by Hamilton, the _Braes of Yarrow_, which Pinkerton
ill-naturedly called “an eternal jingle.” We may therefore divide poetic
iteration into two great classes,—one natural or primitive, which is as
much as to say communal, the other artistic, with a No Man’s Land or
Siberia whither one banishes the artificial. This artificial iteration
of poetic style is perhaps nowhere so insistent as in those interesting
but exasperating oddities known as _Greenes Funeralls_,[464] published
“contrarie to the author’s expectation.” Of course, the step from art to
artifice is not too obvious. Every one knows the smoothness, the
fluidity, as Arnold calls it, which Spenser gave to his verse, often by
this delicately managed iteration—say in _Astrophel_;[465] Donne softens
his roughness with it in many a poem; but it becomes a tiresome trick at
R. B.’s hands:—

Ah, could my Muse old Maltaes Poet passe
(If any Muse could passe old Maltaes Poet),
Then should his name be set in shining brasse,
In shining brasse for all the world to show it,[466]

and it grows worse than tiresome in Gabriel Harvey’s variation of the
_ubi sunt_ theme:—

Ah, that Sir Humphrey Gilbert should be dead,
Ah, that Sir Philip Sidney should be dead,
Ah, that Sir William Sakevil should be dead,

which is not even humorous. Now it is clear that classical models play a
part here. The pastorals of Vergil, the iteration of elegy imitated by
Milton at the opening of _Lycidas_, are to be reckoned with; but not
only was the throng behind all this, as shall be seen in a study of the
_vocero_, not only are the charming iterations and incremental touches
in Catullus,[467]—

multi illum pueri, multae optauere puellae ...
nulli illum pueri, nullae optauere puellae ...

along with store of ordinary repetition and a refrain, to be placed
where they belong, in an alternating chorus of youths and maidens, with
distinctly communal background; but there were cases in early English
where the classical influence is slight, and the song of a swaying mass
is clearly to be heard:[468]—

Adam lay ibowndyn, bowndyn in a bond,
Fowre thousand wynter thowt he not to long;
And al was for an appil, an appil that he toke,
As clerkes fyndyn wreten in here book.
Ne hadde the appil take ben, the appil taken ben,
Ne hadde neuer our lady aben heauene qwen.

In fact, early literature is full of repetition which suggests a recent
transfer from the dancing and singing throng. So even the mediæval
clerk[469] had not only Latin jingling in his head, but also songs of
the country folk buzzing in his ears; and it is no classical tone,
despite the tongue, that sounds in his—

veni, veni, venias,
ne me mori facias,

while repetition takes a more artistic form in the vernacular:[470]—

Come, my darling, come to me!
I am waiting long for thee:
I am waiting long for thee,
Come, my darling, come to me!

Lips so sweet of red-rose grain,
Come and make me well again:
Come and make me well again,
Lips so sweet of red-rose grain!

Incremental repetition, then, as it is found in traditional ballads,
lies midway between two extremes, one communal and one artistic. Behind
it is the indefinite iteration, unchanged, of primitive song; before it
is the repetition of artistic parallelism which is crossed by variation,
mainspring of the poetic dialect. Iteration is the spontaneous
expression of emotion, and begins in the throng; it lies at the root of
all rhythm, cadence, and consent; variation is the assertion of art, of
progress, of the individual. These are the two great elements of poetry.
Variation could take place in two ways. The communal singer had his
stock of communal refrains and the like, derived from tradition of the
singing and dancing throng; for communal purposes he could have added
his own stanzas, just as Burns did in modern days. There was the
chorus:—

Bonnie lassie, will ye go,
Will ye go, will ye go,
Bonnie lassie, will ye go
To the birks of Aberfeldy?

To this, and many a chorus like it, Burns added his own words.[471] But
the early artists who worked out the scheme of national poetry went
about their task by a different method. Their material was the unchanged
repetition, probably in couplets corresponding to the forward-and-back
of a dance, either in line, like some children’s games now, or in a half
circle, like that dance of the Botocudos. Out of this repetition they
made the artistic parallelism found alike in Germanic epic and in Hebrew
psalms, as well as the variation which Heinzel has so neatly compared
for this same epic and for the Sanskrit hymn. As regards Germanic verse,
Dr. R. M. Meyer[472] notes that repetition of words yielded to the
necessity, imposed by rigid metrical law, to take a synonym which would
rime with the principal word, thus ending in a mass of kennings or
verbal variations. It is clear that the strophic ballad is based upon
older conditions, as is proved by preceding examples, and by the lack of
variation in typical verses such as this, the opening of a pretty
dance-song:[473]—

La rauschen, lieb, la rauschen!

The rigid structure of an alliterative verse calls for variation, not
repetition, within its limits; variation in the ballads is incremental
and close to actual repetition, being forced within a stanza only by the
exigencies of rime:—

O where hae ye been, _Lord Randal, my son_,
O where hae ye been, _my handsome young man_?

The refrain, however, could hold to repetition pure and simple, leaving
room for an increment of considerable effect at the climax; thus in the
same ballad of _Lord Randal_, the refrain

For I’m weary wi’ hunting and fain wad lie down,

turns at the end to—

For I’m sick at the heart and I fain wad lie down.[474]

Doubtless, too, variation began in the singing before it was evident in
the record; that change of accent which editors claim for the well-known
verses:—

Sigh nó more, ládies, sigh no móre...
Weep nó more, wóeful shépherds, wéep no móre

may have had its counterpart in far older and far ruder verse of the
throng. If the earliest form of poetry was the iterated single verse, a
statement of a fact, or, in the first instance, a fact stated not
formally but by the repetition of words in a rhythmic period which was
itself exactly repeated, it is clear that the progress of poesy may have
begun by making a proposition of the single verse and then proceeding to
add some new elements in the repetition of it. Artistic skill next fell
upon the single verse,[475] fixed its cadence, curbed its repetition by
syntactic relations, and, as in Germanic poetry, rang the changes on
this law of variation. Now it is evident beyond all doubt how great a
part incremental repetition must have played, and it is also evident
that this can be studied best in a collocation of communal survivals,
like the ballads, and primitive survivals, such as are found in savage
songs. Let us look first at certain songs which belong between these two
classes, then at a form of verse which is found in both, and finally at
the ethnological or primitive material.

Radloff[476] collected an admirable series of songs and ballads in
southern Siberia. Here are the homogeneous community, the oral and
traditional verse, and the slow but sure ruin[477] of both due to
importation of Mahometan learning, books and poets; here too are those
fashions of making and keeping a song, half communal, half artistic,
which yield to the conditions of written poetry. The gregarious song
still lingers in chorus and in improvisations; while individual singers
are working free from the throng, and are diverting the old broad
current of repetition into channels and courses of art. But this
individual artist[478] has a very short tether, and he is close to the
community not only in fact but in the character of his work.
Improvisation is the rule; composition of the deliberate modern sort is
almost unknown. Festal throngs, not a poet’s solitude, are the
birthplace of poetry; and the folk, if they must listen and may not sing
in chorus, choose a pair of singers to compete. “Some one present steps
forward and challenges to a flyting. If no one appears in answer, the
challenger sings improvised stanzas making fun of the people before him;
but if a match is made up, then the two wage their duel in song until
one fails to respond, loses the game, and gives a present to his
conqueror.” As with the Faroe islanders, so here on the Tartar steppes,
and on the slopes of the Altai, if these rival songs show conspicuous
merit, they are remembered, repeated, and sung as traditional
ballads.[479] Radloff has several instances. A girl who enters such a
flyting with a young man named Kosha, now flouts, now praises, and
finally—another world-old trick of traditional song—falls into a series
of riddles. What was first created,—who was so-and-so’s
father,[480]—when do the waters freeze? Kosha answers them all; the girl
gives up, and presents him with a coat. Another pretty flyting[481] is
also between youth and maid; the girl holds her own until the boy says
he has wounded her brother, whereupon she sits down and weeps. In all
these, and in the solitary improvisations, there is constant repetition.
Two verses of a challenge—all go by quatrains—are repeated in the
answer; while in the continuous ballad, song oscillates, as Ten Brink
says of this stage in the development of poetry, between memory and
improvisation, production and reproduction. The singer has a mass of
verses in his head, and puts his own thought only into the third and
fourth lines of a quatrain,[482] the first and second coming from the
common stock. That is the recurrent passage, the “ballad slang”; but
actual repetition, in its incremental phase, is stronger here than in
any poetry on record except that of the Finns. A fine example of this
repetition and variation is in the _Kangsa Pi_, one of the historic
songs;[483] mostly the stanzas are interlaced in pairs. Often the
changes are mere emphasis, not progress; for example:—

If I had a white hawk,
He would scream behind me;
If I had relatives on my father’s side,
They would follow behind me.

If I had a blue hawk.
He would scream behind me;
If I had relatives on the Old One’s side,
They would follow behind me.

These changes of colour, variation on hard-and-fast lines, are very
frequent and often inappropriate, as with a white horse and a blue
horse;[484] one form of the change is not far remote from a Germanic
kenning:—

O Myrat mine, Myrat mine,
A _sea_ is coming,—
How will you cross it?
On its _border_ dwells a tribe,—
How will you come through it?

O Myrat mine, Myrat mine,
A _stretch of water_ is coming,—
How will you cross it?
On its _banks_ dwells a tribe,—
How will you come through it?

Thus a mother to her son; his answer is of the same kind; and so back
and forth for nineteen stanzas, when the poem closes with two stanzas
sung by the son happily returned from war. With this parallelism of form
goes a parallelism of thought not unlike the implied simile in poetry of
the schools; witness the hawk and the relatives, quoted just above, or
these improvised verses:—

What has scattered the golden-seeming leaves?
Is it the white birch? It is indeed!
She whose hair streams down her back,
Is it my wife? It is indeed!

What has scattered the silver-seeming leaves?
Is it the blue birch? It is indeed!
She whose hair streams down her neck,
Is it my betrothed? It is indeed!

This is growing a bit too artistic for comfort; and presently in another
song direct simile breaks out:—

As the meadow fire in spring,
Warms this heart of mine;
As the bird that comes in spring,
Implores this eye of mine.

As the fire that burns in autumn,
Burns this heart of mine;
As the bird that comes in autumn,
Mourns this eye of mine.

Improvised or not, these songs are not only of the individual lover, but
of the artist, the bard, still close to his throng, to be sure, but with
a clear notion of his dignity and a good care for his singing-robes. As
one of these bards, though in another tribe,[485] prettily puts it:—

When the wind blows from the right hand,
Bends and bows the poplar;
When I sit and sing,
May there follow thirty songs!

When the wind blows from the left hand,
May the poplar move and quiver!
When I thus sit and sing,
May my own breast move and quiver!

Presently pen and paper will be found for the singer, and at last
printer’s ink to spread his songs; the days of communal chorus and
communal repetition are numbered. One other effect of the old communal
impulse, however, may be noted along with this trick of style. The
rhapsode, singer, leader, where he is first seen detaching himself from
the throng, has neither the individuality nor the artistic importance of
what one now calls a poet. Every one knows the solicitude of Germanic
singers to base their song upon tradition, to put their own invention
into the background and appeal to the common stock: “we have heard tell
of the Spear-Danes,”—“I heard tell of Hildebrand and Hathubrand.” This
meant that the tale to be told had the communal stamp, and was worth
hearing.[486] Egger[487] notes that the oldest Greek rhapsodes, like
their songs, differed not one from the other in glory; the best song was
simply the last which had been heard,[488] and there was no trace of
rivalry among the bards, no trace of partiality among the hearers. With
the next age, the time of Hesiod, came the stress and struggle for a
poet’s crown; and since the crown was to be awarded to the best singer,
judges were in demand, and so a rough criticism. It is easy to see that
this stage would be reached in any growth of poetry when the bard began
to talk of his thirty songs and of his quivering bosom; behind that
stage lies the stage of the poets as deputies and mouthpieces of the
throng; behind that, the throng itself.

We have now to look at a second class of material where primitive
repetition, born of strong communal emotion, gets artistic control and
so passes into new phases of development; this, confined to no one epoch
of culture, must be sought in some universal human impulse. Birth,
marriage, death, ought to give rise to such songs. Obviously, however,
the first of these will be of the least value, and in point of fact
songs of the sort were rarely recorded in early times, and perhaps
rarely if ever made. Marriage and death, from the terms of the case,
promise far better; and of the two,—for to treat them both would demand
excessive space,—we shall take the songs of death, the _voceri_.[489] A
brief glance at the marriage-songs, however, which are mainly sung in
communal dance and procession, shows repetition everywhere, increasing
with the older stages of culture. In German villages the whole community
still has a share in the bridal;[490] while in Tyrol, if a girl goes
outside the village for a husband, the youths mob her, tie her to a
dung-cart, and lead her through the place, all singing derisive songs,
until her father rescues her.[491] Of course, the mobbing of unchaste
women who marry is common enough; while in other cases of local
indignation, crowds and derisive songs are always in order,[492] being
represented under conditions of print by the “ballad,” which can be used
as a threat, like the modern reporter’s interview or “exposure.”
Gretchen, in her terror, seems to hear these mocking songs. Poor Pamela
hoped she would “not be the subject of their ballads and elegies,” if
she put an end to herself. But this is the other side of a joyous page.
The later epithalamy was sung on private family occasions outside the
bridal chamber and Puttenham gives a lively description of such
festivities; but public and communal features are the older fact. In
Greece[493] the bridal song comes from the festal crowd and accompanies
the communal dance; the bride throws bits of food into the village
fountain, about which the dances begin,—dances “which are regarded as
the last act of the wedding ceremony.” The songs for these dances,
moreover, along with verses composed and danced at other stages of the
affair, “form a considerable part of the national poetry.”[494] In
Albania[495] the bridal bread is baked on Thursday, and the kneading of
it is begun with choral songs made for the occasion; on Sunday the
marriage takes place, and from the procession of the groom and his
friends down to the departure of the pair all is song and dance. The
formal dance is opened by bride and groom, when a song is sung: “Raven
stole a partridge.—Partridge? What will he do with the partridge?—Play
with her, toy with her, and spend his life with her.” English marriage
customs, with communal dance and song, were of the same sort;[496] and
“the poore Bryde” had to “kepe foote with al dauncers and refuse none,
how scabbed, foule, droncken, rude and shamles soever he be,”—an early
puritan view of the case. Song and dance, communal rites throughout,
were certainly characteristic of the Germanic wedding in its old estate,
as is proved by divers names cited by Müllenhoff in his essay on our old
choral verse,[497] and by the fact that a wedding was often called
outright “the bridal song.”[498] Neocorus,[499] too, tells of the
customs in his time among the folk of the Cimbrian peninsula. In the
East, again, down to this day, a wedding, like a funeral, is celebrated
by the entire village for a full week; it was on communal epithalamies
of the sort that one based the artistic bridal poem such as Budde[500]
sees in Solomon’s Song. The modern custom is said to keep many primitive
traits. After a wedding,[501] which is usually in March, the pair are
treated for seven days “as king and queen,” and songs, now of communal
victory and the like, now erotic, are sung by the folk; a great dance,
moreover, is danced to the _wasf_, a song which praises the charms of
bridegroom and bride. The chorus is naturally insistent and incessant,
and a main characteristic of the songs is repetition.[502] But all
folksong of the wedding tells this tale of dance and song, with
repetition as the chief feature of the poetical style; and repetition is
studied to even better advantage in that communal song of lamentation
for the dead, which, for convenience, may pass by its Corsican name of
_vocero_.

Mourners for the dead, now, save in the case of public characters,
restricted to kin and friends, but once the whole community, are only
mutes or audience to the act of burial; it is clear, however, that the
priest and the service, or, as in France, the oration at the grave,
along with the reticent group, are deputy for older and indeed still
surviving songs of lament improvised and uttered by a near relative, and
these again are but a development from the rhythmic wailings of a whole
community or clan. Antiquity is no test whatever. A husband who advances
to the coffin where his dead wife is lying and gives her a passionate
farewell, after the manner of the French, while the funeral guests stand
now in sympathetic silence, now with audible manifestations of grief, is
doing precisely what Lucian describes as common in his day, barring the
extravagance of the previous scene and the violent demonstrations made
by Grecian women. Lucian thinks both demonstrations and oration
ridiculous,[503] and he gives a kind of parody of the speech which a
father makes over the body of his son. So too with the poetical lament,
the elegy, mere antiquity goes for nothing; and the question is one of
stages of evolution, regardless of chronology, from the communal and
choral wail up to the highly individualized and intellectualized monody
of grief. The elegy of Simonides over the dead at Marathon was doubtless
in its way as artistic as Tennyson’s _Ode on Wellington_; and the same
perspective must be kept in dealing with private outbursts of sorrow.
Tennyson’s own lines on the death of his brother are not a whit more
modern in tone than the _Ave atque Vale_ of Catullus which inspired
them. The more primitive obligation was not to hear in respectful
sympathy, not to read with intellectual approval, the oration or the
poem, but to weep with them that weep and so to sing with them that
sing. Uhland[504] cleverly notes the mythological projection of this
older custom in that lament for Balder shared by all animate and
inanimate creation. We are not, however, to think of the _vocero_ as
sprung from the ceremonies of a primitive funeral. Historians of
literature are fond of such a process, and fix upon this or that
religious rite as the source of some poem or song; Kögel,[505] for
example, traces epic to a ceremonial rite as to its ultimate origin,
and, for this particular case, insists that the _vocero_ of a Germanic
wife over her husband was a song of magic, a kind of incantation,
asserting, wildly enough, that choral lament for the dead was unknown to
the Germans of Tacitus, while magic songs had long been in vogue. This
is distortion of facts and reversal of natural evolution. By the very
terms of social organization, social consent must precede social
institutions, and a ceremonial must usually be regarded not as the
beginning but as the end of a social process. The prime factor in social
expression was consent of rhythm; rhythmic cries at wedding[506] and at
funeral do not spring from the religious rites, although this or that
wedding-song, this or that threnody, may have had such an origin; the
rites are rather themselves an outcome, under priestly control and the
hardening of custom into law, of this festal excitement, this communal
grief. The priest, even the shaman, is deputy of that throng which was
once active and is now passive; and when one considers the literature of
death, one finds the earliest stages of funeral lament in that half
chaotic chorus of repetition and tumultuous cries which cannot be
derived from any ceremony, strictly so called, but is rather on the way
to ceremony. At this literature we are now to look.

Homer has preserved in an artistic form echoes of primitive wailing, of
primitive repetition and choral cries, when he describes the funeral of
Hector.[507] “And the others ... laid him on a fretted bed, and set
beside him minstrels, leaders of the dirge, who wailed a mournful lay,
while the women made moan with them.” Andromache then leads the
lamentation, “while in her hands she held the head of Hector, slayer of
men. ‘Husband, thou art gone young from life.’ ... Thus spake she
wailing, and the women joined their moan.” Then Hecuba; and again the
line like a refrain, “Thus spake she wailing, and stirred unending
moan.” Lastly Helen; and again, “Thus spake she wailing, and therewith
the great multitude of the people groaned.” Wailings of the throng are
echoed also in choruses of Greek tragedy;[508] but it is these epic
passages and their details which carry one back into the communal realm,
quite away from the satire of Lucian,[509] however some of the features
which he describes may seem to be repeated here. The song of lament,
whether a domestic duty or a professional act, was mainly a matter for
the women, and was originally improvised; at the funeral of
Achilles,[510] it is his mother and “the deathless maidens of the
waters” who wail about his pyre, and it is the muses themselves who
raise the clear chant. So Hildeburh at the funeral pile, in that episode
of the _Béowulf_:[511]—

Sad at his shoulder sorrowed the woman,
Moaned him in songs.

That a wailing chorus answered her wailing there can be no doubt, though
nothing is said of it; that the song is not quoted, that the record of
these rites is brief, can be explained easily enough, when one remembers
the monk who set down this fine old epic with pagan delight in his heart
but a crucifix before his eyes, and constant thunder of ecclesiastical
denunciation in his ears. Those _neniae inhonestae_, the singing of
diabolical songs and the dancing of diabolical dances[512] about a
corpse, all the “payens corsed olde rites,” were denounced by bishops
and councils of the church with a fervid iteration which at once
accounts for the silence of the poets and testifies to the stubborn
vogue of the ceremony. The dance is of course a survival of very
primitive rites, as will be seen in the study of the actual _vocero_,
and as can be learned from ethnology; for the epics it has been
developed into funeral games, although in the _Béowulf_ one finds an
older stage of these ceremonies than in Homer. Besides Hrothgar’s lament
over Aeschere, a lament intensified by the absence of the dead
body,[513] and the moanings of old Hrethel for his son,[514] there is
the hero’s own funeral, where, when all the clan, presumably, have
mourned their lord, presumably in song, and when the wife has sung, like
Hildeburh, her _giomorgyd_, her song of lamentation, at last the ashes
are placed in the barrow, and twelve noble youths ride round it chanting
the praises of the dead king. A close parallel to this ceremony is found
far to the eastward. In what is now known to have been a Gothic rather
than a Hunnish rite, warriors rode, “as in the games of the circus,”
round the body of Attila where he lay in state, and as they rode sang
also a funeral song of praise; Jordanis[515] gives a Latin version of
it, but as it stands in this guise, it has a very artistic and even
artificial ring. The clan-grief and the clan-praise at Beowulf’s funeral
are nearer to the facts. As regards the riding, it is clear that this
takes the place of an older dance or march, just as the song takes the
place of older wailings and cries. The processions of a whole community,
at times of planting and of harvest, round the field, the barn, the
village, to which we shall presently refer when considering the refrain,
are matched by similar rites of marching with dance and song round
hearth, grave, altar, in the ceremonies of wedding and burial. On the
Isle of Man a wedding party goes three times round the church before it
enters; and in many places the corpse is carried in the same way for a
funeral. In the latter case, the solemn march is only a repetition of
the dance round the corpse itself, the mourners going hand in hand, now
slowly, now tumultuously, to the sound of their own wailing.
Ethnological evidence, again, puts the songs and dances for the dead, as
found among savage tribes throughout the world, in line with these
survivals among the peasantry of Europe; no chain of evidence could be
more complete. To this ethnological material we shall presently return;
meanwhile it is in order to note the evidence in literature.

We have seen obvious cases of the _vocero_ in oldest English, and it
could be followed in other Germanic records. Probably many of the
English and Scottish ballads began as a kind of _vocero_, something like
the coronach of Highland clans: one thinks of _Bonny George Campbell_,
with its repetition and refrain, and of _The Bonny Earl of Murray_, with
its triad of incremental repetitions, ballads which follow close upon
the death of their hero; of ballads less immediate but still memorial,
like _The Baron of Brackley_, and perhaps _The Lowlands of Holland_;
even of the widely spread ballads of a condemned criminal, the _Good
Nights_, and such admirable precipitates of this kind as _Mary
Hamilton_. For more direct evidence, the refrain line _Ohon for my son
Leesome Brand!_[516] is promising; but it is only a line. One _vocero_,
however, has come down to us, although considerably changed from the
normal and original pattern. In Aubrey’s _Remains of Gentilisme and
Judaisme_,[517] mention is made of “Irish howlings at Funeralls, _also
in Yorkshire within these 70 yeares_ (1688)”; and again, quoting the
song, _This can night_, Aubrey says it is from Mr. Mawtese, “in whose
father’s youth, sc. about sixty years since (now 1686), at country
vulgar Funeralls was sung this song,” by a woman like a _praefica_.
Scott has a like account; it was sung a century ago[518] “by the lower
ranks of Roman Catholics in some parts of the north of England. The tune
is doleful and monotonous.” The refrain, or, as Scott calls it, the
chorus, is very insistent and belongs to genuine communal tradition; he
quotes an account of Cleveland, Yorkshire, in the reign of Queen
Elizabeth, which was found by Ritson in a manuscript of the Cotton
library: “When any dieth, certaine women sing a song to the dead bodie,
recyting the journey that the partye deceased must goe.” The following
stanzas will serve as specimens of this highly developed but interesting
_vocero_:—

This ae nighte, this ae nighte,
_Every night and alle_;
Fire and sleete and candle-light,
_And Christe receive thye saule_.

When thou from hence away art paste,
_Every night and alle_,
To Whinny-muir thou comest at laste,
_And Christe receive thye saule_.

In Germany, the _vocero_ lingered long, but is dying or dead; it was an
improvised farewell in “free” rhythm.[519] A very interesting communal
survival akin to the _vocero_ was known in Flanders down to the year
1840,—The Maids’ Dance[520] at the funeral of a companion; it was sung
and danced by the young girls of the parish. When the coffin had been
lowered into the grave, all these girls, holding by one hand the cloth
which had covered the corpse, went back to the church singing this
“dance” with a force and a rhythmic accent which roused the hearer’s
surprise.[521] The two stanzas and the refrain are, of course, partly
modern; but they show traces of the old dance and _vocero_ noted below
as surviving among the Corsicans:—

Up in heaven is a dance;
_Alleluia_.
There the maidens are dancing all.
_Benedicamus Domino.
Alleluia, Alleluia._

It is for Amelia;
_Alleluia_,
We’re dancing as the maidens dance.
_Benedicamus Domino.
Alleluia, Alleluia._

But there is better material in the literature of other races. Nowhere,
for example, is the wailing and chanting of women over the dead better
attested than among the Hebrews of the Old Testament; Syrians of to-day
hold to the same rites and sing a song of mourning strangely like that
which Jeremiah heard twenty-five centuries ago.[522] The lament of David
over Saul and Jonathan, known to be an actual _kîna_, with its personal
touch of “my brother,” and its communal refrain, _how_ _are the mighty
fallen_, differs from the professional lamentation of the women, which
was in a fixed rhythm,[523] while David’s outburst is spontaneous and
“free.” In cases of this kind, to be sure, one must always reckon with
the literary and artistic element; but David’s _vocero_ is close to the
popular custom, and of more value to the student than the lament of
tragedy old and new. Indeed, a kind of declamation over the dead
relative is often found in tragedy, with some resemblance to the actual
_vocero_ both in matter and in style, but with an alien touch of
rhetoric; so Hieronimo, showing the corpse of his son, has the
repetition and play of words already noted among the early Elizabethans,
and at far remove from that “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom!”
of the immediate lament:—

Here lay my hope, and here my hope hath end;
Here lay my heart, and here my heart was slain;
Here lay my treasure, here my treasure lost,

and the rest. Hamlet and Laertes at the grave of Ophelia suggest further
distortion, turning the lament into a kind of flyting. It is the actual
_vocero_, and the communal conditions of it, from which one learns the
course of poetry; and this actual _vocero_, even in its Homeric form,
has two elements, the song of the relative and the answering wail of the
throng. With later conditions the single song comes to be professional,
as with Hebrews, Romans, and nearly all nations; or else the women move
with sympathetic gestures now round the chief mourner, now round the
corpse, singing and wailing as they go. Like modern Syria, modern Greece
keeps the old custom; the myriologue has many features of the Homeric
rite, particularly the primitive trait of improvisation. The song, says
Fauriel,[524] is never composed in advance, but is always improvised in
the very moment that it is delivered, and is always fitted to the person
addressed. “It is always in verse; the verses are always in the metre of
other popular songs; and they are always sung.” Each village—and the
communal trait is significant—has an air of its own for these
lamentations, and sings them to no other air. Hahn’s account[525] is
worth quoting. When a man has died, the women of his family make a
fearful cry,[526] which brings all the neighbouring women to the house,
shrieking, howling, and gesticulating with the mourners. The actual
relatives tear their hair, dash their heads against the wall, _call upon
the dead by name_, and scream so loudly[527] and continuously that for a
time they often lose their voices.[528] So the women; the men are more
calm. The corpse is now washed and clad, whereupon the women seat
themselves about it, and the real lament begins. “This is always
rhythmic and generally consists of two verses sung by one voice and
repeated by the whole chorus of women.” Now it is traditional, now
improvised. As fast as one woman is exhausted, another lifts her hand in
signal and begins a new verse. On the way to burial they sing in the
same fashion.

This song over the dead, which is found throughout the world, in
Greenland, in Peru, in the Hebrides, among the Hottentots,[529] shows a
course of development in which the detached or literary lament is the
latest stage. Here it may be a great poem, pulsing with the grief of
nations and close to the common heart, or a mere exercise made by rule;
the gay science of Provence, like the school poetry of Germany and
England, had minute directions for the making of a good _planch_.[530]
“One may compose a song of lament in any melody,” runs the Catalan rule,
“save in the melody of a dance,”—strange exception, when one comes to
the dances which so often went with the real _vocero_; and Master
Vinesauf,[531] in his _Poetria_, called out Chaucer’s well-known
gibe[532] by the recipe for a poem of grief. “When you wish to express
grief,” he advises, “say something like this;” and an appropriate
sentiment follows. That is the literary stage, the detached lament; but
behind the little artifice, as behind the great art, lies the real
_vocero_ with elements that need to be set in right perspective. We see
the corpse, the wailing relatives, the singing relatives, the
professional singing women, the whole clan in tumultuous grief, loud
discordant cries, a choral wail which is rhythmic and articulate,
chanted verses. Of all these the professional singing woman such as
Jeremiah invoked, the _praefica_ of Rome, the keener at an Irish
funeral, is the nearest to literary lament, and connects the communal
with the artistic. Behind her, and taking her place as one follows back
the course of evolution, stands the “free” or natural mourner, now and
then a man,[533] but usually wife or mother or sister of the dead.
Behind these, again, stands the throng itself, the original mourners,
clan or horde of a time when the bonds of mere community were stronger
than any ties of kin, and when individual grief was hardly if at all
lifted from the communal level; and with this stage one has come from
elaborate verse, through choral lament, to mere iteration of clamorous
grief, rhythmical by the consent of a throng and by the compulsion of
dance, gesture, and spasmodic utterance. In this communal refrain, then,
we reach the origin of all laments; here is surely one, at least, of the
“beginnings of poetry”; and in the _vocero_ of Corsica break forth even
yet those cadenced interjections which were heard throughout the Orient,
spread over Greece in the wailings for Adonis, and echo in the repeated
denunciation of Jeremiah: “They shall not lament for him, saying, _Ah my
brother!_ or _Ah sister!_—They shall not lament for him, saying, _Ah
Lord!_ or _Ah his glory!_ He shall be buried with the burial of an ass,
drawn and cast forth beyond the gates of Jerusalem.”[534] But these
earliest cadenced cries are best approached by means of the second
stage; and the song of grief can still be heard in Corsica from wife or
mother of the dead, with all the force and naturalness of the _vocero_
as it is described by Homer and in the _Béowulf_. Elsewhere, of course,
and in Italy itself, one can find material of the sort. D’Annunzio
describes, in terms said to be rigorously correct, a peasant mother’s
improvised _vocero_ at sight of her drowned boy.[535] After a few
moments of silence, broken only by wild outcries, she begins her
spontaneous song in a short, panting rhythm, rising and falling with the
palpitations of her heart; a characteristic noted also by writers on the
Corsican _vocero_.

We turn, then, first to this Corsican lament.[536] _Voceri_ they call
the songs, as one might say “vociferations,” a name doubtless due to the
_gridatu_ or inarticulate wailings of the throng, which precede the
_vocero_ proper; _lamenti_ and _ballati_ are terms sometimes used
instead, the second, of course, referring to those dances which were
once an inseparable part of the rite, but are now seldom seen. “Make
wide the circle,” runs one lament, “and dance the _caracolu_; for this
sorrow is very sore.”[537] As for the song itself, it is briefly but
adequately defined[538] as an “improvised funeral song,” sung by a near
female relative of the dead man, in a strophe of six verses with four
measures to the verse, that verse beloved everywhere of communal poetry;
and since the same occasion begets them all, all _voceri_ have
considerable likeness one to another, with recurrence of word and
phrase. The speech of Corsica is itself rudely poetic; and these
improvisations, though full of traditional passages,—“sweeter than
honey”; “better than bread,”—are direct in their diction, even to a
point that seems at first sight to deny such a fundamental communal
trait as repetition. Iteration, however, is there, insistently there,
when one takes into account not only the refrain, always breaking down
into sobs and repeated moans, but the evident suppression of repetition
in the text. As to the refrain, the leader now bids all present join her
in this wailing cry, and now bids them cease in order that she may be
heard:—

Di gratia, fate silenziu ...
Finitele ste gride ...

and now, again, she takes the refrain bodily into her own song,
beginning thus a new stanza. “_Di, di, dih!_ Woe is me! Make one great
cry of sorrow, brothers and sisters all,” sings a wife over her husband;
and this inarticulate bit of chorus, always sung, as Marcaggi says,[539]
at the end of each stanza, by the women who surround the corpse, may be
the imitation—echo would better hit the truth—of the old sobbing of the
throng. As for the text, repetition is hardly to be expected in print,
and the editors have doubtless done as Lyngbye did with Faroe ballads,
though here and there occurs a line[540] like,—

Chéta, chéta, chéta, o Sàgra,
Chét’ é nun piegna piu tantu.

They are keen to record the power of improvisation shown by their
countrywomen; what use to print pages of iteration? A fine hint,
however, can be found in Marcaggi’s forewords, not only of the silly
sooth but of the old time; he saw, he says, “one day a poor woman run
shrieking from her house, her hair disordered, and coming to the public
square, where the corpse of her sister-in-law lay, sing in a mournful
and monotonous note, with grotesque leaps and bounds:—

O commari Mari!
O commari Mari!

People said,” adds Marcaggi, “_that she was following the custom of a
former age_, and that she lacked proper reserve.”[541] This is, indeed,
the more primitive note; and the iterated cry, mere appeal to the dead,
like those _cris d’enterrement_ which Bladé heard at Gascon burials, was
once sung by the swaying and dancing throng of mourners. Psychologically
and physiologically this is quite in order; a kind of communal
hysterics, intensely rhythmical, as with a badly frightened child, as
with insanity, delirium, abnormal emotion of any kind, has the cadent
and recurrent note at its utmost; and this woman, with her “lack of
decorum,” like that peasant on the beach by the drowned boy, is the
modern survivor and deputy of panic emotion, a belated case in the
pathology of epidemic grief. Between this mere iterated cry, as was said
above, and the later professional song of lament,[542] lie the bulk of
Corsican _voceri_, sung by sister or mother of the dead, and most
characteristic when it is a violent death which they deplore and when
they will stir to vengeance a group of male relatives standing sullenly
by the corpse. For while a _vocero_ in the case of some peace-parted
soul, such as the village priest, is often a decorous and comforting
office,[543] the passion of the thing is felt only over the bier of a
man murdered in feud. St. Victor, whom all the others quote on this
point, describes the scene. At first, in the chamber of death, rises a
great wail of lament, through which oaths of vengeance flash like
lightning; men draw their daggers, and dash their guns upon the stone
floor; women dip their handkerchiefs in the blood still oozing from the
wounds;[544] sometimes they are moved to a frenzy that vents itself in
dancing round the corpse amid loud cries, until silence is demanded and
the dead man’s mother, wife, sister, moves to the bier and begins her
_vocero_. There is no art in it; “the excuse for its violence is in its
explosive force, ... it sings through the mouth of a wound.” It begins,
however, in a plaintive way, calls tenderly upon the dead, then tells
the story of his taking off; now the gently cadenced movements of the
singer grow more violent, and presently she breaks into a storm of
imprecations and into wild appeals for the vendetta.[545] One after
another of these singers improvises such a lament, and for every stanza
a chorus of sobs and cries and moans, often, one gathers, of articulate
words, rises from the throng. The passion, too, is real; readers who
come of northern blood must banish certain associations of the cardboard
castle, the cloak and sword, loud baritone confidences, and stage
moonlight. These _voceri_ of vengeance are not rated as rant by the law,
which often and vainly tries to put them down. Thus among the Basques, a
race, as George Borrow declared, not of poets but of singers, laws were
passed against the old fashion of the funeral;[546] it was forbidden “to
make lamentations, to tear one’s hair, to bruise the flesh, to wound
one’s head, to chant death-songs.” A Basque chorus of lament is
described by Michel. “All the women join in it with deep sighs and cries
of grief, addressed now to the dead and now to themselves; they begin
with high tones, then fall into a deep note, and pronounce from time to
time _ayené_, a Basque word which means _Alas!_” It is quite clear that
in these repeated words of the chorus one finds the origin of the
_vocero_, the “cry” of communal grief; and a study of such cries at the
actual burial, as they are still heard in Gascon funerals,[547] shows to
what beginnings one must refer the more elaborate _voceri_ of the
Corsicans. As early as 1340 a law was passed at Tarbes against “cries
and lamentations at the return from a burial.” According to Bladé, the
Gascon burial cries are a kind of recitative, lacking rime and even what
modern ears demand in the way of rhythm, for they are now divorced from
the dance, and at best are timed to the steps of the procession. They
begin when a funeral procession starts from the church to the cemetery,
and are a series of “distinct exclamations combined into irregular
stanzas”; mostly they begin “in a high note, falling slowly, to rise
again at the end.” The iteration of these cries is insistent; Bladé
quotes a long _cri_ of the sort:[548]—

Ah!
Ah! Ah! Ah!
Ah! Pauvre!
Ah! Pauvre!
Ah! Pauvre!
Mon Dieu!
Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu!

Ah!
Pauvre Père!
Pauvre Père! Pauvre Père!
Vous êtes mort, pauvre Père!
Pauvre Père, vous êtes mort!
Vous êtes mort!
Vous ne reviendrez jamais!
Jamais! Jamais!

Then the first stanza is repeated. The choral possibilities of this cry
are clear enough, and sung to the dance about a corpse, as was
undoubtedly the primitive case, its rhythm would have been exact and no
“recitative.” A further step is taken when individual and artistic
touches make themselves felt in a pretty little _cri_ which is sung by a
mother[549] over her child:—

Pauvret!
Ah!
Tu seras bien seulet
Au cimitière
Cette nuit,
Et moi
Je te pleurerai
A la maison.
Mon Dieu!
Ah!

Repetition is the original rhythm, the original poem; then comes
improvisation by the individual, begetting the increment and founding a
“text,” while variation plays upon the repeated words. Such is the
course of poetry, and in particular of the _vocero_; repetition lies at
the heart of it. Wetzstein,[550] describing the Syrian song of lament
sung by the women, lays stress upon the constant iteration in it, and
upon the chorus which consists mainly of a single word,—“woe!”
“alas!”—counterpart of the chorus in Corsican and Basque _voceri_.
Indeed, the _vocero_ is not only inscribed with woe, but was once
nothing else; and fragments of this or that “cry” of burial and of death
found their way into the mythology and the recorded poetry of
Phœnicians, of Egyptians, and of Greeks. Brugsch,[551] in his study of
the songs about Adonis and Linos, makes it clear that Linos was simply a
personification of these Phœnician cries of lament, _ai lenu_, the
choral “alas!” or “woe to us!” The refrain or repeated cry of grief sung
by mourners about their dead finds thus both mythical and ritual
projection and the immortality insured by great artistic song. This
_ai_, _ai_, seems to be one of the oldest choral funeral cries, common,
as Brugsch puts it, “to the whole Orient as well as Egypt”; and he
follows it down to the exquisite elegy of Bion. Linos, in the vintage
songs, was made a personification of this cry,[552] became a Greek, was
said to be buried in Argos, and was worshipped on Helicon amid
lamentations of matron and maid gathered at the yearly festival. One
remembers Ezekiel’s wrath over the women who, in the gate of the Lord’s
house, were weeping for Tammuz. In the Egyptian lament of Isis for
Osiris, the opening words, “Come back,” are repeated, as in the choral
cry from which it sprang, and are in accord not only with the _vocero_
of Europe, but with the refrain of a dirge in India:[553]—

We never scolded you; never wronged you;
_Come to us back_!...
_Come home, come home, come to us again!_

The Egyptian _vocero_, the _ai en Ise_, is worth quoting in full:[554]
“Come back, come back, God Panu, come back! For they which were against
thee are no more. Ah, fair helper, come back to see me, thy sister, that
love thee; and drawest thou not nigh to me? Ah, fair youth, come back,
come back! I see thee not, my heart is sore for thee, my eyes seek thee.
I wander about for thee, to see thee in the form of Nai, to see thee, to
see thee, fair lord, in the form of Nai, to see thee, the fair one,—to
see thee, to see thee, God Panu, the fair one! Come to thy darling,
blessed Ounophris, come to thy sister, come to thy wife, come to thy
wife, God Urtuhet, come to thy spouse! I am thy sister, I am thy mother,
and thou comest not to me; the face of gods and of men is turned to
thee, while they weep thee, seeing me that weep for thy sake, that weep
and cry to heaven that thou hear my prayer,—for I am thy sister that
loved thee on earth. Never lovedst thou another than me, thy sister!
Never lovedst thou another than me, thy sister!” Like the companion
lament of Nephthys, this is distinctly a _vocero_ of the sister over the
brother; and the repeated _mââ-ne-hra_, “come home,” the refrain of the
piece, gave rise to the name Maneros, fabled to be a prince of Egypt, a
fact which reminded Herodotus of the similar song of Linos in Greece. In
his chapter on the Lityerses song, Mannhardt[555] notes that this name,
too, with that of Bormos, both supposed to be sons of a king, like
Maneros, Linos, Mannerius, was developed out of an old refrain. The
Greeks, singing a lay which corresponded to the Maneros, went with
choral cries and music to seek the vanished Bormos. So, too, with Hylas;
a Bithynian festival is on record, where sacrifice is made at the scene
of his capture by the nymphs; and the festal throng thereupon wander
over the hills and about the Hylas Lake, crying incessantly upon his
name. It is needless to follow all these myths and the ritual connected
with them; nor can we turn aside and study the memorial festivals of the
dead, like that old Germanic feast in November, now surviving in All
Souls’ Day, where masses said for the repose of Christian dead, and
flowers laid upon their tombs, took the place of older sacrifice, dance,
and song.[556] What one sees beyond question is the origin of funeral
songs in the communal chorus, and what one infers with great probability
is that death, and the resulting expression of communal grief in choral
song and dance, had much more to do with earliest forms of poetry than
even the erotic impulse. Sociology now declares that primitive feeling
for children, relatives, clan, was far keener in its emotional
expression than the sense of sexual desire.[557] The importance of the
love-lyric, now overwhelming, and mainly an individual outburst, yields
in primitive life to the importance of the choral _vocero_ over a dead
clansman; so that, using the terms in a modern way, one must reverse
that saying of the preacher: it was death that was stronger than love.
Coming back to modern survivals, one finds this _vocero_ common, both in
its individual and in its choral form, among the Celts. Leaving the
Ossianic lament alone in its gloom, one may take the honest and homely
prose of Pennant,[558] who made a tour through Scotland in the year
1769, and saw a lyke-wake[559]—he calls it a “late-wake”—in the
Highlands. “The evening after the death of any person, the relatives and
friends of the deceased meet at the house, attended by bagpipe and
fiddle; the nearest of kin, be it wife, son, or daughter, opens a
melancholy ball, dancing and greeting, _i.e._ crying violently, at the
same time; and this continues till daylight, but with such gambols and
frolics among the younger part of the company that the loss which
occasioned them is often more than supplied by the consequences of that
night.” This is eighteenth-century humour, and an eighteenth-century
reason to explain the hilarity is quoted from Olaus Magnus.
Unfortunately Pennant did not hear what he calls the “Coranich”; but he
learned that such a song is generally in praise of the dead, a recital
of his deeds or the deeds of his forbears. Questions, too, were
addressed to the corpse, why, for example, he chose to die—a common
trait of the _vocero_, already put to use by Chaucerian humour,[560] and
noted by old Camden; Pennant remarks that the mother of Euryalus makes
the same query.[561] But Pennant had heard such songs in the south of
Ireland; and this feature of an Irish wake is still accessible to the
curious. On its native soil it has been often studied and
described.[562] When the corpse has been laid out, “the women of the
household range themselves at either side, and the keen (_caoine_) at
once commences. They rise with one accord, and moving their bodies with
a slow motion to and fro, their arms apart, they ... keep up a
heart-rending cry. This cry is interrupted for a while to give the _ban
caointhe_, the leading keener, an opportunity of commencing. At the
close of every stanza of the dirge the cry is repeated.” The authors
give the air to which keens are chanted. “The keen usually consists in
an address to the corpse, asking him, ‘Why did he die?’—or a description
of his person, qualifications, riches; it is altogether extemporaneous.”
A note attributes the ease of improvisation to the fact that assonance,
“vocal rime,” is enough to satisfy the needs of Irish verse. The keener
is often a professional and paid; sometimes a volunteer and a member of
the family. “Any one present, however, who has the gift, may put in his
or her verse; and this sometimes occurs.... Besides _caoines_, extempore
compositions over the dead, _thirrios_, or written elegies, deserve
mention. They are composed almost exclusively by men, as the _caoines_
are by women.” One thinks of Marcaggi’s poetical bandits and their
written effusions as compared with the improvised songs of the
_voceratrice_ over her dead. It is odd to see how the zeal of certain
antiquarians would reverse the law of nature, and make this improvised
keen a degenerate form of older and carefully composed elegies of Irish
“bards.” O’Conor thought the old keen to be “debased by extemporaneous
composition”;[563] and a Mr. Blanford[564] describes the degradation in
detail. The keen, he says, was once an antiphonal affair prepared
beforehand, and sung by bards with the aid of a chorus,—elaborate in
every way. On the decline of these bards, “the Caoinan fell into the
hands of women, and became an extemporaneous performance.” Like the
degeneration theory of ballads, this account of the keen goes to pieces
under the test of comparative and historical studies. Spenser, to be
sure, speaks of these bards, and not without respect;[565] but it is
clear that the ancestral line of the keen among Irishmen runs back to
“the lamentations at theyr burialls, with dispayrefull outcryes and
immoderate wailings,”[566] which he mentions in his argument to prove
that the Irish are descended from the Scythians. Would that Spenser had
not cut short his tale “of theyr old maner of marrying, of burying, of
dauncyng, of singing, of feasting, of cursing, _though Christians have
wiped out the most part of them_,”—best reason for telling in detail of
all the Christians had left!

Wailings, cries now articulate and now inarticulate, but wrought by
repetition, by the cadence of rocking bodies, or of measured steps, by
the spasmodic utterance of extreme emotion, into a choral consent which
is not harmony, perhaps, to modern ears, but which has a rhythm of its
own,—these are the raw material of the poetry of grief. Like the “cries”
at a Gascon burial, like the Irish keen, is the _rauda_ of Russian
Lithuania, which Bartsch[567] significantly calls “a preliminary stage
of actual folksong.” This _rauda_ or _daina_ is sung by women; it lacks
what one calls melody and verse; and it is sung mostly on the way to the
burial or at the grave. Prætorius, at the end of the seventeenth
century, describes the Lithuanian _vocero_ as a mingled song and sob,
with the usual questions to the corpse, so familiar in the Irish
keen—why did the man die, had he not enough to eat and drink, had he not
clothes and shoes?[568] Brand, who made his tour in 1673, tells the same
story; relatives and friends, however, are here seated round the corpse,
shrieking and howling, to be sure, but in words of a more lyric tone:
“Why hast thou left us? Whither art thou gone? I shall go to thee, but
thou wilt not come to me.”[569]

Enough has been said to show the origins of the _vocero_ in Europe.
Among the Tartar folk of Siberia, songs of lament, although nearly
always improvised, have more the character of an elegy, and are sung by
the relatives of the dead during a full year after the funeral.[570] If
the husband dies, it is his wife who makes the song; if son or daughter
dies, it is the mother; while a dead mother is sung by her daughter or a
near female relative. Men sing these songs only when a rich or powerful
person dies, and then only at the funeral:[571] one thinks of David over
Jonathan and Saul, and of that old king in the _Béowulf_. Among the
Eskimo,[572] however, occurs a _vocero_ precisely like the type which
has been found common to the primitive customs of Europe,—a song by the
near relative, with chorus of moans, sobs, and cries from the women who
stand about. Coming to the distinctly savage state, one finds material
enough to fill a book, all going to prove that a choral cry and not an
individual composition must be taken as starting-point of the _vocero_.
“Of the Tasmanians, Mr. Davis relates[573] that ‘during the whole of the
first night[574] after the death of one of their tribe they will sit
round the body, using rapidly a low, continuous recitative, to prevent
the evil spirit from taking it away.’” Naturally the artist comes early
upon the scene; dirges, eulogies, elegies of every sort, are built on
this choral foundation; and that communal magic, if it was anything more
than a Tasmanian _vocero_, is soon replaced by the magic of the
individual shaman. To put him in the van of funeral lament, however, to
say that he preceded communal and choral wailings for the dead, is
ignoring the facts of primitive life and the instincts of human nature.
Comparetti makes the magic songs of the Finns precede their heroic and
legendary verse, and this may well be true; but the communal lament is
older than both, for, as was seen in the case of the Botocudos,
primitive folk have no legend, no history, and as for the magic, while
the sayings of a shaman would get the earliest record, they demand a
communal background. For it is the unavoidable condition of all recorded
literature that what is of the moment and of the mass dies with its
occasion; while only individual skill, the hand of a single performer,
is moved to keep the record of his doing on purpose to a life beyond
life. Even the humblest shaman, too, learns his art and his rude ritual
from an older artist in magic,[575] and so his making becomes a
tradition and his verses flit from mouth to mouth. But the history of
religion has taught us to look elsewhere than to the temple and the
priest and the Deus Optimus Maximus of civilized worship, if we would
find the beginnings of cult and the earliest divinity. As we go back to
a horde of homogeneous men, so we go back to a horde of homogeneous
spirits; as one spirit rises above the rest, so the shaman is deputed,
with his superior powers,[576] to cope with the superior god. It was the
“we” of the horde, in the new sense of coherence and social being, which
started that communal thinking and made that communal belief in the
“they” of a surrounding and potent host of spirits; and it is not
unreasonable to suppose that communal appeal, sheer cries and leaps in
some wild consent of rhythm, must have begun those magic rites which are
perhaps to be surmised in no very advanced stage in the songs of Mr.
Davis’s Tasmanians. Actual incantations that come down to us are full of
repetition, and frequently have a chorus or refrain;[577] elements that
point back to a communal source. Among American Indians the necromantic
songs abound in a chorus which is nearly all repetition, like[578]—

Na ha, Yaw ne;
Na ha, Yaw ne.

But it is the _vocero_ which we are now to study among savage tribes. A
case or so from Africa and Asia will do for that side of the
world—evidence is more than abundant—and then America may tell its tale
at a time when borrowing is out of the question. M. Adanson, a
correspondent of the Royal Academy of Sciences, travelled in Senegal
about 1750; his account[579] of _vocero_ and dance is fairly
representative of the case. One night in a village he was awakened by a
“horrid shrieking,” and found that a young woman had just died. What
follows is interesting for comparison with the custom in modern Greece.
“The first shriek was made,” says M. Adanson, “according to custom, by
one of the female relations of the deceased before her door. At this
signal, all the women in the village came out and set up a most terrible
howl, so that one would have thought they were all related to the
deceased;” the traveller forgets that in certain levels of culture the
clan, even the horde, is above kin. The noise lasted till break of day;
relatives then went into the dead woman’s cottage, took her hand, and
asked her questions,—the common trait of the _vocero_ everywhere. When
she was buried, the lamentations ceased; but for three nights the young
people danced a memorial dance. At this the performers sang a song, “the
burden of which was repeated by all the spectators.” Then follows the
description of certain erotic features of the dance, and the usual
testimony to that exactness of time observed in song and movement and
gesture. The _vocero_ itself is mainly a lament; Mungo Park speaks of
“the loud and dismal howlings,” another of “leaping and dancing”; while
in Loango relatives “weep, sing, and dance” about the corpse.[580] In
Korea, after a night of merriment the body is carried to its tomb; “the
bearers sing and keep time as they go, whilst the kindred and friends
... make the air ring with their cries.”[581]

Interesting are the accounts of American Indians in the days of
discovery. Jean de Lery, a Frenchman who went to Brazil with the
Protestant emigrants in the sixteenth century, and wrote an account of
his journey,[582] was struck by the likeness between the funeral laments
made by savages, and the _voceri_ of the women of Béarn singing over
their dead husbands. He quotes one, a good document. “‘La mi amou, La mi
amou: Cara rident, œil de splendou: Cama lengé, bet dansadou: Lo mé
balen, Lo m’esburbat: Matî depes: fort tard au lheit.’ That is to say,
‘my love, my love, laughing face, fine eye, light limb, brave dancer,
valiant mien, lovely mien, early up and late to bed.’” So too the Gascon
women: “‘Yere, yere, o le bet renegadou, o le bet iougadou qu ‘here’:
that is to say, ‘O the brave Protestant, O the brave player that he
was!’ And so do our poor American women, who, besides a refrain for each
stanza,[583] always throw in a ‘He is dead, he is dead, for whom we now
are mourning,’ whereupon the men respond and say: ‘Alas, it is true; we
shall never see him more until we are behind the mountains, where, as
our Caribs tell us, we shall dance with him’—and other things of the
sort, which they add in their response.” Lescarbot,[584] quoting Lery
about the Brazilians, remarks the agreement in songs of lament between
them and the Canadians “fifteen hundred leagues away.” Such a song ran—

Hé hé hé hé hé hé hé hé hé hé,

a monotonous performance on paper, with the notes _fa_ _fa_ _sol_ _fa_
_fa_ _sol_ _sol_ _sol_ _sol_ _sol_, not too elaborate music; but bodily
graces made up for this, since they then “shrieked and cried in fearful
wise the space of a quarter-hour, and the women leaped into the air with
such violence as to foam at the mouth.” Then once more the tuneful mood
began, and they sang, “Heu heüraüre heüra heüraüre heüra heüra onech.”
In this song they are mourning for their dead parents. As with Lery and
Lescarbot, so the spirit of comparison is astir in Lafitau,[585] who,
however, has less to tell of folklore at home, and a great deal to say
of the ancients, as may be gathered from the title of his book; the
laments for the dead he calls _nénies_, and speaks of the “matron” who
plays the part of _praefica_. He tells, however, a plain story of the
savage customs. When a corpse has been dressed and laid in state, tears
and lamentations, restrained up to that time, begin to break forth, but
in order and cadence. The “matron” leads the other women, who “follow in
the same measure, _but use different words, according to the relation
which they bear to the deceased_,”—second stage of the _vocero_, with a
survival of the chorus, however, far more pronounced than in Corsica.
Men, too, mourn their dead, but in a nobler way, singing the death-song
and dancing the hereditary dance;[586] but these _voceri_ of the women
are of great interest. Grosse[587] quotes from Grey the Australian
_vocero_ for a young man, where “the young women sing—‘My young
brother,’—the old women sing—‘My young son,’—and all in chorus
sing—‘Never shall I see thee again, Never shall I see thee again.’”

In Schoolcraft’s[588] time things had undergone no great change; for
“every person aggrieved makes his own complaint, and it is pitiful to
see a married person commence wailing and singing _kitchina takah_, then
wailing again _kitchina_,—‘men’s friend.’ These are all the words,”—a
significant fact. “The same way in other deaths the deceased is
bewailed.” Here is the single _vocero_; but it is a faint affair in
comparison with the volume and sound of the funeral chorus.
Schoolcraft’s evidence all runs this way. “Choruses,” says Mr.
Fletcher,[589] “are about all the Indians sing.” Carver,[590] to be
sure, like the other travellers, tells of a mother who seemed to
improvise a song of lament over her dead child at the time when it was
laid among the branches; but he is emphatic about the chorus, and calls
it “a not unpleasing but savage harmony.” A recent writer,[591] noting
the monotonous choral songs at funerals, thinks “these chants may no
doubt occasionally have been simply wailing or mourning ejaculation.” As
one comes to lower levels of culture, among the Patagonians, for
example, and the interior tribes of Africa, mere choral iteration of
monotonous sounds and beating the ground with the feet—perhaps not so
much “to keep off the evil one”[592] as to find the communal consent—are
the prevailing characteristics of the _vocero_. The funeral dance of the
Latuka, which Baker saw,[593] really comes to this; while the feathers,
the bells, the horns, are easily recognized as lendings of an incipient
culture, and teach the plain lesson that the state of the African savage
is not to be transferred outright to primitive man. Indeed, it is quite
evident that such perfect consent of communal voice and step as was
shown by the Botocudos may be confused and broken in what one must call
higher stages of culture,—for example, that dance of the Latuka. In
Nubia Miss Edwards[594] saw a ceremony, mainly dance, at the grave of a
member of the tribe, which seemed to her artificial in the extreme. “The
lamentation itself is a definite musical phrase executed by women who,
beginning on a high note, proceed down the scale in third-tones to the
lower octave or even the twelfth. It is taught, like the _zaghareet_, or
cry of joy, by mothers to their young daughters in their earliest
years.” It is only when the historian looks at all this evidence of
savage dance and cry, of feminine song and choral response, of refrain
passing into rite and myth, of detached and artistic lament, and when he
applies to it the evolutionary test, the comparative and historical
test, that it lies in true perspective and allows him to draw some
definite conclusion about one at least of the beginnings of poetry. The
_vocero_ began as communal wailing, horde or clan or house mourning the
brother and inmate in rhythmic cries to the cadence of the dance; with
new domestic ties of blood, in which of course the mother and sister are
supreme,[595] these two stand out as singers of the solitary _vocero_ to
which the crowd makes answer in refrain. The inevitable sundering of
individual and chorus now makes headway, the former passing into
literature, the latter, dropping its concomitant dance and surviving as
refrain, dies slowly out in all save a few isolated communities, and in
all recorded verse except here and there a chanted dirge. But in each of
these diverging fortunes, as in the earliest, so in the last estate of
the _vocero_, in elegy, threnody, ode, one common trait abides; and
everywhere it echoes the insistent voice of repetition.[596] As an
example of this repetition, as well as of the _vocero_ in its earlier
stage, we may conclude with an iterated verse sung by a negro woman,
once a slave, who still lived with her master’s family in the
South.[597] She had just buried her husband, but went about her tasks as
usual and waited upon the children of the house. Suddenly, however, in
their presence, and to their great fright, she burst out with these
words,—

O dem ropes dat let him down!

and continued to sing them without ceasing, in a strange crooning way,
the better part of an hour, and at intervals during some days. It were
to consider too curiously, perhaps, if one should compare this crude
case of “vision” with certain forms of poetry that bear a similar
relation to the original song of grief.

So much for the _vocero_. It has led us from the ballads back to that
ethnological evidence making so strongly, in diction as in rhythm, for
the primitive note of iteration, for the fundamental element which marks
the communal origin of poetry, precisely as variation has marked its
individual and artistic course. Repetition of sounds, when joined with
act of labour, with march or dance, with strong emotion of a festal or
communal kind, made possible the perception of consent, or, to speak
with Professor Baldwin Brown, of order. It begets this sense of order in
other arts; repetition of a certain kind of line on a jar made a rhythm
of decoration, just as a series of similar groups of words, of steps,
made poetry and dance. How important repetition must have been in early
poetry, and in any unrecorded verse, is clear when one reflects that the
invention of writing turned poetry from an art wholly of time and
succession to an art half plastic; we see the line, the stanza,
nowadays, and repetition is an impertinence in poetry, because hearing
has become a secondary and imagined process. The æsthetic value of
repetition in primitive verse gets a new aspect when one considers

Wie das Wort so wichtig dort war,
Weil es ein gesprochen Wort war;

although that other protest is right enough for one who has only modern
poetry in view:—

Im Anfang war das Wort?...
Ich kann das Wort so hoch unmöglich schätzen.

For repetition as the main element in savage poetry it is useless to
spread out evidence; no one denies the fact, and ethnology is full of
it. From surviving incremental repetition, as in the _Kalevala_ and in
the ballads, one passes back, with the increment steadily diminishing,
to outright and unrelieved iteration. The Africans have songs, some of
them known as “national,” which consist of a single word, arranged in
rude rhythmic groups, repeated for hours; and they get as much
satisfaction from it as presumably those Ephesians got out of their own
vehement and repeated cry. Lery and Lescarbot heard these songs of an
iterated word. Lafitau[598] says that Father Marquette saw Indians dance
the calumet dance, and was surprised “that the slave in singing said
nothing but the single word _Alleluia_,”—of course an accidental
coincidence of sounds,—“pronouncing the _u_ after the Italian fashion,
and dividing the word into two parts.” The iterated word in primitive
song has its meaning somewhere, but often shades back into an
inarticulate sound, and shades forward into a traditional and
unintelligible cry, mere relief of emotion. Perhaps words of this sort
went with the “detestable air” which Mary Shelley heard at the _festas_
near her house in Italy.[599] The countryfolk, “like wild savages, ...
in different bands, the sexes always separate, pass the whole night in
dancing on the sands close to our door, running into the sea, then back
again, all the time yelling one detestable air at the top of their
voices,—the most detestable air in the world.” The favourite song of the
Botocudos, their lyric mainstay, was just _Kălăuīā ahā́_, repeated
indefinitely. The chorus of Indian war-songs, in North America,
“consists for the most part of traditionary monosyllables which appear
to admit often of transposition, and the utterance of which, at least,
is so managed as to permit the words to be sung in strains to suit the
music and dance.”[600] Dr. Brinton, in a summary of the characteristics
of American aboriginal poetry,[601]—which was always sung,—noting that
repetition is the groundwork, says that this element of iteration has
two forms: a verse is sung repeatedly, which of course makes some
statement, or there is a repeated refrain; but this refrain is wholly
interjectional and meaningless. The Fuegians often sing not so much as a
word, but only a syllable repeated forever. Progress is in the text, and
by the individual; communal reminiscence is in the refrain: it is clear,
then, that the refrain is the original “poem,” and to the refrain one
must look for an idea of beginnings. A. W. Schlegel[602] conjectured
that the earliest forms of lyric poetry were due to an “effort of the
human heart to express a feeling or mood and to give it permanence by
tone and rhythm,” this effort resulting at first “in simple words and
interjections often repeated.” These are kept in the chorus or refrain;
incremental repetition, as was shown above, works its way in the text.
The chorus, to be sure, rises soon to the dignity of a coherent
sentence; but its communal and retrograde force still is strong, and it
insists on naked repetition, while individual singers cherish the
increment. Miss Kingsley[603] heard the Bubis sing in chorus over and
over for hours this verse and nothing more,—

The shark bites the Bubi’s hand.

A more advanced stage is seen in the cautious but distinct incremental
repetition of a singer among the North American Indians; we quote from
Schoolcraft:[604]—

Ningah peendegay aindahyaig:
We he heway ...[605]

That is, “I will walk into somebody’s home.” The following words proceed
very cautiously. “The composer appears to commence with delicacy ...
singing that he would walk into some indefinite home. The next line
implies that he will walk into his or her home. In the third line ... he
will walk into her home during some night. He then informs her that he
will walk into her dwelling during the winter. In the fifth line”—it is
really a stanza, with that eternal chorus—“he becomes decisive and bold,
and says he will walk into her lodge this night.” So, too, the warrior
sings:[606]—

I will kill, I will kill,
The Americans I will kill!

But the repeated air of that “cereal chorus,”[607] when a girl gets a
crooked ear at the husking, has the stricter note:—

Wagemin, wagemin,
Paimosaid:
Wagemin, wagemin,
Paimosaid.

The work of developing poetry from a rhythmic chaos of wild and repeated
cries up to a chorus of this kind was a communal achievement; art is
responsible for increment and variation. Communal consent in rhythm
caused the repetition of more or less articulate sounds, and so
developed that most important element in primitive speech now known as
emphasis. Repetition, which is modern emphasis in sections, marks the
event or sensation which it records as something out of the common,
holds it in the ear and before the mind as something to note and to keep
noting, and so makes for memory, not idly called the mother of the
muses, while it heightens the actual emotional state. Just as certain
early efforts of plastic art expressed great wisdom by several heads,
great strength by a number of hands, great fecundity by many breasts, so
early man by the iteration of a word gave it poetic force; a better art
seeks perfection of the single feature, and fitness of the single word.
It has been shown already how poetry made a gain when repetition of a
certain number of sounds gave ease to the instinct for harmony, and a
yet greater gain when the regular recurrence of a louder sound or a
longer sound satisfied the craving for finer distinctions;[608] it has
been shown how the mere zeal of repetition was crossed by increment and
variation, until the oldest element of poetry was made superfluous in
the plainer form and was almost utterly driven out of diction, with no
refuge but rhythm and certain forms of lyric sacred and profane. In this
plain and outright form of repeated words, however, it lingered long in
ballads, in festal rites, and of course among the savages; it is in the
refrain, therefore, that one can still find some hints of the actual
beginnings of poetry. The refrain has been touched incidentally in the
treatment of repetition; it is now to be considered for itself.[609]
Important as it is in ballads, the refrain has even weightier meanings
when studied in what may be called the occasional poetry of the people.

The refrain, which in its communal function survives as repetition pure
and simple practised by the throng, and in its artistic function has
come to be the means of marking off a strophe or stanza, is really the
discredited and impoverished heir of that choral song which by general
consent stands at the beginning of all poetry. This choral song, under
the influence of art and the reflecting, remembering, individual mind,
was developed into such forms of epic, drama, lyric, as meet us, more or
less divested of communal traits and conditions, on the threshold of
every national literature. Greek tragedy is a well-known case in point.
The refrain, however, is not a development but a survival,[610] so far,
at least, as communal conditions are involved; and even in ballads what
is called the refrain or the burden is a slowly yielding communal
element fighting hopelessly against invading elements of art. In other
words, as the ballad recedes into primitive conditions, the refrain
grows more and more insistent, so that for the earliest form of the
ballad, now nowhere to be found, but easy to reconstruct by the help of
an evident evolutionary curve, one must assume not the refrain as such,
but rather choral song outright. Different altogether from this communal
survival is the artistic use of the refrain. The extreme of art and
often of artifice is reached in those forms of verse which were
developed out of the older minstrelsy of France, and are known as
_ballade_, _rondel_, _triolet_, _chant royal_, with a refrain as their
distinguishing feature; it is conceded, however, that in the first
instance this refrain was everywhere taken from popular song.[611]
Learned poetry of the Middle Ages,[612] to be sure, imitated not the
vernacular refrain, but the refrain of classical verse; this, however,
in its turn had been taken from the poetry of the people, and, whether
one considers the _Hymen, O Hymenaee_ of Catullus,[613] or the later
_Cras amet qui nunqnam amavit_, which trips so featly through the
_Pervigilium Veneris_[614] and keeps such true step with the popular
rhythm of its stanzas, is at no great remove from communal song.

But refrains of artistic poetry are of subordinate interest for our
study of primitive verse; and it is clear that all investigations which
neglect the older and more popular phases, which neglect the primitive
choral song and the primitive communal conditions, can lead to no valid
conclusions about the refrain. It is something, of course, when Bujeaud
explains this or that refrain of a modern song as imitated from sounds
of some musical instrument, or taken from the _argot_ of the
streets;[615] but when Rosières[616] undertakes to tell the whole story
of the refrain, and settle its origins beyond doubt, saying now that it
“springs from the periodic return of full sounds,” now that it is a
_tra-la-la_ to take the place of musical instruments, now that it is “a
little poem stuck in all the fissures of a big poem,” and now, with a
passing recognition of communal conditions, but with sufficient
vagueness, that it voices popular song, then, indeed, one feels the
vanity of dogmatizing to the full.[617] The need of comparative,
historical, and genetic study is also evident in a similar essay on the
refrain in Middle High German. Freericks[618] regards the original
refrain not as repetition of the words of a singer but as an expression
of sentiment which they evoke, coming back in cries of sorrow or of joy.
“When utterances of this sort continually interrupt the song, there is
the refrain in its simplest form.” So too Minor,[619] in his book on
German metres, calls the refrain “the original cry of the throng in
answer to the song of the singer.” Against all this, Dr. R. M. Meyer, in
two essays,[620] makes emphatic and successful protest. With an eye on
conditions and not on theory, Meyer shows the refrain to belong to the
oldest poetry of man,—inarticulate cries at first, in rhythmic sequence,
to express fear, wonder, grief, affection. The refrain, for example, is
the original part of a threnody, as we have seen very plainly in our
study of the _vocero_; in short, so far from being an aftergrowth of
communal song, this refrain is declared by Dr. Meyer to be the very root
of the matter. With more attention to choral song in the horde or clan,
Posnett has come closer to the facts than Meyer, who failed to
appreciate all the communal conditions of such early verse; for while
Meyer referred to inarticulate cries as a beginning of the refrain, it
is evident that these immediately formed the chorus, and that the
refrain is rather survival and deputy of this old chorus than the chorus
outright. The refrain, in other words, allows one to feel one’s way back
to the choral song of the horde,[621] but is not to be transferred to
those primitive times even in its unintelligible and inarticulate forms.
To make this clear, we must study the refrain in its various communal
survivals.

Records of early literature and early religion show the refrain in its
original guise as a part of the choral song, and it echoes audibly the
steps of the dance. Nowhere is this echo more insistent than in that
hymn of the Arval brothers, sung, of course, with a dance that was
confined to the priests, and already come a long way from the shouting
and leaping throng of primitive time; nevertheless, as a hymn used in
processions about the fields, it is to be connected with the survivals
of similar rites and the songs still heard from European peasants at the
harvest-home. In the inscription which preserves it, each verse, except
the last, is given thrice.[622] A free translation[623] follows:—

Help us, O Lares, help us, Lares, help us!
And thou, O Marmar, suffer not
Fell plague and ruin’s rot
Our folk to devastate.
Be satiate, O fierce Mars, be satiate!
Leap o’er the threshold! Halt! now beat the ground!
Be satiate, O fierce Mars, be satiate!
Leap o’er the threshold! Halt! now beat the ground!
Be satiate, O fierce Mars, be satiate!
Leap o’er the threshold! Halt! now beat the ground!
Call to your aid the heroes all, call in alternate strain;
Call, call the heroes all.
Call to your aid the heroes all, call in alternate strain.
Help us, O Marmar, help us, Marmar, help us!
Bound high in solemn measure, bound and bound again,
Bound high and bound again![624]

Refrain and iteration are here in thrall to religious ceremony, and the
priest has laid hands upon the rough material of the throng; but the
throng is present, takes part,—even if, in later time, by deputies,—and
invention is at a minimum, appearing only in its regulative, and not in
its originating force. It is easy to see how question and answer,
strophe and antistrophe, are simply a development and division out of
the crowd with one voice, as in the Greek chorus. So, too, in an
Assyrian hymn:[625]—

Who is sublime in the skies?
Thou alone, thou art sublime.
Who is sublime upon earth?
Thou alone, thou art sublime.

The Hebrew psalms[626] show very clearly a more or less artistic use of
the refrain sung under congregational and therefore to some extent
communal conditions.[627] These communal conditions can be guessed in
their older and simpler form from such an account as is given of David
and his dancing before the ark, when he “and all the house of Israel
brought up the ark of the Lord with shouting and with the sound of the
trumpet”;[628] the personal song detached itself from the rhythmic
shouts of the dancing or marching multitude precisely as the song of the
wife and sister over their dead came out clearer and clearer from the
wailings of the clan. So, if D. H. Müller be right, following in the
path marked by Lowth, the form of Hebrew prophecy was at first choral,
then was divided into strophe and antistrophe, yielding in time to an
impassioned solo of the prophet himself. In any case, this single
prophet, in historical perspective, lapses into the throng, into those
“prophetic hordes” which Budde compares with modern Dervishes, “raving
bands” now forgotten or dimly seen in the background of a stage where
noble individuals like Amos, still in close touch with the people, play
the chief part, and hold the conspicuous place.[629] As Amos and his
brother prophets yield to the later guild whose prophecies were written,
so one goes behind Amos to the “bands,” to communal prophecy, to the
repeated shouts and choral exhortation, and so to the festal horde of
all early religious rites. The backward course would be from a prophecy
written to be read, to the chanted blessing or imprecation of the seer;
thence to a singing and shouting band under the leadership of one man,
with constant refrain; and at last to the shouting and dancing of purely
communal excitement, the real chorus. Moses and the children of Israel
“sang a song unto the Lord, saying, I[630] will sing unto the Lord....
And Miriam the prophetess ... took a timbrel in her hand, and all the
women went out after her with timbrels and with dances. And Miriam
_answered_ them, Sing ye to the Lord.” Here is certainly no premeditated
verse; and it must be borne in mind that refrains, except where they
have a sacred tradition behind them and are kept up by the priests, as
in the Arval “minutes,” easily drop from the record. Oral tradition, on
the other hand, is fain to hold fast to all these vain repetitions; they
are the salt of the thing. Now and then an unmistakable refrain is
preserved. “And it came to pass as they came, when David returned from
the slaughter of the Philistines, that the women came out of all the
cities of Israel, _singing and dancing_, to meet King Saul, with
timbrels, with joy, and with instruments of music. _And the women sang
one to another in their play_, and said:—

“Saul hath slain his thousands,
And David his tens of thousands.”[631]

That women in all nations and at certain stages of culture make songs of
triumph like this, as they dance and sing, is known to the most careless
reader; one or two chorals, strangely similar to these songs of the
Hebrew women, may be noted from mediæval Europe. Now it is the singing
of Gothic songs of welcome by those maidens who come from their village,
as the women of Israel from their cities, to meet and greet Attila,[632]
dancing as they sing. So the daughter of Jephtha greeted her sire with
the singing and dancing maidens; and so in Cashmere a stranger is still
met by the women and girls of a village, who form a half circle at the
first house where he comes, join their arms, and sing eulogies of him,
dancing to the tune of the verse. Malays and even Africans do the
same.[633] Again, it is in the seventh century, and an obscure saint,
Faro by name, has won the gratitude of a community; straightway a song
is made and sung “by the women as they dance and clap their hands.”[634]
It was not often that a saint’s name lent grace to these songs of the
women and saved them from clerical wrath; the decrees of councils, the
letters of bishops, refer perpetually to the wicked verses and
diabolical dances in which maids and even matrons indulged at the very
doors of the church. Sometimes, however, national glory covered the
shame. In the chronicle of Fabyan,[635] who is here telling no lies, it
is said that after Bannockburn songs were made and sung with a refrain
“in daunces, in the carols of the maidens and minstrels of Scotland, to
the reproofe and disdaine of Englishmen”; and Barbour,[636] mentioning a
fight in Eskdale where fifty Scots defeated three hundred English under
Sir Andrew Harcla, says he will not go into details, seeing that any one
who likes may hear—

Young wemen, quhen thai will play,
Syng it emang thame ilke day.

One is even fain to believe that Layamon[637] was thinking of the women
when he said that after a treaty of peace,

Tha weoren in thissen lande blisfulle songes.

That the record of these refrains is so meagre and baffling need cause
no surprise. The histories of national literature are disappointing to
the student of beginnings, for the reason that they almost
invariably[638] study these beginnings as conditioned by the habits of
authorship in modern times; they are always looking for original
composition, for expression of individual feeling, for a story, and
therefore turn aside from these stretched metres of an antique song. But
the story, and the expression of personal emotion, are precisely what
one seldom if ever finds at the beginning of a literature; one finds
there, when one finds anything, the chorus or its deputy the refrain.
The refrain was a constant element in early Greek song, “an essential
mint-mark”;[639] not only the early melic verse, but a study of the
chorus[640] in dramatic survival, proves this beyond doubt, and one is
amazed to find Rosières, in the essay quoted above, saying that the
ancients, particularly the Greeks, had no need of the refrain, and
hardly used it at all. How important, on the contrary, this refrain must
have been, how it works back through the alternate strains of chorus and
solo to the throng of communal singers and dancers, could be shown for
classical poetry, and can be proved by mediæval and modern refrains,
some already noted under the _vocero_, and others presently to be
considered in songs of labour and of the harvest. True, the records are
scanty; and the unwary historian of English poetry in the early stage,
reviewing his material, announces that, with the exception of some
insignificant charms, there is just one poem with a refrain, the
“Consolation” of Deor, the king’s minstrel out of place,—taking, that
is, a lyric of individual and artistic reflection as the only example of
that part of poetry which above all belongs to the communal and
spontaneous expression of the throng. Recorded poetry has here a poor
tale to tell, and even that is usually marred in the telling. Where,
then, is the old refrain of the English folk, and where was the chorus?
Had they no dances, no ballads, no communal singing? If the evidence of
ethnology from tribes and communities of men in every degree of culture
is to be accepted, it is certain that Englishmen of that early day had
dance, ballad, chorus, and refrain. We know that their old heathen hymns
went with the dance; and the dance means a strophic arrangement. What,
then, has become of this refrain? So far as the old English poetry has
found record at the hands of the monk, it is in a fixed alliterative
metre, without strophes,[641] suited to epic and narrative purposes,
suited to recitation and a sort of chant, but not, in its literary
shape, suited to refrain and chorus.[642] One does not dance an epic, or
sing it; it is chanted or recited; and even Anglo-Saxon lyric, barring
that little song of Déor, is elegiac and highly reflective. The refrain,
says Dr. R. M. Meyer,[643] is to be assumed for oldest Germanic poetry,
although it was thrown out by the recited alliterative verse, only to
come again into recorded literature with the introduction of rime; but
no one supposes that Englishmen ceased in that interval to dance and
sing. It is a defect of the record. The chorals and refrains, even the
ballads of which William of Malmesbury speaks as crumbling to pieces
with the lapse of time, were simply deemed useless if not harmful, and
had no claim whatever to the life beyond life. Nor is this chorus, this
refrain, simply assumed for oldest Germanic poetry; it is proved, and
nowhere proved so well as in Müllenhoff’s essay.[644] Many conclusions
of this sturdy and often too intolerant scholar have been rejected by
later investigation; but his assertion in regard to choral poetry as the
foundation of every literature remains an article of faith among those
who deal at first hand with the material involved, and writers since his
day who have undertaken to describe the different kinds of Germanic
choral song have done little more than follow in his steps.[645] There
is no need, then, to rehearse this proof of the existence of refrain and
chorus as main form[646] of poetry among the ancient Germans; it is in
order simply to trace these and other choral songs in the later
fragments and the surviving refrains, whether sung at the solemn
procession round the fields, or sung to the festal dance at
harvest-home, or in whatever survivals they may be found, and to compare
them with kindred refrains and kindred customs elsewhere. From this
point of view, even the blackness of thick darkness which broods over
Anglo-Saxon communal song, that darkness of superstitious fear felt by
monks who knew these customs and these songs to be of the devil himself,
and would not write them down, is lifted a little. We look, then, at
refrains of labour, refrains of actual work, too trivial usually for
record, and at those refrains and chorals of the harvest feasts, of
plantings, sowings, reapings, which had the taint of heathendom upon
them, and so were either left in silence or coaxed into a harmless
formula; we look, too, at refrains and chorus of the dance, the sunnier
side of life, and still more provocative than labour as an occasion of
communal song. For the refrains of war, and even for the choral raised
by a whole army as it marched to battle, an occasion which Müllenhoff
calls the supreme moment of all Germanic life, the fierce and clamorous
words needing no leader,[647] and the wild rhythm asking no aid from
trumpet or drum, there is ample evidence; and indeed these war chorals
might be connected by easy stages with the ridiculous marching songs
already noted above. From the _barditus_ to “ma poule a fait un poulet”
were a pretty journey; but we will keep to the ways of peace, and the
_saure wochen, frohe feste_ of everyday life will yield material enough
in regard to this communal refrain.

Songs of labour are found everywhere; but there is a great chasm between
the actual refrains, the survivals of communal or even solitary song
which come from the real scene of labour and from the real labourers,
and those songs which are made for the labourer. Nowhere is the
difference between _volkspoesie_ and _volksthümliche poesie_ so evident;
and we have here no concern with poetry, however successful, which has
been written for the edification of “honest toil.”[648] It is the song
of actual labour to which we now turn, as it has abounded in all the
activities of life, and which, like the ballad, is fast vanishing from
the scene. Sometimes the labour was solitary, and the song was a
plaintive little lyric when it was made by the lonely maiden grinding at
her hand-mill:

Alone I ground, alone I sang,
Alone I turned the mill....[649]

but often even this grinding of the mill was social, as in Poland, where
it was the manner of the women to repeat a word in chorus.[650] Plutarch
has preserved an old Greek “song of the millstone,”[651] which he heard
a woman sing; from the older Scandinavian literature[652] comes a lay,
sung by two maidens, Menja and Fenja, as they grind out King Frodi’s
fortune, which may hold bits of the actual refrain of labour, and has,
too, its touch of folklore, explaining “how the sea became salt”; but
the real and primitive choral of such labour is sufficiently attested by
those women in Poland, and by a similar case among the Basuto
tribe,[653] where, as Cassilis says, to relieve the fatigue of solitary
grinding, “the women come together and grind in unison, by singing an
air which blends perfectly with the cadenced clinking of the rings upon
their arms.” There is plenty of evidence for this choral of the grinding
women in places and times so widely sundered as to forbid all idea of
borrowing, and to leave the conditions of communal labour and communal
consent as the only explanation. Originally there was a spontaneous
chorus or refrain[654]—in the strictly choral sense, that is, and not in
the technical meaning presently to be considered—suggested by the
movements, cadence, and sounds of the work itself; improvisation added
words at will, until at last art seized upon the material and gave now a
song like that of Fenja and Menja, now even a jolly refrain such as one
finds in an audacious song of Beaumont and Fletcher’s _Maid of the
Mill_.[655] Everywhere labour had its refrain and song, and even the
scanty remains of Hellenic communal poetry tell of songs for reaper,
thresher, miller, for the vintage, spinning, weaving, for the drawers of
water, oarsmen, rope-makers, watchmen, shepherds, and for the common
labourers marching out to their work. Rome itself, in the old silent
period, has something of this song for the attentive ear;[656] and
allusions scattered throughout the Bible show that the Hebrews sang at
their work in house and in field. A few echoes of such singing come from
Egypt; while darker and darkest Africa, along with savage tribes over
the world, shows yet more elementary, and hence more insistent and
necessary[657] connection between work and song. With the breaking up of
communal conditions, with the advance of individual and initiative art,
these songs of labour, like the ballad, like all communal poetry, tend
to disappear or yield to alien verse. Often the individual works in
silence, when his labour demands intelligent thought, but where labour
is automatic or monotonous, wherever it is collective, the labourer
sings, and always will do so; the important fact is that he now ceases
to sing the old refrain or song of the labour itself, born, as
Bücher[658] shows so plainly, of the very movements and sounds which it
called forth. For good reason, _andere zeiten, andere lieder_. Neus[659]
noted that the Esthonians, a century ago, sang their own songs, and sang
always as they worked in the fields or came together for festal
occasions; now,—and “now” is fifty years ago—he says that either the
song is silent, or else it is changed for an imported German ditty. All
the more need, then, to collect and study such survivals of the refrains
of labour as can be found. Speaking of the decline of folksong in
Germany, not only of the making but even of the singing, Professor E. H.
Meyer[660] remarks that collective labour still has some power here and
there to stir the old instinct into a fitful activity. Now it is in the
spinning-room,—where Böckel[661] a few years ago could hear Hessian
folksongs in the making—now at the berry-picking in Nassau, at the
flax-breaking, and elsewhere in cases where companies of peasants still
ply the monotonous tasks of their forefathers. And in all these cases,
as in the beginning, so in the end, women are the mainstay of communal
song.[662]

Of particular trades and callings, perhaps sailors, oarsmen, and
watermen generally, would furnish more refrains than could be found in
any one industry of the land. Sailors’ chanteys are still heard in every
ship;[663] but they are now apt to echo those songs of the street and
the dance-hall which have been picked up at port, and they have seldom a
traditional interest. Here and there, however, the genuine refrain is
clear enough, and attests itself by its power to withstand the
_discrimina rerum_ and the changes of time; it is said that modern Greek
sailors, when reefing sails, have nearly the same melodious calls as
those preserved in a play of Aristophanes.[664] Negro roustabouts on the
Mississippi sing interminable refrains, while a capable leader
improvises stanzas on the work in hand or on current events; a process
which is matched by refrains and songs of manual labour in every part of
the world. A well-known passage in the _Complaynt of Scotland_[665]
gives the cries and songs both of weighing anchor,—where a leader sings
and the rest answer “as it had bene ecco in an hou heuch,” like the echo
in a hollow ravine, mainly in repetitions,—and of hoisting sail, with
iteration of short running phrases such as:—

Grit and smal, grit and smal,
Ane and al, ane and al,—

and not stopping here, undertakes to set down the “chorus” of guns heavy
and light as a spirited sea-fight begins. In the old play _Common
Conditions_ occurs a pirates’ song, the stanzas in quatrains, with a
jolly refrain or chorus:—

Lustely, lustely, lustely let us saile forthe,
The wind trim doth serve us, it blows from the north.

Hoisting, pulling, however, and work of the sort on shipboard, yield in
importance, so far as refrains are concerned, to the regular cadence of
the oar, where voices have kept tune and oars have kept time from
earliest days. Not only in the classical period, where actual song and
music came to take the place of the refrain,[666] but with Egyptians,
Africans, Tonga Islanders, wherever rowing is practised, these refrains
are known; the Maoris, for example, “row in time with a melody which is
sung by a chorus sitting in canoes.” The same thing is told of the
Indians of Alaska.[667] A refrain already noted seems to have served in
England both for hoisting and for rowing; Skelton mentions it:—

Holde up the helme, loke up, and lete god stere,
I wolde be mery, what wynde that ever blowe,
_Heve and how, rombelow, row the bote, Norman, rowe_!

and D’Israeli says that sailors at Newcastle in heaving anchor still
have their _Heave and ho, rumbelow_; while it is recorded that in 1453,
Norman, Lord Mayor of London, chose to row rather than ride to
Westminster, and the watermen made this roundel or song:—

Rowe the bote, Norman,
Rowe to thy Lemman,—[668]

so that two refrains are confused in the laureate’s account, and the
exquisite reason, with a Lord Mayor in the case, is no more probable
than such stories of origins are wont to be. For example, Cnut is
credited[669] with a little song, which he is said to have composed as
he rowed by Ely and heard the chanting of the monks; “ordering the
rowers to pull gently, and calling his retinue about him, he asked them
to join him ... in singing a ballad which he composed in English and
which begins in this way:—

“Merie sungen the muneches binnen Ely,
Tha Cnut ching rew ther by.

“Roweth, cnihtës, noer the land,
And herë we thes muneches sang.”

Several things here are noteworthy; both Grundtvig and Rosenberg have
pointed out[670] that this song is composed in a two-line ballad strophe
of four accents to the verse, the kind afterward so common in
Scandinavia and in England; and whatever Cnut’s share in the making of
it, it is at least of the eleventh century, and is the first recorded
piece of verse to break away from the regular stichic metre of our
oldest poetry. Moreover, it is said that Cnut improvised the song, and
that he called on the others to join him; the lines quoted then, so
Grundtvig infers, are the burden or chorus of the song itself; and it is
interesting to know that in the days of the chronicler, say about the
middle of the twelfth century, this refrain as well as the song was sung
in the choral dances of the English folk. Doubtless it was sung to the
oar itself; and that may have been the first of it, with royalty as an
afterthought.[671]

Coming to land, one would think that the blacksmith, rhythmic as his
work may be, must have little breath to spare for song; and, indeed,
Bücher could find but one specimen which seemed to hold the genuine
rhythm of the anvil. Had he looked to the English, however, he would
have met more; an old “Satire on the Blacksmiths”[672] preserves a
refrain probably sung to the work itself, or, at worst, imitated from
its cadence:—

Thei gnaven and gnacchen, thei gronys togydere....
Stark strokes thei stryken on a stelyd stokke,
_Lus! bus! Las! das!_ rowten be rowe,
Swych dolful a dreme the devyl it todryve!
The mayster longith a lityll, and lascheth a lesse,
Twineth him tweyn and towcheth a treble,
_Tik! tab! hic! hac! tiket! taket! tyk! tak!
Lus! bus! Las! das!_ swych lyf thei ledyn.

St. Clement is the patron of blacksmiths, and while Brand’s account of
the festivities gives no refrain, but only poor doggerel and mimicry, it
is clear that processions, songs, and dances were a feature of the
saint’s day,[673] once regarded as the beginning of winter; so that
communal origins may even lurk in the traditional anvil song, quoted by
Dickens,[674] “that imitated the measure of beating upon iron, and was a
mere lyrical excuse for the introduction of Old Clem’s respected name”:—

Hammer, boys, round—Old Clem,
With a thump and a sound—Old Clem.

Again, there is the tinker with his catches, which moved Overbury[675]
to a theory of origins; “from his art was music first invented, and
therefore is he alwaies furnished with a song,” to which his hammer
keeps time. Of course, the only point of interest in these songs of the
trades is the survival of a refrain which carries the sound and cadence
of the work itself. Thus in the old play of _Tom Tiler and his Wife_, it
is probable that an actual refrain has crept into the lively song of
which Dame Strife sings the first staff, with its

Tom Tiler, Tom Tiler,
More morter for Tom Tiler, ...

clearly an echo from the roof. But there is more of the communal strain
in spinning-songs;[676] for here is the home of balladry, a city of
refuge even to this day,[677] and here the women make as well as sing
the song. Echoes of the wheel itself[678] are not infrequent; perhaps
they are too close to art in that pretty song of sewing, knitting, and
spinning, sung by three women in the first act of _Roister Doister_:—

Pipe mery Annot, _etc._
Trilla, trilla, trillarie,
Worke Tibet, knitte Annot, spinne Margerie:[679]
Let us see who shall winne the victorie....

although, what with incremental repetition in other stanzas, and the
audible whir of the wheel, this is like the songs which still move women
to emulation under like circumstances in the spinning-rooms of Europe.
“In Northamptonshire, when girls are knitting in company, they
say”—surely sing?—

“Needle to needle, and stitch to stitch,
Pull the old woman out of the ditch;
If you ain’t out by the time I’m in,
I’ll rap your knuckles with my knitting-pin.

The ‘old woman,’ ‘out,’ and ‘in’ are the arrangements of the wool over
and under the knitting-pins.”[680] The same authority gives other rimes
of this sort, more or less suggested by the movements of the work; for
instance, a song of Cumberland wool-carders:—

Tāary woo’, tāary woo’, tāary woo’ is ill to spin,
Card it well, card it well, card it well ere you begin.

Slightly different is the song of Peterborough workhouse girls in
procession, where the refrain is quite primitive in form:[681]—

And a-spinning we will go, will go, will go,
And a-spinning we will go.

Bell[682] records what seems to be a real refrain of the spinning-wheel
in the Greenside Wakes Song:—

Tread the wheel, tread the wheel, dan, don, dell O.

The flyting that goes with this refrain is negligible,—a man and a woman
on horseback with spinning-wheels before them, singing alternate stanzas
in the midst of the fair, with its dancing and merriment, a sort of
side-show; but the refrain may well be old.

Songs of the crafts, however, are less likely to hold the festal,
gregarious, communal note than those old refrains which took their
cadence from the movements of workers in the field. An agricultural
community, whether in its rudest stages, a horde that lives in fertile
river bottoms as distinguished from the nomadic, predatory bands of the
plain, or in the civilization of feudal Europe, always tends to
homogeneous conditions and always fosters communal song. Where these
conditions survive, this song in some degree survives with them.
Corsican labourers in the field, says Ortoli,[683] still sing so at
their work; the Styrian threshers, eight together, make their flails
chorus thus:—

Hiwer, hawer, hawerhaggl,
Hiwer, hawer, hawerhaggl,

while Silesians, with two, three, four, five, six, hear as many
different refrains made by the strokes of the flail;[684] and Bladé[685]
prints a song of Gascon peasants which seems to give again all the
stages in the culture of the vine,—a stanza or two may follow for
example of the repetition and the refrain:—

Plante qui plante,
Voici la belle plante;
Plante qui plante,
Voici la belle plante
Plantons, _plantin_,
Plantons le bon vin.
Voici la belle plante en vin,
Voici la belle plante en vin.

De plante en taille,
Voici la belle taille;
De plante en taille,
Voici la belle taille.
Taillons, _taillin_,
Taillons le bon vin.
Taillons la belle taille en vin.
Taillons la belle taille en vin.[686]

Early English drama was evidently fond of songs not unlike this, and in
_Summer’s Last Will and Testament_ Nash brings harvesters on the scene
singing what appears to be a song of harvest-home, if one may judge by
the refrain of _Hooky, Hooky_, said by a Dodsley editor[687] to be heard
still in some parts of the kingdom. “Enter Harvest,” run the directions,
“with a scythe on his neck, and all his reapers with sickles, and a
great black bowl with a posset in it, come before him; they come in
singing:—

Merry, merry, merry, cheary, cheary, cheary,
Trowl the black bowl to me;
Hey, derry, derry, with a poup and a lerry,
I’ll trowl it again to thee.
_Hooky, hooky,[688] we have shorn,
And we have bound,
And we have brought Harvest
Home to town.”_

The tendency to put popular and traditional songs into a play was common
everywhere. Hans Sachs[689] used a May-song for the ring-dance which is
clearly made in its turn out of a lusty old refrain:—

Der Mei, der Mei,
Der bringt uns blümlein vil.

Best of all, however, George Peele, who in his _Old Wives’ Tale_ gives
tryst to countless waifs of folklore and popular stories, makes room
there for a pretty song of harvesters. “Ten to one,” cries Madge, when
they first enter upon the stage, “they sing a song of mowing,” but they
are sowing, it seems; and once again they come in, this time with a song
of harvest. The present writer has ventured[690] to change the first
song so as to make it agree with the second, not an audacious feat when
one considers the case. The songs, with an interval between, would then
run as follows:—

Lo, here we come a-sowing, a-sowing,
And sow sweet fruits of love.
All that lovers be, pray you for me,—
In your sweethearts well may it prove.

Lo, here[691] we come a-reaping, a-reaping,
To reap our harvest fruit;
And thus we pass the year so long,
And never be we mute.

The refrain is easy to detach from the rest; and it is clear, too, that
actual imitation of sowing, reaping, binding, often went with the song,
probably in this case a combination of gesture and word known still in
games of modern children.

These songs, particularly the Gascon vintage chorus, are simply a festal
recapitulation of the rustic year, with more or less echo of actual
refrain sung to the labour in its various stages. From the moment when
communal labour began to sow the seed—in Japan[692] the peasants still
plant their rice in cadence with a chorus, and in Cashmere[693] the
onions are sown with accompaniment of “a long-drawn, melancholy
song,”—through process after process, down to the picking,[694] reaping,
harvesting, and so to the festal imitations just noted, even to the
ritual of priestly thanksgiving, every stage is marked by communal
singing, except that in the function last named the community turns
passive, the guild replaces the throng, and art has begun its course.
Hence it is that most of the survivals of song and refrain come down to
our day with more or less magic in the case. Rites are performed by the
head of a family, and are even transferred from the field to the home;
as when[695] at flax-planting a German wife springs about the hearth and
cries, “Heads as big as my head, leaves as big as my apron, and stalks
as thick as my leg!” In Silesia,[696] again, husband and wife sing
together a song with the refrain,—

Om Floxe, om Floxe, om Floxe!

Even in the field itself, song is mingled with these symbolical and even
religious rites; incantations, such as that Anglo-Saxon charm[697] for
making barren or bewitched land bear again, are strongly tinged with
clerical lore, and in this case involve a visit to the church altar. The
Romans, too, had spells and charms for restoring fields to fertility
when other spells and charms had bewitched them; harmful rites of this
sort were forbidden in the laws of the twelve tables.[698] Corruption is
rife in these things; but in a charm[699] for the old English peasant to
get back his strayed or stolen cattle, amid the hocus-pocus of Herod and
Judas and the holy rood and scraps of Latin, a few lines echo the old
repetition, but have no refrain:—

find the fee[700] and drive the fee,
and have the fee and hold the fee,
and drive home the fee.

A thousand things of the sort survive, but seldom touch the refrain;
perhaps the charm to make butter come from the churn, common in
1655,[701] had a choral element:—

Come, butter, come!
Come, butter, come!
Peter stands at the gate
Waiting for a butter’d cake,—
Come, butter, come!

We turn back to the actual labour of the fields, and the songs and
refrains that went with it. A refrain[702] has come down to us from the
harvesters of ancient Hellas,—“Sing the sheaf-song, the sheaf-song, the
song of the sheaf,” which is not unlike the type just considered in
George Peele’s “Lo, here we come a-reaping”; while that waif of Germanic
myth,[703] the story of Scéaf, where the “sheaf” is made the name of an
agricultural god, or culture-hero, as one will, reminds us of Phrygian
countryfolk who at their reaping sang “in mournful wise” the song of
Lityerses, itself said to be the outcome of an old refrain, lapsing into
a _vocero_ for the hero’s death. Burlesque laid unholy hands upon the
custom and the myth; the story growing out of the song passed into a
tradition which coldly furnished forth the satire and comedy of a later
day; since any song of the harvest-field or the threshing-floor came to
be called a Lityerses,[704] the name was seized upon for certain comic
features, and grew to be a symbol of an insatiable eater. Yet dramatic
allusions and uses of more serious nature, like the song recorded by
Peele, were doubtless common in Greece and throughout the Orient. It has
been said already, in speaking of the _vocero_, that the song of Maneros
was sung by Egyptian reapers, just as they sang on the threshing-floor
the song of the oxen treading out the corn; while at the harvest-home
Greek husbandmen, if Mannhardt’s surmise[705] is right, sang a variant
of the Maneros; and Homer is witness for the singing of the Linos at the
time of vintage.[706] If, now, one seeks for similar songs in the fields
of modern Europe, one finds, to be sure, hints in plenty, descriptions
by this and that traveller, and fragments of actual verse; but
conditions of religious ceremonial have broken up the old refrains and
barred any handing down of a Germanic Linos or Lityerses. Customs, too,
have changed; and few are the places where folk at harvest-home do as
their forbears did, when “the whole family sat down at the same table,
and conversed, danced, and sang together during the entire night without
difference or distinction of any kind” as between master and man,
mistress and maid.[707] Add to the case that great transfer of vital
interests upon which economists lay such stress, from open-air life to
home-life, from the throng with its indiscriminate dance and merriment,
often, too, its indiscriminate morals, its communal habit of thought and
expression, to the individual responsibility, the sober pleasures and
the stricter morals of the fireside, from the delight in movement,
noise, cadence of many voices, to lamplight and the printed page and
meditation: add this to the account, and one sees how ill it must have
fared with the communal refrain of work, feast, and ceremonial rite.
Reactions come, of course, and no one denies a constant market for cakes
and ale; but what is a church fair, even a camp-meeting, to the old
vigil? The wife of Bath is still with us, but she has to make shift with
an afternoon tea. Disintegration, due to the lapse of communal feeling,
has either broken up the traditional refrains, leaving only _Hooky,
hooky_,[708] and unmeaning things of the kind, or else has favoured the
making of doggerel which may or may not mean something, and which in any
case threatens the student with perils of a too curious interpretation
of chops and tomato-sauce. Even where there is neither corruption nor
distortion, there is unblushing if often innocent substitution of modern
mawkishness. Precisely as one boggles, when reading Herd’s _Scottish
Songs_, to find under the title “I wish my Love were in a Myre” the
familiar translation of Sappho’s “Blest as the Immortal Gods,”—so, in
coming to the “Cornish Midsummer Bonfire Song,” in Bell’s collection, a
title to make any student of communal poetry get out a fresh pen, and in
reading, too, that here “fishermen and others dance about the fire and
sing appropriate songs,” one pulls up with a rude shock at—

Hail! lovely nymphs, be not too coy,
But freely yield your charms,[709]

which, while appropriate in sentiment, has not the note of simplicity
that one expects from Cornish fishermen dancing round the bonfire of
heathen tradition. True, this is a very bad counterfeit; but many a
verse quite as alien at heart, if not on the face, has been foisted upon
communal and traditional song.

The best survivals come from the harvest field, and mingle refrain with
improvisation. Very common in old times and in new is the note of
ridicule, particularly for the wayfaring man, converted temporarily into
a fool, who passes by the labourers; such a man even now gets rude
handling as well as rude rimes, and this was the case in Hellas.[710] In
an often-quoted Idyll of Ausonius there is reference to the exchange of
abusive lyric compliments between workers in the field and the boatmen
on the Moselle; while any one can note how this instinct for a flyting
between labourers in a band and the _spectator ab extra_, alone or in
company, holds always and everywhere, while, on the other hand, the
solitary labourer and the solitary wanderer are wont to pass the time of
day with full courtesy and often with an inexplicably kindly feeling.
German peasants breaking flax in the fields still sing to the rhythm of
their strokes; as in the old days, a stranger who passes by them is sure
to be hailed in improvised verses not of a complimentary kind.
Particularly if the stranger be a young gentleman, a possible suitor for
one of the daughters at the great house, sarcastic song greets him from
twenty or thirty throats, mainly a refrain, and that partly of an
imitative character, with derisive lines like:—

Too fat is he quite,
And he isn’t polite,

with the refrain for conclusion,—

Hurrah, let him go![711]

All this, of course, to the exact time of the work in hand. When no
stranger offers, mutual flytings will serve. Near Soest all the young
people shout and sing throughout the entire process of preparing
flax,—“unsung flax,” they say, “is good for nothing,”—and songs are
improvised in satire of one another, with a refrain _rummel dumm dum_ or
_rem sen jo jo_. Travelling in Wales, by the bye, had once these chances
of satire, and Aubrey tells about them, thinking doubtless of his
favourite time “before the civil warres.” For in Wales there were not
only “rymers ... that upon any subject given would versify extempore
halfe an hour together,” but “the vulgar sort of people ... have a
humour of singing extempore upon occasion: _e.g._ a certain gentleman
coming to ——, the woemen that were washing at ye river fell all a
singing in Welsh, wʰ was a description of ye men and their horses.”[712]
How facile the black fellows of Australia, Africans, and savages
everywhere, can be with this improvised ridicule, mainly practised on
the march, or at some sort of labour, all travellers testify. Samoans
sing instead of talking “as they walk along the road, or paddle the
canoe, or do any other piece of work. These songs often contain
sarcastic remarks, and in passing the house or village of parties with
whom they are displeased, they strike up a chant embodying some
offensive ideas.”[713]

We must keep to the harvest fields. Wordsworth’s solitary reaper called
forth an exquisite lyric; but there is material more attractive for the
student of refrains, however it lack poetic merit, in Boswell’s and
Johnson’s stories of a Highland harvest, and one would be glad indeed if
the doctor, who had all of Wordsworth’s curiosity on this point, could
have made the reapers tell him what they sang.[714] He was coming close
to Rasay in a boat, while, as Boswell says, the boatmen “sang with great
spirit,” and Johnson remarked that “naval music was very ancient”;[715]
then the men were silent, and from the near fields was heard the song of
reapers, “_who seemed to shout as much as to sing_, while they worked
with a _bounding activity_.” Johnson’s own account[716] of reaping on
Rasay may refer to this or to another occasion. “I saw,” he says, “the
harvest of a small field. The women reaped the corn, and the men bound
up the sheaves. The strokes of the sickle were timed by the modulations
of the harvest-song in which all their voices were united. They
accompany in the Highlands every action which can be done in equal time
with an appropriate strain, which has, they say, not much meaning;[717]
but its effects are regularity and cheerfulness.” These hints from the
Highlands are of peculiar importance because of the undoubted
homogeneous conditions of life in the clans, keeping songs of this sort
in an almost primitive state. Significant is the rhythm of shouts,
significant the preponderance of the refrain. Lady Rasay showed Johnson
“the operation of _wawking_ cloth. Here it is performed by women who
kneel upon the ground and rub it with both their hands, singing an Erse
song all the time.” Boswell speaks of their “loud and wild howl”; and
Dr. Hill[718] quotes Lockhart that women at this work screamed “all the
while in a sort of chorus. At a distance the sound was wild and sweet
enough, but rather discordant” at close quarters.

The Lowlands of Scotland, too, had their _kirn_,[719] and the English
harvest-home, practically the same thing, had merry songs and refrains
down to living memory. What must these songs have been, when, if
Professor Skeat[720] is right in his estimate and inference, on one
estate of two hundred acres in Suffolk no less than five hundred and
fifty-three persons were assembled for harvest? At almost any period of
English country life one finds the rural philosopher looking back, like
the Rev. Dr. Jessopp now,[721] to kindlier and more communal times,
greater harvests, keener jollity, a wider and deeper social sense; so
Overbury’s franklin felt that he held a brief for the _tempus actum_.
“He allows of honest pastime, and thinkes not the bones of the dead
anything bruised, or the worse for it, though the country lasses dance
in the churchyard after even-song. Rocke Monday, and the wake in summer,
shrovings, the wakefull ketches on Christmas eve, the hoky or seed-cake,
these he yearly keepes.” Of this festal round harvest-home was
culmination, since it knitted the bond between labour and rest, and was
the pledge of plenty, the high tide of the agricultural year. Three
elements may be noted in this harvest-home so far as the refrain is
concerned; first, the shouting, the choral cries and songs of the
labourers in the field as the last sheaf is cut and bound; secondly, the
march homeward with the hock-cart to the cadence of loud refrains and
songs, with the thrice-repeated procession about barn and yard; and
thirdly, the more elaborate ceremonial of those gatherings which marked
the safe accomplishment of harvest. Moreover, in any of these cases a
progress may be noted from the rude but cadenced shouts, the refrains
and chorals, through definite songs of harvest, up to all manner of
offshoots and distortions,—fixed rites, speeches, sermons, pantomime,
beggings, what not; but even in the last and worse estate of the
communal harvest-song there is everywhere echo of the refrain,
everywhere echo of the dance. The breaking up of communal labour has
left mainly the songs and cries of working folk on any given farm or
estate; but the songs of a common festival for harvested crops still
linger in customs of the village,—now a traditional march of the elder
folk, now some half-understood dance and walk of the maidens, such as
Hardy describes in his _Tess_, and now a mere song of village children
coming in a band from the search for berries, as in the Black Forest:—

Holla, holla, reera,
Mer kumme us d’Beere.[722]

Lithuanians coming back from the field, or in any communal gathering,
when they have sung through their traditional stock of songs, call for a
new ditty; amid jest and jollity some one strikes up a _daina_ of his
own, composing as he sings; the rest repeat in chorus, correct the
words, add to them,—and so a new song is made, and, if it finds favour,
is handed down, and even passed to the neighbour villages. This custom,
however, is fast going out of date.[723]

In some places the day when harvest begins is still a time of communal
and ritual importance; Würtemberg reapers, men and women, gather in the
early dawn and sing a choral for blessing on their work.[724] As they go
to the field, the throng still sing choruses, improvised verses, and
traditional ballads; and when they march home at dusk to their village,
they sing songs, often modern enough, but, as Pfannenschmid points out,
substitutes for older and doubtless far more communal singing, which
indeed lingers in the unintelligible refrain. In many places, however,
chorus, refrain and song, whether communal or alien, to be sung at
harvest and threshing, are dying out or dead; in Normandy, says
Beaurepaire,[725] at the _fête de la gerbe_, when the last of the wheat
is threshed, no song of any sort is heard, though elsewhere the festival
is loud with chorus. A scrap of the refrain sung in another part of
France—

Ho! batteux, battons la gerbe,
Battons-la joyeusement, ...

Beaurepaire heard, to be sure, here and there in Normandy; but it was no
longer a refrain of labour, and was attached to a love-song.[726]

The main ceremony, of course, is at the end of harvest. In many places a
custom still prevails, that when the last sheaf is to be cut, a portion
of grain is left standing, and the reapers now dance about it with
repeated cries, sometimes of vague mythological tradition like “Wold,
Wold, Wold,” and with songs; now bare their heads, and pour food and
drink upon the spot; now let the “bonniest lass” cut this remnant, dress
it, and bring it home as the “corn-baby”; now throw their sickles at it
to see who can cut it down;[727] and so on, in variety of form, but all
to the same purpose. In Flanders they sing, when the last load is taken
from the field,

Keriole, keriole, al in!
’t loaste voer goat in.
Keriole, Keriole, al in![728]

There is every reason to think that some rite of this sort, accompanied
with communal refrain and song, was once universal in agricultural
life.[729] The corn-baby just described as decked in silk and ribbons
and brought home with singing, is also known as the kirn-baby, the
ivy-girl, and the maiden; so that harvest-home is here and there called
the maiden-feast.[730] The songs belong primarily on the field and with
the homeward faring cart; but customs change. In Suffolk at harvest
suppers some one is crowned with a pillow and the folk all sing _I am
the Duke of Norfolk_,[731] though elsewhere in the country the old note
remains. Still farther from the field, Hertfordshire countrymen sing
_The Barley Mow_ in alehouses after their day’s labour; but in another
part of Suffolk this is a festal song chanted at the harvest-supper
“when the stack, rick, or mow of barley is finished.” It is a song of
repetitions, and holds an old refrain.[732] For this song at the
harvest-home supper, its variations, corruptions, survivals, its
refrains, and its choruses, one would need a book; a description or two
of recent doings must suffice. “At the harvest suppers up to some twenty
years ago,” say Broadwood and Maitland, “while the other guests were
still seated at the table, a labourer carrying a jug or can of beer or
cider filled a horn for every two men, one on each side of the table; as
they drank, this old harvest-song was sung and the chorus repeated,
until the man with the beer had reached the end of the long table,
involving sometimes thirty repetitions of the first verse. After this,
the second verse was sung in the same manner.” The chorus—from
Wiltshire—ran thus:—

So drink, boys, drink, and see that you do not spill,
For if you do, you shall drink two, for ’tis our master’s will.

What is left here of communal song is the fact of the chorus and the
infinite repetition; the song has a poor mixture of the bucolic with the
buckish. The older collection of Dixon gives a better song:—

Our oats they are howed and our barley’s reaped,
Our hay is mowed and our hovels heaped,
Harvest Home! Harvest Home!
We’ll merrily roar out Harvest Home!
Harvest Home! Harvest Home!
We’ll ...

with another repetition of the line.[733] The men who sang this chorus
were still in thrall to an old custom at the barley harvest. On putting
up the last sheaf, which is called the craw, or crow sheaf, the man who
has it cries out,—

I have it, I have it, I have it!

Another asks,—

What hav’ee, what hav’ee, what hav’ee?

And the answer comes,—

A craw, a craw, a craw!

Then wild cheering, and off they go to the supper, where they sing a
well-known cumulative song about the brown bowl, the quarter-pint, the
half-pint, and so on.

These repeated cries, however, take us back to the field. In Devon, as
Brand relates, they still cried “the neck”; a little bundle was made
from the best ears of the sheaves, and when the last field was reaped,
all gathered about the person who had this neck, who first stooped and
held it near the ground. All the men doffed their hats and held them
likewise and then cried, in a very prolonged and harmonious tone, _The
Neck_, at the same time raising themselves upright, and elevating arms
and hats above their heads, the holder of the neck doing likewise. This
was done thrice; after which they changed their cry to _wee yen_,[734]
_way yen_, prolonged as before, and also sounded thrice; then boisterous
laughter, amidst which they break up and hurry to the farmhouse,—a
maimed rite, indeed, but of interest when compared with kindred doings.
For the words are surely wreckage of an old refrain, full of
repetitions, like that song Montanus rescued from the rites of
midsummer-eve along the Rhine. Under the “crown,” boys, girls, and their
elders dance in a ring and sing as they dance a sort of refrain which is
made of incremental repetitions into a description of the game they are
playing; meantime one person stands in the midst of the ring until he
has played his part to the choral suggestion, a common element in other
games of children. In these and kindred ceremonies it is clear that a
concerted shouting was the main feature, but the shouts were rhythmical
and went with the communal dance, not with a disintegrated, howling mob.
At Hitchin farmers drove furiously home with the last load of harvest,
while the people rushed madly after, shouting and dashing bowls of water
on the corn; but this is chaotic, for old Tusser[735] knew a better
way:—

Come home lord singing,
Come home corn bringing.

In Germany the last load of grain is brought home with throwing of water
and singing of traditional songs and shouts for the master. So too in
English “youling,” when cider is thrown on the apple trees, at each cup
“the company sets up a shout.”[736] Doubtless the elaborate chorus of
the Arval brothers had once its wild but cadenced shout of the whole
festal throng, as they “beat the ground” in communal consent of voice
and step; and this primitive shout recurs in all folksong, not only in
the _schnaderhüpfl_, in the _jodel_ which ends a stanza, but in those
cries at the dance which have crept into the ballad itself. But the
cadenced shout, the refrain, the infinite repetition of a traditional
song, pass with the dance that timed them, and decorous reapers may now
depute one of their number to act as spokesman; hence, as in
Mecklenburg, the recited poem, or the little speech, or even, as in
Hanover, a figure made of the stalks is furnished with a letter to be
read aloud for the behoof of neighbours; and there are other infamies of
the sort. So passes the old Harvest-home.

Of vast importance for agricultural life, and resonant with refrain and
song, were those processions about the field, about parish boundaries,
to sacred wells,[737] to woods and groves to bring in the May, and for a
hundred other purposes to a hundred other resorts. The solemn procession
of a community, along with the festal dance, forms the oldest known
source of poetry; and Kögel points out that in German even now the
proper word for celebrating a festal occasion is _begehen_, while the
corresponding noun is used in a mediæval gloss for _ritus_ and _cultus_.
The song of the Arval brothers had its origin in such a procession about
the fields; and Vergil’s advice[738] to the farmer shows that this rite
was no monopoly of priests, or even of the man skilled in incantations,
but a communal affair,—marching round the young crops, and dance and
song at harvest:—

... thrice for luck
Around the young corn let the victim go,
And all the choir, a joyful company,
Attend it, and with shouts bid Ceres come
To be their house-mate; and let no man dare
Put sickle to the ripened ears until,
With woven oak his temples chapleted,
He foot the rugged dance and chant the lay.[739]

There can be no question of borrowing in these songs and dances, even in
the simpler forms of ritual, which are found wherever rudest agriculture
has begun. Doubtless only a change of religion deprives us of those
songs, or some echo of them, which were sung in the famous procession of
Nerthus,[740] the _terra mater_, goddess of fertility and peace among
the Germanic tribes who lived by the northern oceans two thousand years
ago. These people, so Tacitus[741] records the rite, “believe that she
enters into human activity, and travels among them.” Drawn by cows, she
is accompanied in her mysterious wagon by a priest; “those are joyful
times and places which the goddess honours with her presence, and her
visit makes holiday.”[742]

Tacitus was interested in the mysteries of the rite; would that he had
heard and transmitted the songs that rang out in honour of this German
Demeter, and had described the dances of the folk about their
fields![743] For, as Kögel points out, the later procession to bless
crops and to ban all things hostile to their thriving, a custom still
common in certain parts of Europe, is only a repetition of this old
progress. Half-way between the time of Nerthus and the present occurs
that Anglo-Saxon charm for making barren or bewitched land bear fruit;
amid its excrescences of ritual, and under the alien matter, still
lingers a hint of the old communal procession, the old communal song and
dance; and perhaps Nerthus is dimly remembered in the cries of,—

Erce, Erce, Erce, earth’s mother,

which has a repetition familiar from many survivals,[744] and in the
lines:—

Hail to thee, Earth, all men’s mother,
Be thou growing in God’s protection,
Filled with food for feeding of men!

Again, one has the extremes of shouts, communal cadenced cries, and
songs which are often quite irrelevant; thus in Brandenburg on Easter
Monday girls march by long rows, hand in hand, over the young corn of
each field, singing Easter songs, while the young men ring the church
bells;[745] but one learns that Wends of the fifteenth century greeted
the early corn as they ran round it in wild procession, and hailed it
“with loud shouting.”[746]

About the year 1133, and along the lower Rhine, a procession was in
vogue which may have been a survival of the worship of that goddess
recorded by Tacitus and called Isis because her symbol was a ship; for
in the mediæval rite such a ship was placed on wheels and carried about
the country, followed by shouting bands and hailed at every halt with
song and dance.[747] The songs, _turpia cantica et religioni Christianae
indigna concinentium_, were condemned by clericals,[748] and the dances
of scantily clad women, not unlike the festal dances of savage women in
many places at this season of the year, were doubtless not only
intrinsically objectionable, but pointed back to the heathen doings from
which our Germanic folk were so slowly converted. A glimpse at this
older worship is given by Gregory in his often-quoted story of the
Langobards who offered a goat’s head to their “devil,” running about in
a circle and singing impious songs.[749] A survival of some such heathen
rite, with ridiculous perversion of Christian legend, is the feast of
the ass, the festival of fools, on Christmas or on St. Stephen’s day,
when during mass the priest brays thrice and the congregation respond in
kind; here and there, as in France, a hymn is sung, with refrain from
the throng:[750]—

Hez, Sir Ane, hez!—

and ending in what Hampson oddly calls “an imitation of the noisy
Bacchanalian cry of _Evohe!_”—

Hez va! Hez va! Hez-va-he!
Bialz, Sire Asnes, carallez
Belle bouche car chantez,—

a very far cry, indeed. After service, crowds marched through the
streets, sang Fescennine songs, danced, and ended by “dashing pails of
water over the precentor’s head.” It is needless to follow this
degenerate choral over Europe, as it blends thus with rites of the
church, passes into the song of the waits, and lingers in degraded form
with the beggars or children who parade the countryside at Martinmas or
in Christmas week, singing refrains that echo older and better song and
doggerel that echoes nothing.

A soule-cake, a soule-cake,

was the refrain which Aubrey heard; but in modern Cheshire it is—

A soul! A soul! A soul-cake!
Please good Missis, a soul-cake![751]

printed here with full apologies to all outraged friends of the
immensities and the eternities, who sought nobler stuff in a book on the
beginnings of poetry. On Palm Sunday, near Bielefeld in Germany, the
children go about with branches of willow and sing “all day long”—

Palm’n, Palm’n, Påsken,
Låt’t den Kukkuk kråsken,
Låt’t dei Viögel singen,
Låt’t den Kukkuk springen![752]

Most stubborn, of course, is this converted or Christian survival, and
almost as stubborn the custom of the village and of remote agricultural
communities; such a procession as Coussemaker[753] describes, popular
throughout Flanders and Brabant, with a fixed refrain, held its place
even in the cities. Occasionally Church and State were opposed;[754] a
proclamation of Henry VIII forbade processions “with songes and dances
from house to house,” and even carols were forbidden by act of
Parliament in Scotland. Wakes[755] were either abolished, or else passed
into that curious communal revival, the love-feast and the watch-meeting
of Methodists. But the communal song and procession are fast dying out,
and the new century will hear little of them; although early in the old
century the Christmas days[756] heard many a shouting throng, now with
cries of _an guy_, now _gut heil_, now _hogmenay trololay, give us your
white bread and none of your gray_! and whatever other etymological
puzzles the scanty records can show. These fragments of festal song are
too far gone in corruption for profitable use. Aubrey[757] felt the
lapse, and made such _memoranda_ as these: “get the Christmas caroll and
the wasselling song;” “get the song which is sung in the ox-house when
they wassell the oxen,” that is, with echo of an old refrain, where they
drink “to the ox with the crumpled horne that treads out the corne”; and
he has noted a few of these songs. The civil wars, he thinks, made an
end of these old customs; “warres doe not only extinguish Religion and
Lawes, but Superstition; and no suffimen is a greater fugator of
Phantosmes than gunpowder.” But peace has its victories of this sort.
Not long ago the procession about village and parish boundaries was
common enough; the whole community took part in this festal affair, and
all sense as of an individual purpose or individual ownership was laid
aside. Shout, dance, song, banquet, even directly ceremonial acts, were
the concern of a homogeneous throng, “our village” in strictest communal
sense. On the march—for example, the boundary march at Hamelin, in the
late autumn,—rose traditional songs, varied by noise of every sort; and
at the feast which followed, gentle and simple joined hands in the
dance, until, with recent innovations, the gentry withdrew, became mere
onlookers, and at last left the old rite to fall, like most communal
traditions, into a shabby, vulgar, discredited uproar of the lower
classes, a thing common and unclean. A quite similar case of
degeneration is quoted by Brand from the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ for
June, 1790, as going on at Helstone in Cornwall.[758] But where the
prosperity of crop and barn is in question, the rites are more stubborn
and hold their ground. This Helstone song welcomes summer; but before
that was sung, processions of all kinds were wont to go about the
fields, and in 1868 what the _Times_ newspaper called a “ritualistic
revival” came off in Lancashire, priest and choir making a progress
through the fields with cross and banners, and singing as they went.
Rogation week is still known as gang-week.[759] In older times the
community itself was priest and choir; the cases are plentiful and may
be read in Brand’s account of “parochial perambulations.” Then there is
the song of bringing home the May,[760] the dance and song about the
Maypole, with material and survival beyond one’s compass; enough to let
them echo in the verses put by Nash into his chaotic but pretty play,
where the clowns and maids sing as they dance:—

Trip and goe, heave and hoe,
Up and down, to and fro;
From the town to the grove
Two and two let us rove.
A-maying, a-playing:
Love hath no gainsaying;
So merrily trip and go.[761]

The voices of the real maying folk are here, and the steps, lightly
touched by art in the transfer to the play; in that Furry-Day Song at
Helstone, with its opening about Robin Hood and Little John, there is a
rougher but less effective refrain:—

With ha-lau-tow, rumble O!
For we were up as soon as any day O!
And for to fetch the summer home,[762]
The summer and the May O!
For summer is a-come O!
And winter is a-gone O!

What the poet can do with a fragment of communal song, with a heart full
of communal sympathy, and with that final touch of art and individual
reflection, may be felt by any one who will read in the echo of this
rough old chorus those exquisite verses of Herrick to Corinna.

Songs that may pass as communal drama hold something of this old refrain
of labour; so, for example, in the flytings of winter with summer or
with spring,[763] which seem to go back in England to times before the
conquest. A refrain, with change of “summer” to “winter” in alternate
stanzas, runs through a ballad printed by Uhland:[764]—

Alle ir herren mein,
Der Sommer ist fein!

Another refrain is sung “by all the youth,” when a mock fight between
the two is ended, and winter lies at jocund summer’s feet:—

Stab aus, stab aus,
Stecht dem Winter die Augen aus!

In the strife by deputy,[765] owl appearing for Hiems, and cuckoo for
Ver, there is the call of the bird for refrain; or else it is holly for
summer and ivy for winter, a chorus,[766] said to have been written down
in Henry VI’s time, running—

Nay, Ivy, nay,
Hyt shal not be, iwys;
Let Holy hafe the maystry
As the maner ys.[767]

These flytings came to be extraordinarily popular, and it is hard to
draw a line between the _volkspoesie_ and the _volksthümliche_; learned
allegory, which was early on the ground, has the mark of Cain upon it,
and cannot be missed. Probably Böckel[768] is right in looking on the
winter and summer songs as originally communal, with those dialogues
between soul and body, which one finds in nearly every literature of
Europe, as a learned and allegorical imitation; a combination of the two
kinds is not unusual.[769] So one passes to all manner of
debates,[770]—riches and poverty, wine and water, peasant and noble,
priest and knight, down to Burns’s _Twa Dogs_; but it is the old
communal sap that keeps holly and ivy green, and an old communal rite,
the driving out of winter or of death, lingers in the verses which
German children still sing to the dance:[771]—

Weir alle, weir alle, weir kumma raus,
Weir brenge enk’n Tod hinaus;
Der Summa is wieder kumme,
Willkummen, lieber Summe![772]

Refrain and chorus of labour among savages have been noted here and
there in the foregoing pages; to collect them to any extent would be
useless. They are found everywhere, and show that stage of development
at which the repetition of a single sentence, often of a single word,
affords unmeasured delight or ease. Individual singing is almost unknown
in many savage tribes,[773] and the refrain in its function as deputy of
the older chorus, is less common than the chorus itself.[774] Where the
savage is still mainly a hunter, mainly a warrior, the refrain is
insistent whenever a connected bit of description breaks away from the
choral song, as if artistic poetry could not yet walk by itself; and
where he has begun to till the soil, or even merely to gather plants and
fruits, there is the chorus and there is the refrain of a rude
harvest-home. For the hunter and warrior we may quote Heckewelder’s
account.[775] “Their songs are by no means inharmonious. They sing in
chorus; first the men and then the women. At times the women join in the
general song, or repeat the strain which the men have just finished. It
seems like two parties singing in questions and answers, and is upon the
whole very agreeable and enlivening.... The singing always begins by one
person only, but others soon fall in successively, until the general
chorus begins, the drum beating all the while to mark the time.” Their
war-dance is described in the familiar terms; but Heckewelder adds a
more interesting account of the feast which under agricultural
conditions would be a harvest-home. “After returning from a successful
expedition,” he says, “a dance of thanksgiving is always performed....
It is accompanied with singing and choruses, in which the women join....
At the end of every song, the scalp-yell is shouted as many times as
there have been scalps taken from the enemy.” As to the rhythm,
Heckewelder makes a statement much clearer than the accounts given in
Schoolcraft’s question and answer, for he does not undertake to express
Indian metres in terms of civilized poetry, but simply says that “their
songs ... are sung in short sentences, not without some kind of measure
harmonious to an Indian ear.”

These Indians, however, were not in the absolutely primitive stage, and
the artist had elaborated dance, speech, song; in short, like European
peasants of isolated communities a century ago, the redskin was at that
point of poetical development where improvisation is a general gift, and
every one is expected to compose his bit of song, leaning, of course, on
the chorus, on refrain and repetition, and on those traditional phrases
which even more than modern speech realized Schiller’s lines about the
poet:—

Weil dir ein Vers gelingt in einer gebildeten Sprache
Die für dich dichtet und denkt, glaubst du schon
Dichter zu sein?

“The Indians also meet,” says Heckewelder, “for the purpose of
recounting their warlike exploits, which is done in a kind of
half-singing or recitative ... the drum beating all the while.... After
each has made a short recital in his turn, they begin again in the same
order, and so continue going the rounds, in a kind of alternate
chaunting, until every one has concluded.” It is easy to see that while
the chorus of war is an eminently communal performance, asking an
exactness of consent which makes strongly for rhythm at its best, the
conditions of nomadic and belligerent life must breed excellent
differences, set apart the great warrior, the great orator, and work in
certain ways toward communal disintegration and the triumph of the
artist. Agricultural communities, on the other hand, foster the choral
and social side of poetry, and discourage individual feats. So even with
the Indians; witness that “cereal chorus,” as Schoolcraft calls it,[776]
at the corn-husking, sung whenever a crooked ear is found by one of the
maidens:—

Crooked ear, crooked ear, walker at night,—

with additions and variations. This crooked ear, _wa-ge-min_, is the
symbol of a “thief in the cornfield,” and may have some relationship
with Mannhardt’s corn-demon.[777]

Older views of the American savage show him in the warlike guise, to be
sure, but with poetry overwhelmingly choral. Lafitau,[778] who says that
commerce with the white man has materially changed the savage’s customs,
is determined to paint him in his unspoiled state. During an eclipse,
for example, all the tribe dance in a peculiar manner, filling the air
with lugubrious cries; that rhythm is in them, though it is no song in
Lafitau’s ear, is proved by the dance, which, of course, compels a
rhythm, and by that picture of the girl who shakes pebbles in a
calabash, “trying meanwhile to make her rough voice accord with this
importunate jingle.”[779] Singing and dancing are the chief features of
Indian social life, and constitute the main charm of the life to come;
improvised songs, even speeches, occur, but general singing and dancing
make the background of their poetry and fill their festivals.[780]
Everybody improvises, and has his special song,—a trait noted among the
Eskimo; the dancers always sing, and apparently the singers always
dance; the verse is measured, but has no rime, and individual songs are
always supported by an accompanying _he! he!_ in cadence from the
throng, a sort of burden. Dramatic songs of war are common; and Lafitau
gives a case marvellously like that Faroe ballad of the luckless
fisherman, with satirist and victim in full view, although here the
latter is passive, and is often forced by the laughter and scorn of the
tribe to break away and hide his head in shame.[781] Song-duels, too, as
among the Eskimo, are frequent, with throwing of ashes, which makes
Lafitau call on Athenæus for a parallel among the ancient Greeks. But,
after all, what sticks in Lafitau’s mind about Indian dances is the fury
of them and that wild _he! he!_ which gave them cadence, but which often
“made the whole village tremble and shake.” The war-dance is described
in terms familiar to the reader of later accounts.

Lery gives an older story, but in the same spirit as that found in
Lafitau. Of great interest is the Huguenot’s account[782] of a festivity
which he and one Jacques Rousseau saw and heard performed by five or six
hundred savages in a certain village. The men retired into one house,
the women to another; Lery and his friend were shut in with the women,
about two hundred in all. From the house of the men came a low murmur,
like that of folk at prayers; and the women, pricking their ears,
huddled together in great excitement. Then the noise grew in volume, and
the men could be heard singing in concert, and often repeating their
interjection, _he, he, he, he_; the women now began to reply in kind,
crying, _he, he, he, he_, for more than a quarter-hour, leaping,
meanwhile, and foaming at the mouth, till it was quite plain to Lery
that the devil was entering into them. But this was not all. From
another house a mob of children now tuned the hallowed quire; and the
Huguenot, despite his year and a half in those parts, is free to say he
felt a desire to be “en nostre Fort,” doubting the sequel of all this
coil. Suddenly the women and children were quiet; and Lery could now
hear the men singing and shouting “_d’un accord merveilleux_,” so that
these “sweet and more gracious sounds” heartened him to go near the
house of the men. He made a hole in the soft wall and looked in; then,
with two friends, he went inside, saw the dance, and heard the songs,
which ran on without stop. All the men stood in a close circle, but
without clasping hands or stirring from the place, bent forward, moving
only the leg and the right foot, each having his right hand on his
buttocks, the arm and left hand hanging, and so danced and sang. It
seems to have been a communal dance, like that of the Botocudos, save
that certain priests—_caraïbes_—richly arrayed, holding in their hands
“little rattles or bells made of a fruit bigger than an ostrich egg,”
had evidently extraordinary powers. There is a remarkable picture by way
of illustration,[783] showing the naked dancer, bent over, as described,
with a priest behind him, a parrot on a perch just above the dancer’s
shoulder, and a monkey at his feet,—these doubtless an exuberance of the
artist.

The social foundation, the communal dance, the incessant refrain, the
festal excitement, are here plain outcome of primitive conditions in
survival; the priest, and the ritual functions which are left to one’s
guessing, show that mingling of ceremonial tradition and art which is
bound to spring up with even savage culture. Despite this mingling,
however, the overwhelming characteristic of the whole affair is
communal, and the songs are in close tether to the refrain. An excellent
summary of American savage songs and American savage poetry in general
has been already quoted in part from a paper by Dr. Brinton,[784] and
may be used here as a conclusion of the whole matter. Repetition is the
groundwork of this poetry; it is always sung; it has no rhythm,—no
metre, that is,—no alliteration, but depends on two kinds of repetition.
Either one verse is repeated indefinitely, or a refrain is used. “The
refrain is usually interjectional and wholly meaningless; and the verses
are often repeated without alteration four or five times ever.” This is
the case with Eskimo poetry. Now and then, each line “is followed by an
interjectional burden.” A little ballad may be quoted from Dr. Brinton’s
paper[785] to show how events passed into poetry, without forming what
could be called in any sense narrative or epic verse. About the year
1820, the Pawnees captured a girl and put her to the torture; but a
Pawnee brave, of generous vein, made a daring rescue and flight. After
three days he came back; and as the thing was so mad, it was counted
inspiration, and no one harmed him. Whereupon this song was sung:—

Well he foretold this,
Well he foretold this,
Yes, he foretold this,
I, Pitale-Sharu,[786]
Am arrived here.
Well he foretold this,
Yes, he foretold this;
I, Pitale-Sharu,[786]
Am arrived here,—

and in this song, leaning so hard on the event, so bare of statement, so
woven in with the life of the actual day that lapse even of a year or so
must have brought need to its hearers to be edified by the margent,[787]
so dependent on the refrain, so suggestive of an accompanying dance and
of gestures to make the little drama real, it is not unfair to say that
one has at least some of those factors which went to make the beginnings
of poetry.

The refrain has been considered as the main communal element in songs of
labour; here are its functions in communal play, primarily a combination
of consenting cries and movements in the festal dance. The song that
always went with a dance got its name thence, and was called a ballad;
and in the ballad, whether strictly taken as a narrative song, or as the
purely lyrical outburst for which there is no better term than folksong,
this consenting and cadenced series of words found its main refuge and
record. The subject is complicated enough, and asks a volume to put it
into any semblance of order; all that can be done here is to group the
main facts in their relation to primitive poetry. Unless one holds fast
to the idea that refrains represent the original choral song of the
mass, one begins to explain them by their modern features, and thus,
while accurate as to a certain stage of poetry, falls into error on the
historic and genetic side. Ferdinand Wolf[788] gives an admirable
account of the refrain, an admirable definition, but with a wrong
inference of origins, when he assigns it to the participation of the
people or of the congregation in songs which were sung to them by one or
more persons on festal occasions, where the throng repeated in chorus
single words, verses, whole strophes, or else in pauses of the main song
answered the singer with a repeated shout to express their agreement,
applause, horror, joy, or grief,—a shout which often lost its real
meaning and became a mere conventional choral cry. Hence, says Wolf, it
is clear that the refrain is as old as songs of the people.[789] It has
been said that this statement is misleading in any genetic sense; it
fails to note the growth of the exarch or foresinger into the poet, and
to follow the backward curve of evolution to a point where the voice of
the foresinger is lost in the voices of the choral throng itself, that
raw material from which all poetry has been made. On the other hand,
this definition undoubtedly states the facts of the refrain in its
mediæval stage of survival from the chorus. In ballads, for example, it
is the part taken by the throng in distinction from the part of the
minstrel; but there is great difficulty in deciding how the throng
actually sang the refrain. Names are no guide; and the terms, chorus,
refrain, and burden are used in no exclusive fashion.[790] Probably one
will not stray far from facts if one assumes that whenever a ballad came
to be sung artistically, as a part-song in the rough, the
refrain—_hey-no-nonny, the wind and the rain_, or what not—was really a
burden, “the base, foot, or under-song”;[791] as is proved by the scene
in _Much Ado_,[792] where no man is in the group to sing this base or
foot, and Margaret, wishing a song to which they can dance, cries,—“Clap
us into _Light o’ Love_; that goes without a burden: do you sing it, and
I’ll dance it.” A passage quoted by many writers from the old play, _The
Longer thou Livest the more Foole thou art_, tells how Moros enters,
“synging the foote of many songes”; and bits of them follow, an
interesting list; a little later, three of the characters are to “beare
the foote,” and there is much testing of the key. On the other hand, in
Jonson’s _Bartholomew Fair_,[793] there is the same play of getting key
and tune, and Cokes “sings the burden” with Nightingale; but this is
simply a couplet recurring at the end of each stanza. So Guest[794]
defines the burden as “the return of the same words at the close of each
stave.” Is this right? For what one most wishes to know, so far as the
singing of ballads is concerned, is whether the refrain, constant or
intermittent, was sung as the “foot,” that is, contemporaneously with
the regular lines, or after them, either as couplet or in
alternation,—as in—[795]

It was a knight in Scotland borne,
_Follow, my love, come over the strand_,
Was taken prisoner and left forlorne
_Even by the good Earle of Northumberland_.

Here the fitness of things indicates intermittent singing of the refrain
which thus makes a four-line stanza out of a two-line stanza; this is
Rosenberg’s theory of the evolution of a ballad strophe.[796] Certainly
the refrain came to be used in artistic and late communal poetry to mark
off the stanza as the rime marked off the verse. What we now call a
chorus, a recurrent stanza, sung after each new stanza, is often a clear
case in ballads; for example, in _The Twa Magicians_,[797] that
provocative and tuneful cadence of—

O bide, lady, bide,
And aye he bade her bide;
The rusty smith your leman shall be
For a’ your muckle pride.

But there is doubt in regard to the refrain when it is said to be sung
as burden, or what Grundtvig calls burden-stem; although there is no
doubt that refrains were taken from folksong and chorus and were used as
burdens in the ballad.[798] Even the song of labour is used for the
refrain:[799]—

Hey with a gay and a grinding, O!

distorted into—

Hey with the gay and the grandeur, O!

The question, as Professor Child acknowledged, is extraordinarily
difficult even when narrowed down to ballads. It is discussed at length
in an unpublished dissertation by the late Dr. J. H. Boynton, who
decides for the simultaneous singing of the ballad strophe and the
refrain,[800] and incidentally for the growth of a four-line strophe out
of the early strophe of two lines. Icelandic and Faroe ballads show the
most archaic elements in the Germanic group, and “a large proportion of
their refrains deal directly with the dance.” The “stem” is sung first
by the leader of the dance, and is a “lyric in itself,” fit to go “with
any ballad.” Now it is clear that whether the ballad and the burden were
sung simultaneously, as Boynton believes to have been the case, or
alternately, as certain English ballads seem to require, and as Guest
assumed in his definition, this question of musical technique cannot
affect the inference that the burden, a “lyric in itself” which serves
as refrain, is older than the ballad or narrative song, and has most
intimate relations with the steps of the dance. In other words, here is
the refrain in its passage from a dominant place as choral repetition of
the throng, timed to their steps and deriving its existence from these
steps and from the expression of festal delight that prompted them, to
an ancillary and subordinate place as choral support to the artistic
progress of a narrative in song. This agrees with the records of
communal song not only under savage conditions but among the homogeneous
and unlettered communities of Europe. Neocorus,[801] a priest who writes
about the beginning of the seventeenth century, defending that
unschooled song which he still heard at the dances and festivities of
his countryfolk of the Cimbrian peninsula, and which still flowed so
easily, although much of it was lost that ought to have been recorded
and sung, describes their communal dance; it is in a fairly advanced
stage, of course, and is led by an expert. First, this leader comes
forward singing alone, or with a colleague, and begins a ballad. “And
when he has sung a verse, he sings no further, but the whole throng, who
either know the ballad or else have paid close attention to him, repeat
and echo the same verse. And when they have brought it to the point
where the leader stopped, he begins again and sings another verse.” This
is again repeated. Presently, with the singing thus under way, a leader
of the dance comes forward, hat in hand, dances about the room, and
invites the whole assembly to join. Facts which have been given already,
and facts still to be considered, show clearly that these leaders of
song and of dance are deputies of the throng which once danced as a mass
to its own choral singing. On the other hand, as Boynton noted,
repetition and refrain may take the form of a genuine burden. In
Icelandic ballads, the “burden-stem” was often in a different metre from
the ballad stanza; it was sung “to support the voice by harmonious notes
under the melody,” and “was heard separately only when the voices
singing the air stopped.”[802] But in the Faroe isles “the whole stem is
sung first, and then repeated as a burden at the end of every verse.”
This is certainly more natural than the process, known in Iceland, where
a leader sings the incremental stanzas and the throng keeps singing the
burden or accompaniment; although a very familiar ballad might so be
sung, and the fact would of course indicate either a shifting of
interest toward purely musical ends, as in Elizabethan England, or else
a devotion on the part of the crowd to the dance proper and the refrain,
while the narrative is left to the leader of the song.[803]

Apart from the manner of singing it under later conditions, the refrain
in itself, so far as ballads are concerned, is clearly the recurrent
verse or verses sung by the festal crowd; and the nearer one comes to
the source of a ballad, that is, to the dancing throng, the more
insistent and pervasive and dominant this refrain becomes. That is the
fact which nobody has ever denied. Jeanroy,[804] in a careful discussion
of origins, concludes that refrains are really fragments of song for the
dance, now and then, as he hints, of songs of labour; he regards them
solely in their function as lines sung at the end of a stanza, and like
other scholars thinks they were “originally repeated by the chorus in
answer to the soloist.”[805] Elsewhere, however, he grants that this
need not have been the universal fashion, and that now and then all the
dancers may have sung all the song,[806] a theory fortified by his
conjecture that the refrain was once made up of imitative sounds.
However, the modern refrain of the dance, best preserved among French
and Italians, is a lively lilting couplet, or the like, to which the
other riming verses are prefixed in the growth of the actual song, as in
the stanzas quoted from Bujeaud:—

Là haut, dessus ces rochettes,
J’entend le haut-bois jouer,
Et vous autr’, jeunes fillettes,
Qui allez au bal danser,
_Allez, allez, tenez vous dreites,
Prenez gard’ de n’ pas tomber_.

The transition is very evident. In another case[807] the leader calls on
the dancers to make some cry imitative of animals, which now serves as
refrain; but, wherever found, the test of a really popular refrain, as
Jeanroy insists, is that it was made for the dance. Read “in the dance,”
and communal conditions are even better satisfied.

For the ballad is a song made in the dance, and so by the dance; a mass
of those older dance-songs which have come down to us as popular, are
later development, are of either aristocratic or learned origin, and
simply point back to the communal dance which is the real source of the
song. Originally a chorus of all the dancers, it gave vent to the
feelings of joy,—in the old _vocero_ dance, of grief,—to the common
emotion of the throng. An impulse which makes for this song of the dance
is simple delight that the season of dancing is begun:—

A l’entrada del tems clar, _eya_;[808]

and so one may trace these invocations of nature to their later form at
the beginning of a narrative song like _Robin Hood and the Monk_. This
dancing of the round as an expression of feeling on the part of a
throng—dancing in pairs, we know, did not reach Neocorus’s country, for
example, until the middle of the sixteenth century—meets one everywhere
in mediæval records, and it has died a reluctant death; unless
observation be at fault, even children are ceasing to play the old round
games common not many years ago, a city of refuge that seemed at one
time so secure. But in those mediæval days one danced in throngs on
almost any occasion; and impossible as the story may be if taken
literally, there is truth enough for our purpose in that account[809] of
Leicester’s army in 1173 pausing on a heath, where they “fell to daunce
and singe—

“Hoppe, Wylikin, hoppe Wyllikin,
Ingland is thine and mine.”

Many of the folksongs go little beyond this stage of an exhortation to
dance, along with a brief comment on the posture of affairs or on the
scene. Such an exhortation as refrain for the dance occurs in the old
play of the _Four Elements_, with an interesting context. Says
Ignorance—

I can you thank; that is done well;
It is pity ye had not a minstrel
For to augment your solace.

and Sensual Desire replies:—

As for minstrel, it maketh no force,[810]
Ye shall see me dance a course
Without a minstrel.

Then he singeth this song and danceth withal, and evermore maketh
countenance according to the matter; and all the others answer
likewise:—

Dance we, dance we, prance we, prance we.

Ignorance says it “is the best dance without a pipe he has seen this
seven year.” But Humanity inclines to think “a kit or taboret” would
improve the dance; and the dancers retire to a tavern where they are
sure “of one or twain of minstrels that can well play.” Humanity now
proposes “to sing some lusty ballad”; but Ignorance is against all such
“peevish prick-ear’d song,” and when he is told that prick-song in
church pleases God, makes the often-quoted reply that there is no good
reason why it is “not as good to say plainly _Give me a spade_, as _Give
me a spa, ve, va, ve, va, vade_.” No; if a song is wanted, one of the
good old sort will do; and there follows a list not unlike that of Moros
in the play or that of Laneham in the letter, with the trifling
exception that this runs into a helpless sort of burlesque. “Robin Hood
in Barnsdale stood” is probably a genuine first line, and so are some of
the other titles. The main thing is that ballad singing is opposed to
prick-song and the new fashions generally, and that a refrain from all
lusty throats is better for the dance than pipe or minstrel. The refrain
in this case is just the old exhortation to dance. This exhortation is
common enough in folksong, alone or as a refrain:[811]—

Springe wir den reigen ...
Saute, blonde, ma joli’ blonde ...

but a pure and simple description of the matter in hand, as communal,
spontaneous, and immediate an expression in song as may be, and tied to
steps of the dance by the shortest of tethers, is doubtless to be found
in the game where a circle of children dance round one of their
companions in the ring to this refrain:[812]—

Here we go the jingo-ring,
The jingo-ring, the jingo-ring,
Here we go the jingo-ring
About the merry-ma-tanzie.

Let this be a survival of a wedding ceremony, or whatever the learned
will, the refrain, sung with each stanza, and suited of course to the
action, is typical of the earliest choral stage.[813] Now so soon as
narrative takes the place of this description of contemporary and common
action, this exhortation of all to all to do something which they are
all doing, then memory, deliberation, arrangement, are needed, and an
artist comes to the fore. When a ballad records some doing of the folk,
when the epic element takes upper hand, it is clear that a process of
separation is inevitable. A ballad of this sort may long remain as
favourite song for the communal dance. Thus a lively little thing, found
in Flanders and in Germany,[814] is of particular interest, first for
the narrative which is the old satire on monk and nun, so popular in
mediæval times; secondly for the refrain, which is nothing less than a
dance about the maypole, keeping the song itself in some places for this
festivity; and thirdly for the wandering of the ballad as a whole, from
the fifteenth century down to its modern refuge in a children’s game:—

A monk went walking along the strand,—
Hey! ’twas in the May!
He took his sweetheart[815] by the hand,—
Hey! ’twas in the May!
So gay!
Hey! ’twas in the May!

Here the dance has held its own with the story; but in most cases, as
the foresinger or exarch takes command, the new verses, beginning as
incremental repetition in the dance, grow bolder and learn to walk
alone; singing is still a condition, but the dance is only an occasion,
not a cause; and finally the crowd passes over the bridge of chorus and
refrain into a quite passive state of audience, with intermittent echo
and applause, utterly disappearing at last behind the sheets of a
broadside.

This, of course, is a conclusion at very long range; and there is an
extensive period, a large field, where elements of art mingled freely
with the old communal motive. For a single example, take the _Bouquet de
Marjolaine_.[816] This is a case of incremental repetition, with the
same rimes throughout, and an unvaried refrain or chorus which is
knitted to each stanza by this pervading rime. The third line of each
stanza forms the opening line of the next stanza, so that the story
proceeds slowly but surely to the end. The whole can be gathered from
one stanza and its refrain, with addition of the following incremental
lines:—

Me promenant dans la plaine,
(Tir’ ton joli bas de laine)
J’ai trouvé un Capitaine.
(Tir’ ton, tir’ ton, tir’ ton bas,
Tir’ ton joli bas de laine,
Car on le verra.)

Then, “il m’a appelé’ vilaine”; “je ne suis point si vilaine;” “le plus
jeun’ fils du roi m’aime;” “il m’a donné pour étrenne”—“une bourse
d’écus pleine,” “un bouquet de marjolaine;” “je l’ai planté dans la
plaine;”—and, for good last, and with that touch of pathos common in
these things, despite the gay tone, “s’il fleurit, je serai reine”; and
so, with the refrain, an end. Full of communal elements, this song is
nevertheless of an artistic type and of an aristocratic origin, an
offshot of the _pastourelle_ and its kin; popular enough, of a certain
simplicity and beauty, it is not directly communal in its tone; it has
gone among the people, and yet, though it was imitated from purely
communal refrains, like other and older songs treated so successfully by
Jeanroy, it has not come directly from the people. In fact, the communal
refrain of the dance is seldom in such independent case as this
infectious lilt; when it is not a survival, as in children’s games, its
best chance for life is as parasite to a narrative ballad or even to a
“lyric of sentiment and reflection,” as anthologies call them. Thus Ten
Brink is undoubtedly right when he takes the refrain as old,
traditional, communal, and the stanzas as new and artistic, in that
pretty English lyric, _Ichot a burde in boure bryht_, which has the
refrain at the beginning, as in many Provençal ballads:—

Blow, northern wind,
Send thou me my sweeting!
Blow, northern wind, blow, blow, blow!

Compare this with the artistic refrain of _Alisoun_, from which it
differs so widely, and with the refrain of the Cuckoo Song, in its
recorded form part of an elaborate composition, but doubtless taken from
the “nature” refrain of a dance. The ballads and folksongs of Europe are
of course in the transitional stage. They ought to be sung, but many of
them may have been recited; they echo the cadence of a dancing throng,
and have often timed the dance, though they are separable from such
company. It must be borne in mind, however, that many ballads in which
one would not now suspect such uses, were employed to regulate the slow
steps of a dance. Narrative ballads were in great favour for the
purpose; Faroe islanders danced to the stories of Sigurd, and the
Russians, whose folksongs are always choral and without instrumental
music, dance the _khorovod_ to a narrative song,—in fact, the word means
a blended song and dance; while even the Robin Hood ballads, if we may
believe the _Complaynt of Scotland_, as well as some ballad of Johnny
Armstrong, were sung at the dance of the shepherds. Savages sing
narrative poems to the dance, and so do Melanesians.[817] One can
therefore understand the statement made by Steenstrup,[818] that every
genuine ballad has a refrain, though this may not be recorded; for the
refrain is the tie which binds a ballad to its parent dance. As one
retraces the path of the ballad, the refrain grows in importance, slowly
pushing the leader or soloist nearer and nearer to the throng, until he
is lost in it; and a repetition of cadenced choral cries becomes the
main factor of poetry. As every one knows, those cadenced cries were
regulated by the dance; and to this important factor in early poetry,
already considered under the head of rhythm, we must now turn.

Dancing, most momentary of all the arts, as A. W. Schlegel called it, in
Wagner’s words “the most real,” seeing that the whole man is concerned
in it, “from head to foot,” with motions and gestures that give it tone,
and rhythm that gives it speech,[819] was also the primitive and
universal art, the sign of social consent; consenting steps, with
mimicry of whatever sort, timed a series of rude cries which expressed
the emotion of the moment, and so grew into articulate language. But the
song detached itself from dancing long before dancing could shake off
the choral cries and the refrain. Among Tasmanians and Australians songs
already existed apart from the dance; but there was no dance without a
song, and the dances were prevailingly of the whole horde or clan.
Survivals of this primitive stage, and the early history of dancing in
all quarters of the world, afford good warrant for the conclusion of
Böhme;[820] “no dance without singing, and no song without a dance,” is
his axiom for earliest times. Moreover, this proof of the connection of
song and dance in the primitive horde, a bond which one or two writers
have lately tried to sever, but without success, disposes of Mr. Herbert
Spencer’s attempt[821] to explain the dance as a modification of the old
movement of obeisance.

Dancing is universal among savages; and if a few cases occur which make
against this doctrine, one may safely assume, as Ribot does, and even
Wallaschek,[822] that they are due to insufficient observation,[823] or
else, at the worst, that they belong to tribes with hardly any claims of
humanity, degenerates, retrogrades, who have no social order and
consequently no dance. Again, the primitive form of the dance is to be
found in the choral throng; but it must be borne in mind that even
rudest tribes can develop an art of complicated, traditional, and ritual
character,[824] which in its turn breeds the solo and the professional
artist in dancing. However, the choral dies hard even under civilized
conditions; among savages it is prominent everywhere and in full vigour.
Waitz,[825] speaking of tribes in the South Seas, says that song there
is mainly choral, and dancing, affair of the community as a whole, is as
universal as song, often passing into mimicry and a rude drama.
Everywhere, too, song is accompanied by dancing, and when women thus
dance and sing they clap hands or slap the hip in time with their steps
and words, after the manner of their sisters in mediæval Europe. Musical
instruments are few. Chamisso noted now and then what he took to be
degeneration of song into mere howling; but we know there is a more
excellent way to explain these festal and cadenced cries. Dancing is in
order at each important moment for the community,—when strangers arrive,
when war is imminent, at feasts of every sort. As with these natives of
the South Sea, so with other and more savage tribes. It is useless to
insist in detail upon the African love of dancing, which goes on every
evening and in every village for hours at a time. “The natives of Obbo
began their dance by all singing together a wild but pleasant-sounding
melody in chorus,[826]” is only one of many descriptions of this
favourite communal diversion; but the legends and the complicated
artistic dances which exist side by side with the choral song and the
communal dance warn one that while primitive ways survive on the Dark
Continent, there is a lower stage of song and dance to be found
elsewhere. Like the Botocudos in South America, the Australians are on a
quite elementary level with regard to dance and song; they attach more
importance to the gesture than to the articulate word, so far as the
telling of stories or the describing of events is concerned, and they
know scarcely any individual performance.[827] Dance and song are of the
horde, the clan, as a whole. Choral shouts, refrains which repeat a word
or a short phrase indefinitely, and so time the steps of the throng,
make the original social art; with the aid of gesture, mimicry of
labour, of feats of hunting, this passes into kangaroo-dances, erotic
pantomimes, sham fights, and all the rest. Perhaps, as Hirn[828]
suggests, the dance of the Weddas, or Veddahs, in Ceylon is as primitive
as anything of the kind; although Ehrenreich’s account of the
Botocudos[829] shows little if any advance. A spear is stuck into the
ground to serve as centre for the ring of dancers, who move with swaying
of legs and arms to the cadence of their own singing,—call it rather
shouting,—while they keep exact time by slapping the naked stomach.[830]
From this communal dance and song, emerges after a while, as in the case
of the Botocudos, an individual performer; and it is clear that
elaborate dances, such as those given for the benefit of Captain Cook
and other foreign visitors, are an outgrowth of this primitive huddling
in mass with concert of cries and movements. It is significant that
instinct of the clan calls for some concerted dance and song as
necessary preface for war or any similar doing of the community as a
whole; in long range of development this is the war-dance of our own
Indians, often described, where a general chorus serves as background
and stimulus alike to the volunteers who step forward singly and
promise, in chanted and improvised song that times their steps, deeds of
individual valour in the impending fight. So, perhaps, the _gab_ of
romance, the _gilp_ or _gilpewide_[831] of Germanic warriors, was
originally made not only, as we know it, in the mead hall, but to the
chorus of the tribes and with the steps of a dance. At close range,
however, and with the foe in sight, it was a communal and general gab, a
choral performance; witness the interesting account of Captain
Cook.[832] In the first voyage, some four hundred islanders, about to
attack the captain and his friends, but hesitating, at length “sung the
song of defiance and began to dance.” Such was a particular case; and in
his general statement, Cook says that New Zealanders, before they begin
the onset, “join in a war-song, to which they all keep the exactest
time”; and while he does not mention the dance here, it is evidently
implied, for his scattered accounts of skirmish and fight are full of
it. A curious case is what would seem to be a war-dance in a boat which
was attacking Cook’s ship; as it approached, the savages in the boat
varied menaces with peaceful talk, “till, imagining the sailors were
afraid of them, they began the war-song and dance, and threw stones on
board the ship.” Then Cook goes on: “In the war-dance their motions are
numerous, their limbs are distorted ... they shake their darts, brandish
their spears ... they accompany this dance with a song, which is sung in
concert; every strain ending with a loud and deep sigh. There is an
activity and vigour in their dancing which is truly admirable; and their
idea of keeping time is such that sixty or eighty paddles will strike at
once against the sides of their boats, and make only one report.”
Concerted singing, this communal initiative, goes not only before war,
but before embassies, messages of peace, greetings, and the like; and
the dance is clearly an original prop of this song, now and then
retained, but often omitted. In Cook’s last voyage,[833] “a double
canoe, in which were twelve men, came towards us. As they drew near the
ship, they recited some words in concert, by way of chorus, one of the
number first standing up and giving the word before each repetition,”—a
“solemn chant,” Cook calls it. Readers of these and other voyages in the
South Seas, know how singing rather than speaking takes the foreground
of private as well as of tribal life; a chief coming on board the ship
hails it with a song to explain his visit, and there is the case of the
islander who told in song his story of life aboard an English ship, and,
asking the native who had met him what news there was from home, put his
excited questions in rhythm and got the equally excited answers in rapid
chant. Behind this individual song is the chorus; with the chorus is
nearly always the dance; wherever the dance, there is song. Musical
instruments the islanders knew, of course,—drums, perhaps, best; but as
Cook says[834] of a great dance which was given for him, it did not seem
“that the dancers were much assisted by these sounds, _but by a chorus
of vocal music, in which all the performers joined at the same time_.”

Indians of the Western continent have the same tale to tell, and it has
been told in part already by Lery, Lafitau, and the older travellers. A
century and more ago, Carver[835] noted that the savages of North
America “usually dance either before or after every meal”;[836] and
“they never meet on any public occasion, but this makes a part of the
entertainment.... The youth of both sexes amuse themselves in this
manner every evening.” At the feasts and other dances, “every man rises
in his turn, and moves about with great freedom and boldness, singing,
as he does so, the exploits of his ancestors. During this the company,
who are seated on the ground in a circle, join with him in making the
cadence, by an odd tone, which they utter all together, and which sounds
‘_Heh, heh, heh_.’” This they repeat “with the same violence during the
whole of the entertainment.” “The women dance without taking any steps
... but with their feet conjoined, moving by turns their toes and
heels.... Let those who join in the dance be ever so numerous, they keep
time so exactly with each other that no interruption ensues.”

In recent times the intricate dances, ritual and ceremony which, of
course, reach back in far tradition, have been studied and recorded; but
this is not a primitive phase of the art,[837] and even among the Moqui
and Navajo tribes of New Mexico, where instrumental music is common, now
and then the dancers furnish their own music, each one rolling out “an
_aw, aw, aw, aw_, in a deep bass tone.”[838] So in ancient Mexico, where
civilization of a sort had long held sway, the dances “were almost
always accompanied by singing”; this, however, was “adjusted by the
beating of instruments.”[839] But this public dance is no longer
communal in the old way; ritual of the clan becomes a state religion,
while dance and song are not only lifted but expanded. There is a sense
of ritual, to be sure, about the dance of a small community, as when
among the Bechuanas, to ask a man “what he dances,” is the same as
asking to what clan or tribe he belongs, a phrase curiously akin to
Gosson’s remark[840] that “to daunce the same round” means to be of the
same flock. But all this belongs only to the primitive horde or the late
homogeneous community; the dance of such a little clan about their
growing crops yielded to traditional and solemn rites, and the
spontaneous singing and dancing which Vergil recommends to his
farmers[841] is really a more primitive stage of the art than the
seemingly older ceremony of the Arval brothers, which had already
hardened into ritual and belonged to a close corporation under control
of the state. Tribal dances become expiatory and religious acts at a
very early stage of culture; it is easy to see that the records would
preserve such a dance only when it had lost some of its spontaneous
character, and taken on a ritual form. Germanic, Slavic, and Romance
peoples have the communal dance surviving as a religious act; and it was
one of the hardest tasks for councils and bishops to stop this dancing
of the congregation within the church itself. Often they allowed it in a
modified form. As a part of ritual, choristers still dance before the
altar of the cathedral at Seville; sixteen boys in blue and white form
“in two eights,” facing each other, and the priests kneel in a
semi-circle round them. Then “an unseen orchestra” begins to play, the
boys put on their hats and sing the _coplas_ in honour of the Virgin:—

O mi, O mi amada
Immaculada!—

“to a dance measure.” After this they begin to dance, “still singing,” a
“kind of solemn minuet.”[842] This is done at the feast of the
Immaculate Conception. In the sixteenth century boys and girls danced
about an image of Christ set upon the altar of German churches, singing
Christmas songs, while their parents stood by, also singing and clapping
their hands in time with the dance.[843] From these good folk to the
German barbarians “running in a circle” round the goat’s head and
“singing diabolical songs,” as seen and heard by Gregory,[844] is no
long step backward in development if it is in chronology. When the
children were at last driven from the churches, and when the old
ring-dance was at last forgotten by their elders, even in the fields and
about the fires of St. John’s Eve, the little ones made a brave rescue
and kept up the ritual in their games. Now even these are vanishing.
Outside of Europe, sacred and even national dances of the throng go this
same path of development and decline. The Hebrew communal dance passed
into traditional forms;[845] and there are other dances, outside of
religious cult, which acquire a fixed form and are passed down as of
tribal and even national significance. One thinks of the Pyrrhic
dance;[846] indeed, a study of the sword-dance in all its varieties, and
from this double point of view, communal and national, would be of great
interest. Savages, as Donovan remarked, imitate in their dancing now the
movement of animals, now the clash of arms in war, and again, though not
to the extent asserted by Scherer, erotic gestures.[847] For the second
sort, a gymnastic motive, the sense of preparation and drill for future
fighting, and a festal or reminiscential motive, combine to produce such
an exercise as the sword-dance, a convenient name for this group,
although the sword itself is not always in evidence. Chronology is here
of no account; for earliest records may show a well-defined and almost
national exercise such as Tacitus noted among the Germans, and very late
examples can be found of the purely communal sword-dance, with flyting,
songs, refrain, and rustic acting, as in the Revesby Sword Play;[848]
while Xenophon tells of a little drama, enacted by soldiers of the ten
thousand, combining the weapon dance, the imitated fight, and other
elements, in terms which could be matched by many an account given by
traveller or missionary of a similar affair among quite savage
tribes.[849] It is easy to see how one of the many paths from this dance
of mimicry, exercise, and rhythmic shouting, would lead to the narrative
song or ballad, and how such a ballad would long cleave to a particular
traditional dance. The Phæacians have a narrative song sung to them as
they are dancing, and when two dance alone, tossing the ball,[850] “the
other youths ... beat time”; but an older and more communal habit is
found in the dances of the Faroe islanders, where the gestures and
expression of face show how keenly the folk feel what they sing;[851] in
the Icelandic _rimur_, narrative songs which went with the dance; on the
Cimbrian peninsula, where ballads about the battle of Hemmingstede were
used for the same purpose; in scattered rural communities[852] of
Europe; and among savage tribes the world over. It has been made clear
to probation how the narrative ballad grew out of a tribal or communal
dance; and it is equally clear that there was an even shorter path from
dance to drama.[853]

From this point of view, it is easy to understand why the dance plays
such a part in the beginning of nearly every national literature, not
only in the Dionysian origins of Greek drama, but in less obvious ways.
The same ecstasy, indeed, appears again and again in a kind of panic
dance; in the summer of 1374 along the Rhine and in the Netherlands, and
again in 1418 at Strassburg, communal excitement went quite mad in the
St. John’s or the St. Vitus’s dance, vast crowds of men and women
leaping and shouting, garlanded, singing, as they reeled, a refrain
which might belong to the usual dances of St. John’s Eve:—

Here Sent Johan, so, so,
Vrisch ind vro,
Here Sent Johan!

until they fell exhausted, but still raving.[854] These panic dances
reproduce in some features the mad dance of mænads and all that “wild
religious excitement,” that “Bacchic ecstasy,” which lay behind the
Hellenic drama, and anticipate as mad a dance of as wild an ecstasy,
though not religious, when the mob of Paris dances the _carmagnole_ to
its own singing; but all this belongs to the pathological side of the
case, and one turns to the harvest-field, and to the village oak, where
merry dances often set a rhythm heard in later and nobler verse. Not
long ago, poetry of every kind was thought to start in some religious
rite, and a god or goddess lay hid under the most harmless rime of the
yokel; of late, however, a wholesome tendency has prevailed to stop the
search of sky and storm-cloud and other far-away haunts for an
explanation of the rustic dance and of the rustic refrain. On one hand,
the chase, war, whatever concerned the routine of nomadic life, and on
the other hand, among agricultural folk, the round of seedtime and
harvest, days of plenty or of want, and in both cases, the common joys
and sorrows of mankind, are now thought to be a better reason for
communal dance and song. Primitive man did not go about with his eyes
fixed upon the heavens; and it is not the goddess of spring and sunshine
transferred to those harvested crops as signs of her presence which
explains a Nerthus or a Ceres, but rather a slow inference from local
delight in harvest up to a great feast of gathered and related tribes,
involving wider ideas of divinity and arriving by easy stages at the
abstraction of one beneficent deity sending out her largess of sun and
quickening showers. The dance, then, with nomadic tribes was a triumph,
an outburst of communal elation, dealing in its mimicry with scenes of
the war or hunt, and cadenced by shout and song that echoed a clash of
arms; with the agricultural community it was a harvest-home, with
recapitulation of the rural year, imitated acts of sowing, planting,
watching, reaping, storing, which survive in some sort to this day. In
both kinds of life, nomadic and agricultural, the dance was an essential
part of such rites as the wedding and the funeral, and is still
considered in this way by peasants in remoter Europe. Thus in Dalmatia
and Montenegro,[855] the _kollo_, that is, circle, “the figure of all
their dances, though the steps differ,” is danced at weddings. “Twelve
or thirteen women ... danced in a circle, singing a slow and rather
plaintive song ... while waiting for the bride.... In the meantime, the
men ... walked in procession to the court before the church door, and
danced in a circle.” Evidence of this sort is everywhere; it has been
studied under the refrain; but the festal idea may be repeated here in
comment on the meaning of our old English word and suffix _lâc_, and the
related Gothic _laiks_,[856] German _leich_, originally the combination
of word, song, and dance—or march—in one communal act,[857] with an easy
transition into the idea of battle, the “play of spears,” where, indeed,
this communal act always served as prelude, as well as into the idea of
feast, ceremony, merriment. A festal song and dance after the fight,
easily turned into ritual and thanksgiving to the gods, but once mere
fighting the battle over again, was called in Norse the
_sigrleikr_.[858] Further philology would not be in place; enough that
the earliest songs and poetry of Europe appear everywhere hand in hand
with the dance,[859] and that this dance is partly the triumph of
victorious war, partly a triumph of peace and plenty, always, however, a
festal and communal affair.

In considering this communal dance of Europe, one finds that it is
practically inseparable from song, and the song is mainly sung by those
who dance. In modern Greece, even, Fauriel[860] found that “every new
dance was the result of a new song, of which it formed the mimicry; it
was never danced without this song, and fell with it into oblivion.” A
study of the refrain showed how close this bond between song and dance
must have been; and one sees how slowly and reluctantly the separation
takes place, most reluctantly, of course, in the games of children. It
must also be borne in mind that dancing by pairs is of comparatively
recent date; Neocorus, one will remember, says it was unknown among his
peasant neighbours between the German ocean and the Baltic until the
middle of the sixteenth century, while Bladé makes this way of dancing a
stranger to the Gascon countryfolk as late as seventy years ago. What
they knew and practised was the old round, danced once to the songs of
the dancers, but now dominated more and more by instruments;[861] the
song, when used, is led by a soloist who improvises a line or so which
is repeated by the dancers in chorus, with a refrain for all stanzas.
This round, of course, is the _carole_[862] of Romance literature, known
later as the _branle_, a dance or march of many, hand in hand, with
chorus or refrain to time the steps;[863] it was the main amusement of
aristocratic folk, but derived directly from popular usage. Such an
aristocratic dance is described in the _Romaunt of the Rose_.[864] Dante
refers[865] to the practise of singing with the dance; and if we had his
chapter on the _ballata_, we should have riches. On the dance-song of
these Romance nations, and its absolutely communal origin, enough has
been quoted already from such authors as Wolf and Jeanroy; and it would
be waste of time to heap up evidence of the English ballad[866] as it
was danced in Elizabethan fields, and when the youth went out to “mix
their songs and dances in the wood.” Dances of this sort we have already
noted not only among shepherds, but in the Elizabethan theatre; besides
the refrains of labour and merriment to which the actors danced, ballads
were in demand. A good instance is in the old play of _Like Wil to
Like_,[867] where Nichol Newfangle, the Devil, and Tom Collier are on
the stage. Says Nichol,—

Godfather, wilt thou daunce a little before ye go home to hell?...
Then, godfather, name what the daunce shall be.

“Tom Coliar of Croydon hath solde his cole.”

Why, then, haue at it by my father’s soule.

[Nichol Newfangle must have a gittorn or some other instrument (if it
may bee), but if hee haue not, they must daunce about the place all
three, and sing this song that followeth, which must bee doon also
althoug they haue an instrumenth.]

And the song follows. Jigs were songs, largely improvised, and sung by
actors as they danced; they came after the play.[868] It was the fiddle,
says Mr. Baring-Gould,[869] “which banished the ballad as a
song-accompaniment to a dance. Nevertheless, as a very aged fiddler told
me ... in his early days the lads and maids always sang whilst dancing
to his music.” On the stage this substitution was more immediate and
thorough; so that in the days of George II, when Nancy Dawson “produced
the novelty of singing as she danced,” she took the town by storm;
though one may conjecture that it was the survival, not the
“novelty,”[870] in the case which thus aided her charm as a woman and
her grace as a dancer. For rural England, like rural Europe, showed
reluctance enough in giving up the good old way; a Scottish parson,
moreover, writing in 1793, tells of a large stone, set up in one of the
islands, about which he saw “fifty of the inhabitants” gathered on the
first day of the year, and “dancing in the moonlight” with no other
music than their own singing.[871] About such stones, but by preference
about the village linden,[872] folk danced to their own singing in
Germany down to modern times; and as the dance was an even movement in a
ring, the dancers hand in hand, it was quite possible for them to sing
the ballads which seem to us grotesquely unfit for the lively springing
of single performers as well as for the rapidly gliding couples.
Leaping, and livelier motions generally, followed the dance in a ring;
but it was to the latter that ballads were sung and in the first
instance composed.[873] The dances which go mainly to a refrain
represent of course an older stage than those which are danced to a
ballad, to a narrative song; the early dance knows only present action,
and exhorts or describes, as in the Flemish dances[874] now mainly
relegated to children.

As Mr. Thomas Hardy is so fond of reminding his readers, this is a
merry, dancing world no more; even youth can hardly make shift “to revel
in the general situation” as all men used to do. _Weltschmerz_ is to
blame, no doubt, and there is Mr. Baring-Gould’s fiddle, which has done
a deal of mischief. Rivals to the human voice, successful rivals, were
early at the dance,—harp, lyre, pipe, what not. South Sea islanders were
fain, not of these, but of the drum. With the dominant note of alien
music came a desire to break up the ring, to dance in pairs, or even to
listen and look on. Meddlesome bishops and officials of every sort were
bound to destroy this communal dance as a place of scandal; and we have
seen how the chimney and the clean, warm fireside and the lamp drew
sober folk from the village dances and left these to the baser element.
One can take quite seriously that petition[875] of the would-be peasant
to restore legal sanction to the village dance; and one is interested to
hear the petitioner complain that it is the violin now where once was
the bagpipe,—and once, too, he might have added, the echoing refrain.
No, the dance as well as the dancing song, the ballad proper, is going
out of date;[876] and not only the dance in this communal and social
meaning, but the very fact of rhythm, which is the soul of the dance.
Children play these games less and less, although the kindergarten makes
some stand in the matter; and even in music, as Bücher[877] points out
in those pages to which we have so often referred, teachers and artists
are fain to give rhythm an ancillary place and put melody, harmony, in
the foreground. One feels little displeasure, says Bücher, at the sight
of unrhythmic movements; and what would be said of an orator who, like
his Athenian brother, should address a political assembly as his “fellow
dancers”? But the decline set in early; even in Sir Thomas Elyot’s
day,[878] dancing is “that exercise whiche of the more parte of sadde
men”—serious folk, that is—“is so litle estimed.” So, too, in imperial
Rome. When the Romans hired mimes to dance for them, some lover of the
old ways might have said of the communal dance, expression of social
union and social equality and the strong, compact state, what the stern
old orator said of his profession when he first heard hired applause in
the courts of law: _centumviri, hoc artificium periit_,—“judges, oratory
is doomed!” In both cases one is dealing with the decline of communal
force and the growth of individual power.

Our business, however, is with the past. It is clear that movements of
labour, particularly in a reminiscent festal act, and movements of the
communal dance, furnished the raw material of poetry. In all cases the
primitive dance, or what seems to come nearest to that state of the art,
is a dance of masses of men for one purpose and to one exact
rhythm.[879] Equal sets of movements gave the verse, and sets of these
sets gave in time the strophe. Communal interest, resulting in the
communal expression, added contents to form; and shout, movement,
cadence, are all born of this absolutely social and communal impulse. To
use the good old word, here is the poetry of nature; facing this
communal material, what are we to say of the changes wrought upon it by
individual art?[880]

CHAPTER VI

SCIENCE AND COMMUNAL POETRY

We have Dr. Johnson’s word for it that one does well “to see great works
in their seminal state, pregnant with latent possibilities of
excellence; nor could there be any more delightful entertainment than to
trace their gradual growth and expansion.” So science came to think; and
all the works of nature and of man have been treated in this spirit to
the convincing of sane minds everywhere, except in the domain of poetry.
There one still clings to a paradise and a perfect poet at the
start,—perfect, that is, because he had all the functions and privileges
and opportunities of the latter-day bard, and stood to his public as a
poet stands to the public of this age. A study of facts, records as well
as survivals, leads us to no such perfect primitive bard; at the end of
the path we see no dignified old gentleman in flowing robe, with a long
white beard, upturned eyes, and a harp clasped to his bosom, but rather
a ring of savages dancing uncouthly to the sound of their own voices in
a rhythmic but inharmonious chant. This, however, is only saying that
poetry, like all human institutions, like the earth itself, goes back to
rude and barren beginnings; and the lowest stratum of poetry to which
one can come either by sight or by inference is only what one ought to
expect from the doctrine of evolution, applicable in this case as in any
other case. With a sense not intended by Browning, “rock’s the song-soil
rather,” and even fossil signs of life are few. But it is precisely here
that Johnson’s unconscious praise of these studies should be borne in
mind. Not the bard come down from Olympus, with majesty in his mien and
the light of divine song shed about him, singing to his rapt hearers of
the deep things of life, is the nobler view: nobler by far is the sight
of those little groups gathered on the marches that lay between the old
beast and the new man, facing inexorable powers which had crushed out
life upon life before, and whole systems of life; dimly conscious of a
force that treads down the individual and dooms the solitary to defeat;
dimly conscious, too, of the resisting power that lies in coherence,
union, common front in a common cause; marshalled by the instinct of
kind into a tentative confederation of single resources; and so
beginning the long battle which humanity is still waging against foes
unseen as well as seen. The first cry of emotional consent along with
the consenting step, the cry that remembered a triumph found in
instinctive common action, and felt itself to be prophetic of a triumph
yet to come; this concerted step and shout which seemed the expression
of concerted purpose, of communal will, force, effectiveness, has more
in it even for the man of sentiment than can be found in any flight of
poetry in later time. But we are not seeking sentiment in the case; and
having come in this rude dance and song, so it would seem, to the
beginnings of poetry, we ask what was the beginning of this beginning.
If one must have a formula for the process, it need not be in those
intolerant terms of personal initiative and gregarious imitation upon
which M. Tarde insists so strenuously, but rather in the mild and quite
as scientific terms of consent, the consent of instinctive individual
gestures and sounds due to the perception by a group of human beings
that common action makes unity out of diversity. Art is of social
origin; that is the thesis of Guyau in his well-known book; and the
social sense precedes any relation of master and pupil, leader and
followers. It is overwhelmingly probable that rhythm, the simplest form
of social consent, was the earliest form of a discovery which made
social progress possible. Still, this probability must not be taken for
granted.

The question, like the democratic thought of a century and more ago, has
an outer and an inner circle.[881] For the latter, let us ask whether
poetry, queen of the arts, is an art in the sense of something invented
by the artist, not only in details, but in essence. The arts of life
belong to the artist; but is the artist anterior in every way to his
art? Is there no spontaneous, instinctive background? In the first
place, one must guard against a fallacy of terms. The invention of a
tool, for example, even though it be “organic projection,” is different
in kind from the invention of a poem, which, by the principles of
æsthetic, has no one practical end in view,—for theory, at least; in
reality, the inventor of a poem nowadays has a practical end in view,
the sale of his verse, and Scherer carried this commercial idea back to
the very origins, setting up a primitive literary market, with supply
and demand, poet and public, bargains, sales, entertainer and audience,
on the very tree-platform of our hairy ancestors. But Scherer fell into
absurdities. Gigadibs the literary man does not thrive in those regions;
and one cannot reduce the primitive choral to terms of artist,
invention, public, sale. If anything has been made clear in preceding
pages of this book, if anything can be made clear in the study of
improvisation about to follow, if there is any certain curve of
evolution in the course of poetry, it is that the passive element, the
audience, the receptive public, disappears inevitably as one recedes
from conditions of the present time, and that the throng as a productive
active body assumes more and more the functions now regarded as
belonging almost exclusively to the individual. Invention itself has
been reduced to a convenient absurdity, for this very article of rhythm,
by M. Kawczynski, in his essay on rhythmic origins.[882] Nobody denies
that an Alcæus may invent an Alcaic strophe,[883] that another master
may hit upon the elegiac couplet; but this vivacious essay declares that
rhythm itself was invented by some thoughtful benefactor of the race,
some genius of prehistoric times. A book published in the same year, the
_Æsthetics of Movement_, by M. Souriau,[884] had made temperate protest
against Mr. Herbert Spencer’s doctrine[885] of the universality of
rhythm in the realm of nature, and had asserted that rhythm, exceptional
in nature, is nevertheless “the constant law of muscular movements,” and
not the result of will. But this spontaneity of rhythm in the motion and
muscular exertion of man, this tendency in each of our motor organs “to
adopt a fixed rhythm which becomes its normal movement,” is precisely
what M. Kawczynski will not allow; he is bent upon banishing “the false
system of spontaneity” from its last place of refuge and will hound it
off the face of the earth. Not only was this or that dance invented,
this or that march and walk; dancing, marching, leaping, yes, walking,
are inventions all. This is very clear language of M. Kawczynski, but it
is a trifle too clear; one asks for a bill of particulars,—first for an
explanation of the inventive process, and secondly for an account of the
imitation; and here one meets difficulties. The individual mind plays
about general instincts, modifies them, develops them into a thousand
forms, precisely as it does with the raw material of nature. It invents
a dance as modification of the general instinct to dance; it invents the
steam-engine, but is not yet credited with inventing steam and iron. So
one easily understands the invention of a distinct song; but what of
singing? Or say of breathing? The Dogberry who says that these things
come by nature, and asks how they could come by art, is pained to find
the advocate of invention wrapping himself in a cloak of biological
mystery not unlike the theological garment donned, under similar
questions, by Jacob Grimm himself. We shall see that in the outer circle
this question is answered by M. Tarde with a reference to the cell;
ultimate individual invention is an affair of the individual cell; while
the process itself is a mystery, described only in the most modest and
euphemistic hints, and to stare at it would be the part of peeping Tom.
M. Kawczynski makes no effort to explain invention, but simply asserts
it; and although imitation is a clearer case, yet even here he says
things which are not good for the interests of his theory. He is safe so
long as he keeps to general terms and describes all literature as a
gigantic system of borrowings,—German from Roman, Roman from Greek,
Greek from Egyptian mayhap, and Egyptian from creditors unknown, all
imitation, with here and there a bit of invention going on decently
behind closed doors. But M. Kawczynski dares too much, and blunders in
the particular case. A witness should be taken from the box when he
tries to help his cause by making German Siegfried an imitated compound
of Jason, Achilles, and Perseus; by naming Otfried as the founder of
really Germanic literature; by making alliteration in Norse an imitation
of German, which got it from Anglo-Saxons, who got it from the Irish,
who got it from the Latin; and by calling Germanic verse itself an
imitation of the classic hexameter.[886] “Historic influences,” one is
told, “are stronger than the natural and proper gifts of any people”;
but are not natural and proper gifts themselves the strongest of
historic influences? This question is worth a glance by the way.

No one denies the great part played in poetry by imitation; but it is
not the only element in the case. True, it is the most obvious element.
Comparative literature, as a science, is young. The task put before its
followers was plain enough; they had first of all to sift the material,
to note where deep has called unto deep in the influence of one poet
upon another, as well as to follow the fortunes of a primitive bagman’s
jest carried on the old trading routes from land to land and starting up
at last as _conte_ or _schwank_ in a hundred scattered communities, in
cloister, school, and court. But this is not all, and the task is not
done even when one has struck the balance between the borrowings of a
poet and what one suffers to pass as his individual and original genius.
Abused as the terms have been, the genius of time, place, community, is
still a factor in the growth of any literature; and M. Gaston Paris, who
has done so much for the study of sources, is emphatic on this point. In
several passages, notably in a discussion of the method to be followed
in studying poetry of the people,[887] he sets a bound to the theory of
borrowings, and insists upon the common fund or “patrimony” of national
tradition. Steinthal, too, is not altogether negligible with his query;
why assume, he asks,[888] that because Europe imported so much, she must
have been herself sterile? That old Aryan patrimony, to be sure, as
source of myth, legend, poem, rite, is out of favour, perhaps definitely
abandoned; but Comparetti,[889] who approves this abandonment, is full
of zeal for the development of all poetry, provided it has the
spontaneous and native note, within the limits of its own nation and its
own tongue. Borrowing is, after all, incidental, however conspicuous in
fact; and it would be a wild system of economics which should explain
the industrial life of the world as purely a matter of exchange, of
debtor and creditor, without any hint of agriculture and manufactures.
One sees all the faring of ship and car, the tumult of docks, drays,
storehouses, the stir in counting-rooms, banks, exchange; what of plough
and mill and mine? It is just these, so to speak, that one fails to see
in such clever literary balancing of accounts as certain scholars have
made in the study of Scandinavian ballads. Take a holiday throng of the
unlettered mediæval community, intent upon song and dance, all dancing
and all singing; will no one tell us what they sing? A score of
scholars. They produce the ballad,—no easy feat,—and for this alone
deserve lasting gratitude. As they find it, it is not likely to be
merely a local affair, for such things seldom come upon record, although
it is quite clear that perhaps the majority of ballads in this class
were of purely local interest. Very likely, however, it is borrowed, and
the scholar—again, no easy feat—traces the loan to its source. The form
of the stanza may be imported, too, with its simple air; and even now
and then the peculiar rhythm of the lines may be an echo of alien song.
Here, then, is imitation; it need not have been imitation, and in some
other place was doubtless a home product throughout; but here imitation
must be conceded. Our ingenious literary accountant, however, is
emboldened to take another step; the impulse which drives that throng to
express its feelings by rhythm, movement, cry, he takes away from
instinct and sets down to the credit of some other community; the very
dancing and singing, that is, he regards as an imitated, borrowed thing.
Rosenberg, in his book on the _Intellectual Life of Scandinavia_,[890]
tries to prove that “dancing and singing to the dance” came to Norsemen
from the Celts; and to make this probable, he has recourse to that
perilous figure, the universal negative. There were no dancing-songs, he
says, in oldest English; dancing-song and refrain, he argues from
records notoriously imperfect, were also unknown to the early German,
and came to him as a Celtic export, although the German was the first to
use these forms in narrative.[891] That is, the Germans had at first no
song for the dance, but got it from the Celts, who in their turn had not
used the narrative song for dancing, and by way of barter imported it,
as among the Bretons, from a German source. The refrain and the dance,
novelties both, came with viking spoils into Scandinavian life, made
things “lighter and more gay,” and “for the first time gave ladies the
chance of active participation in social enjoyment.” In Iceland,
Rosenberg goes on to say, there was no dancing until about the year
1200;[892] though folk there took hugely to the thing when they once had
it. Moreover, “all agree that this dance and song was at first an
exclusive prerogative of noble families.” A thousand years, then, one is
to conceive the case, foot and voice went never paired in Norland, dance
and refrain were unknown, until example came from the South! _Tantae
molis erat_; to set folk dancing to their own songs needed such
ponderous machinery and such a stretch of time! Had Rosenberg’s
comparative literature only made itself comparative beyond the shreds
and patches of written records, beyond the narrow range of Europe and
the mediæval limits; had he only taken Adam Smith’s or Lord Monboddo’s
interest in African natives like that one who danced a war dance before
the genial Adam and his friends, compelling all hands to leap upon
chairs and tables for safety! Rosenberg and scholars of his class are
not comparative enough; they forget wider and more important
reaches.[893] The habit of turning an event or a situation straightway
into improvised verse with gestures and dancing, is so well attested in
the accounts of savage life, so well attested in cases where isolated
and unlettered communities in modern Europe have been left to their own
“literary” devices,[894] that in the face of such evidence the assertion
that Norse folk waited a thousand years for a hint from the Celts before
they began to dance to rough chorus and refrain of their own singing,
falls like a house of cards. Borrowing money is not a sign of
bankruptcy; and the valuable affirmative evidence of literary loans
which these scholars give us is half spoiled by the absurdity of their
universal negative in regard to native production. For example, we know
that Finns, in very recent times, borrowed a store of Swedish ballads,
and that the name _veisa_,[895] used in Finnish for a ballad, is taken
from that source; but, as every one knows, the Finns had their own
native songs. Suppose, now, that these native songs had long since
disappeared, as they doubtless would have disappeared under the
circumstances of primitive Scandinavian ballads; and how cheerfully the
literary accountant could have assured his reader that there were no
Finnish songs whatever until those Swedish loans were made!

Let us go back now to the main question, and take its outer circle. Here
one is told to blot from one’s dictionary such words as _instinct_,
_spontaneity_, _homogeneous_; but, with these well erased, how is one to
speak of that group of primitive men huddled on the frontier of
civilization? They have no instincts, no spontaneous gestures and cries;
they are not homogeneous, and no homogeneous expression can come out of
them. They cannot borrow; for they are opening the first concern of its
kind. What are they doing, then? Getting ready, one is told, for a game
of follow-the-leader, the game of all civilized and uncivilized beings,
and the law of all animate things. Here is a formula not merely valid in
the explanation of literary progress, but the last word of philosophy
itself. It is labour lost to set up the spontaneous, communal impulse as
a factor in solving these problems of primitive poetry, if the
spontaneous and the communal are impossible ideas, mere superstitions,
props on which rationalism once leaned in passing from the grosser
explanations of ghosts, gods, what not, but now broken and cast as
rubbish to the void. By the theory of M. Tarde, for example, there is no
spontaneity possible; rhythm in its widest sense, dancing, even tears
and laughter, breathing, all cease to be outcome of emotion common and
instinctive; they are imitation by one individual of another individual,
or, to take refuge in biology, of one cell of another cell. The
microcosm is here no figure of speech; in this little world of man is a
commonwealth of individual cells, with crossing and varied interests; an
inventive, masterful cell takes the lead, sweeps along most of the other
cells, which imitate and obey, opposes and destroys others, adapts
itself by compromise to a few more,—and this is man, just as it is
society: invention, imitation, but no spontaneity. Invention is the rare
and difficult factor; imitation is the constant factor.[896] That is, to
put the case more concisely, Tarde attacks two theses, the assertion of
spontaneity in a throng and the assertion that development is from the
homogeneous to the heterogeneous.

All this is not so new as it seems to be. It is early eighteenth-century
philosophy translated into late nineteenth-century science. It is a
reaction from a reaction; for Wilhelm von Humboldt, Hamann, Herder, and
the rest, “tired of kings,” tired of the “great man,” turned to man
himself, to humanity, nature, to great forces revealed in human
institutions everywhere. Speech, said Humboldt, is no invention; it is
an energy, a power. At the beginning, says M. Tarde,[897] “a savage
genius” in a single family, invented the earliest form of language; and
families everywhere came to borrow this anthropoid’s linguistic fire. M.
Tarde is suavely bent on exterminating the idea of nature. Even Darwin
had said speech was half art, half instinct; and an early Darwinian,
Lord Monboddo,[898] believing that “everything of art must be founded on
nature,” derived language from “natural cries.” Nature, says M. Tarde,
is a superstition; and with it he tosses away instinct and spontaneity.
The solution for every possible problem of man’s destiny he seeks in one
of those _cerveaux de génie_, savage or civilized, heterogeneous factors
of life, like the masterful cell from which all has come and to which
all shall yet return. All social adaptation is reduced to the work “of
two men, of whom one answers, by word or by deed, to the question,
verbal or silent, of the other.” Men are alike, think alike, do alike,
not by any law or by any instinct of species, but by this fact of
imitation; any group, large or small, will consist of two parts, one
learning and one teaching, one producing and one consuming, “one actor,
poet, artist, and the other looker-on, reader, amateur.”[899] The group
of two individuals, the harmony of it, Tarde now pushes back to an
earlier harmony between two ideas in the brain of the individual
inventor; and this is to stretch into the infinitesimal. How, he cries
in an eloquent passage,[900] how can a Spencer, as well as the man in
the street, go on treating this infinitesimal as of no moment, as a
homogeneous, neutral thing, with naught in it spiritual and distinct?
Why make the vast range of space your theatre of existence? Within this
despised infinitesimal, mayhap, lie the chances of death or immortality,
the secret of being itself. And we call this ovule, this part of the
ovule, this part of the part,—undifferentiated![901] Darwin is right in
his general theory of descent, but he is wrong in his explanation,
thinks M. Tarde; for the true cause of the species is “the secret of the
cells, _the invention of some early ovule endowed with peculiar and rich
originality_.” What, once more, what of our little group of primitive
men, their instinct of kind, their spontaneous gestures and steps and
cries, their homogeneous character and therefore homogeneous expression?
Seek out the masterful cell in the masterful brain of the masterful
leader of that sorry set of imitators, and it will tell all secrets of
civilization and human progress, poetry and the arts included. There is
no “society” for M. Tarde, and, for the sake of dignified and decent
thought, no _milieu_, no “they,”[902]—that figment of nonsense in the
phrase “they say,”—no “social forces.” Instead of explaining the small
by the great, the detail by the mass, he explains a group of similar
things by the accumulation of minor elementary processes, the great by
the small, the mass by the detail. There is for M. Tarde no genius of a
race, of a language, of a religion; at the best, this genius of the
people is a label for the individuals, or a sort of composite
photograph. Hennequin[903] argued in the same way against an English
type in literature, against a Norman or a Gascon type in French; it is
worth noting that his arguments and Tarde’s philosophy were anticipated
at one of the Magny dinners in January, 1866. “Taine asserted,” so the
_Goncourt Journal_ reports, “that all men of talent are the product of
their environment. We took the other side. ‘Where are you going to
find,’ we said, ‘the exotic root of Chateaubriand,—a pineapple growing
in the barracks!’ Gautier came to our support, and maintained that the
brain of an artist was the same thing under the Pharaohs that it is
now.”

M. Tarde, however, with his followers, is by no means in undisputed
possession of the field, whether in sociology or in literature.
Gumplowicz[904] declares that “the behaviour of collective entities is
determined by natural and sociological laws, and not by the motives and
natural qualities of individuals.” Moreover, as he says, the horde and
the social group make a unit, and this is unlike its parts; it cannot be
inferred from its parts. Social thought came before individual thought.
Some of the best scholars in sociology have come out frankly for
dualism; and in the opinion of Dr. Barth,[905] dualism has now been
proved for the past and recognized for present and future. Professor
Giddings[906] takes this view and offers proof; he puts the
consciousness of kind before invention and initiation, for society, as
he says, is an organization and not an organism. Perhaps a majority of
French scholars hold against M. Tarde; and while Germany has been
rampant for individualism, a distinct reaction has set in with the work
of Bernheim, of Lamprecht, and of Barth himself. As Ranke grew older,
says Lamprecht, he grew less willing to lay stress on great
personalities in history, which, he thought, must more and more find its
account in the movement and condition of masses. Comte is not
discredited in the spirit of his theory, whatever has become of the
details; and, turning to psychology, one finds Wundt[907] actually
defending the social mind, so vehemently attacked by Paul in his
_Principles_. Wundt says there is such a thing as the _volksseele_, the
sum of experiences in a multitude; and the products of such communal
experiences, due to the coexistence and mutual working of many minds,
cannot be explained by conditions of the individual mind. Language,
myth, and custom, he says, are the three products of this mind or soul
of the people; and it is not hard to find room for poetry in the
province lying between speech and myth.[908] The problem thus stated and
studied by Wundt has been undertaken by several other writers, notably
by M. Le Bon,[909] and even, in a hostile spirit, by M. Tarde himself.
Von Hartmann[910] studied the “collective mind” as long ago as 1869, and
fitted it into his philosophy of the unconscious; while the _Journal of
Demo-psychology and Philology_, of Steinthal and Lazarus, fought a
losing fight for demos in the old days from 1860, merging at last into
the _Journal of the Ethnological Society_.[911] It is the fashion to
laugh at this old journal, and it had its defects; the student of
poetry, however, will do well to bear in mind that Ten Brink,[912] in
his spirited account of communal song as the basis of English poetry,
expressly declares that he “learned the most” about his subject from an
article by Steinthal in the same periodical. Again, there is Bastian for
ethnology; obscure in expression, hazy in thought, he backs his pet idea
of the _völkergedanken_ with a range of ethnological facts which no one
will neglect or despise. These are positive considerations; and with
them must go a negative but valuable result due to the failure of Tarde,
Kawczynski, and others, in applying their arguments to facts. Take M.
Tarde’s signally unfortunate illustration of his idea that invention is
the only initial power with which one reckons in literature,—that
poetry, for example, always “begins[913] with a book”—a book—“an
_épopée_, some poetical work of great relative perfection, ... some high
initial source.” And what are the examples of this law of poetic
origins? “The _Iliad_, the Bible, Dante.” Here is sheer absurdity. Each
of these cases tends to prove the exact opposite of what M. Tarde would
have it prove. Did he come to this fatal idea, that all great literature
starts with a great book, by reading Hugo’s preface to _Cromwell_?[914]
Worse, even, is his assertion that “modern literature begins with the
_Romance of the Rose_.”[915]

The theory of M. Tarde, noteworthy as it is, and salutary as some of its
appeals must prove in correcting romantic extravagances, cannot be
upheld even as a theory, and breaks down lamentably when applied to
poetical facts. A saner belief would accept the immense part played by
imitation, but would refuse to give it sole possession of the field. It
is the clash of communal and individual tendencies,[916] of centripetal
and centrifugal, with which M. Tarde forgets to reckon; now the
individual invents, rules, awes, masters, and the throng follow like
sheep, and now again this throng is—not _are_—tyrannical to such a
degree that the philosopher of that epoch cries out that there is no
individual initiative, all is law, natural forces, social forces,—and so
comes to an extreme as illogical as that of M. Tarde. It is true that a
work of art is not a mere registry of popular sentiment, of environment,
of the temper of the time; it is also true that the artist cannot take
himself out of those influences. Art is social, and without society
would not exist. It is simple recognition of facts to assert that art,
like religion, law, custom, serves as an index for tendencies which
underlie the thought and emotion of an epoch; it works below the
surface, this movement, and is often belied by all signs that can be
read on the surface, until suddenly these change too, and the period has
registered its characteristics after the fashion of a clock which moves
its hands only at the end of each minute. It is true, moreover, that
this movement must belong to the body in which it takes place; yet it is
also true that the movements of communal thought, as Wundt pointed out,
are different in kind from the movements of individual thought.

But this is too fine-spun stuff for that group of primitive men
concerned with their first effort at song. Granted the communal force
with which we would endow them, what of the instinctive step, gesture,
cry,—can these really be instinctive and not mere imitation of a leader?

As to instinctive utterance, that idea, though somewhat rudely shaken,
still stands.[917] There are instinctive sounds, and man is or was no
exception to the rule. The social influence, assumed by everybody as
real cause of articulate speech, would work not upon a new sound
“invented” by some primitive genius, but upon the instinctive sounds
uttered by each unit of a throng. That individuals discovered or
invented modifications of these sounds, no one will deny; but the
conditions of primitive life were those of a horde, with individuals at
a minimum of importance, so that the earliest progress in speech and
poetry was due to the almost unconscious changes made by a festal throng
under the excitement of social consent,—a very different thing from
invention and imitation as the terms now hold. Whether one wishes to
carry farther this mutual influence of man upon man in a throng equally
active in all its parts, or not, is of little moment. The conditions of
progress in speech and song were immediately communal, in strong
contrast to the isolated, individual, mediating conditions of such
progress at the present day. All we ask of biology is the concession of
instinct; at the basis of human poetry, that vast edifice of art, and,
as it seems to the modern man, of nothing but art, lie instinctive
utterances, homogeneous, if one may judge by chick and bird,[918] and
subject to their first modifications not from individual effort but from
social consent and the enormous force of communal emotion.

Psychology, too, joins biology in allowing that instinctive forms of
utterance and expression in primitive times may have led to that
_gemeinsames dichten_ in chorus, refrain, dance, which is claimed for
nature and opposed to art. Imitation, in any sense that concerns the
argument in hand, is after all a matter of deliberation, reason, choice;
but the expression of emotion in children as in savages is rapid,
instantaneous, instinctive. “Except fear,” says Ribot,[919] “all primary
emotions imply tendencies to movement, sometimes blind and violent, like
natural forces. This is seen in infants, animals, savages, the
barbarians of the first centuries of our era.... The passage of emotion
into action, good or bad, is instantaneous, rapid, and fatal as a reflex
movement.” Panic fright, where animals are almost paralyzed, is, indeed,
a matter of rapid suggestion and imitation in cases where the cause is
not apparent; but panic elation is active, a movement, a sympathy, an
instinctive consent of voice and limb. Moreover, the throng is always to
be kept in mind, and the analogy of children in a family, as well as of
savages brought among civilized folk, is to be held resolutely back; it
is no analogy at all. Who played the suggestive part of parent, of grown
or civilized people, to the imitation of a mass of human beings in those
earliest days? Horde conditions are too easily forgotten, and psychology
needs to take them more into account, just as it is taking instinct
again into favour. Beginning about 1850, a movement against instinct is
plainly traced through the writings of men like Bain and A. R. Wallace;
but the feud was carried too far, and Professor Karl Groos, in one of
the best books[920] which have lately appeared on this subject, notes
the reaction not only in Wundt, but in Lotze, Spencer, Sully, and Ribot,
against this effort to blot the word instinct from our dictionaries.
Groos, who has ample respect for imitation as a leading force in
development of both body and mind, refuses to give it absolute rule.
Play, he says, is not imitation, “but, if the phrase will pass, a
foreboding of the serious occupation of the individual”;[921] and again,
“particularly in the most important and most elementary forms of play,
there can be no question either of imitating the animal’s own previous
activity, _or of imitating the activity of other individuals_.” Mr.
Lloyd Morgan allowed that his young moor-hen, with imitation out of the
question, executing “a pretty and characteristic dance,” showed instinct
“even in the narrower acceptation of the term.” Now if this solitary
activity is “congenital” and “instinctive,” imitation must also yield
some ground to instinct in gregarious play of animals and in communal
play of men. When Wundt[922] says that human life “is permeated through
and through with instinctive action, determined in part by intelligence
and volition,” he states in scientific terms the old dualism of nature
and art, of throng and artist, at which the rationalists of criticism
have directed so many attacks. That fascinating book, Hudson’s
_Naturalist on the La Plata_, gives evidence about gregarious play among
animals.[923] All mammals and birds, he says, have “more or less regular
or set performances with or without sound, or composed of sound
exclusively ... performances which in many animals are only discordant
cries and chorus and uncouth irregular motions,” yet, “in the more
aerial, graceful, and melodious kinds, take immeasurably higher, more
complex, and more beautiful forms.” Again, “every species, or group of
species, has its own inherited form or style of performance; and however
rude and irregular this may be ... _that is the form in which the
feeling will always be expressed_.” Plainly, for whatever reason, the
individual is here under the control of the species; and imitation
cannot be the sole explaining cause either of the impulse or of the
performance. In fact, as Groos concludes,[924] in regard to play “the
instincts are sole foundation. Foundation, for not all play is pure work
of instinct; on the contrary, the higher one proceeds, the richer and
more delicate grow those psychological elements which are added to the
simple impulse of nature, ennoble it, elevate it, and now and again
almost conceal it. But the foundation is instinct.”

What Professor Groos has not done in his interesting books is to give
adequate importance to the choral and communal fact; he neglects the
antithesis between common action and imitated action in a social group.
This choral impulse may be referred to a pleasure in common, instinctive
action, rarely noted by psychologists, which is a quite different affair
from the pleasure of imitating as well as from the pleasure of seeing or
hearing a thing done. Groos himself notes that the mass-play of birds is
like the mass-dance of primitive men which sprang from sexual
excitement. Still, in the table[925] printed at the end of his earlier
book one sees how completely he leaves the choral and communal case out
of account. He recognizes in the first column of this table the
representation of self, the personal impulse, but not as a social
expression by social consent; these forms of play should differ
according to the solitary or social character of the performance, and
this again not simply in terms of personal instinct and communal
imitation. There is a social or communal personality, at all events
where human society is in question, created by any combined action and
deriving from the instinctive, not necessarily imitative acts of
individuals as conscious parts of a whole. Society is not the sum of
individuals, but the mass of them, differing as a mass in its parts from
these parts as individuals, plus the greater or less influence of
generations of previous masses,—in traditions, custom, and the like.
Dead and living form a combination partly organic and vital, partly
immaterial; against this stands the centrifugal, thinking, protesting,
innovating individual. But even ignoring tradition, the difference
holds. If I vote with a party, and “it” gains, my joy is not mine plus
the joy of all who voted with me, but mine because I am a part of the
voting body. How much stronger the direct case under almost exclusively
communal conditions! Communal elation, quite apart from personal
elation, any one can still study in his own mind, but under conditions
which make his elation a thing of shame to his intellectual, critical
self. This shame, which breeds the “mugwump” and breaks up political
parties, barely existed in primitive life,—so sociology concludes with
no dissenting voice. Communal elation, instinctive expression in
consent, began, by Donovan’s reckoning,[926] in the spontaneous
“play-excitement” of a festal throng, which may or may not have
parallels in the play of beasts and birds; here were human fellowship,
homogeneous conditions, “a common cause of excitement,” and a common
expression of it in the social consent of rhythm. Donovan, too, has a
table[927] to illustrate all this; “play-excitement,” instinctive,
drifts into “habits of movement” and into song; individual song-making
is a later affair, and is developed “out of the racial memories.” So
great a factor was this communal elation, this play-excitement, in the
making of poetry. But life has never been all play; poetry echoes,
perhaps even clearer than in the case of play, the stress and pain of
human effort. As was shown in preceding pages, Bücher laid stress upon
the instinctive cries and motions of labour, the rhythm of individual
and social work. Rhythm, he insisted, “springs from the organic nature
of man”; it is automatic, instinctive,[928] and nowhere so much as in
labour. Nor were the realms of play and labour very far apart. Treading
the grapes of Dionysos, treading the wild dance of Dionysos,—there was
little space between the two activities, and no distinction at all so
far as rhythm and instinctive motion were concerned. In brief, whether
one takes the instinct of play, as preparation for work, with Groos, or
the play-excitement, with Donovan, or the instinctive rhythm furnished
by work pure and simple, with Bücher, there is ample recognition in each
case for the spontaneous, and in two of the cases for the communal, as
essential elements in the beginnings of poetry. The conclusions of
psychology[929] and sociology are still in tune with the dualism hinted
long since by Aristotle, and stated just a century ago by A. W.
Schlegel. Aristotle referred the beginning of poetry to two
instincts,—imitation and “the instinct for harmony and rhythm”; but the
art itself came only with individual effort. “Persons ... with this
natural gift little by little improved upon their early efforts till
their rude improvisations gave birth to poetry. Poetry now branched off
in two directions _according to the individual character of the
writers_.”[930] So, too, he speaks of tragedy, which, like comedy, “was
at first mere improvisation,” festal excitement of the throng;[931] and
there is the same hint of communal spontaneity coming under artistic
control when Aristotle notes that “Æschylus diminished the importance of
the chorus,” and when he speaks of a time when “poetry was of the
satyric order, _and had greater affinities with dancing_.” Would there
were more historical work of this sort from that “honest and keen-eyed
observer,” as Schlegel calls him! Could the dualism be more plainly set
forth? Döring[932] points out that Aristotle distinguishes two kinds of
dithyramb; one is natural, spontaneous, improvised, and this is nothing,
in his eyes, but the raw material of poetry; the other is the dithyramb
of art. Schlegel’s position has been defined already, but part of a
brief[933] for a lecture which was never written out, may be noted as in
point; he is more generous to the ruder stage of verse than Aristotle
seems to be. “The idea of a natural history of poetry.... End of this.
_Transition to art and to the consciousness of it. All primitive,
original songs inspiration of the moment._” Now the evidence of
ethnology has set this last remark upon the surest base;[934] no fact is
better established for savage poetry. Creatures of impulse, without
individual thinking, without individual plan and purpose, with uniform
and circumscribed conditions, with homogeneous natures, they are swayed
by communal emotion to a degree which seems incredible to the man of
culture. Schlegel himself had an eye on this sort of evidence.
Speaking[935] of the songs before Homer, he calls them “quite artless
outpourings of lyrical impulse”; they were “made up of a few simple
words and outcries, constantly repeated, such as we find to-day among
savages.” Again, returning to the dualism of instinctive and artistic,
one may note his happy phrase for it when he speaks[936] of “the change
of nature-purpose into art-purpose.”

A deeper study of this change, a study of the beginnings and development
of Hellenic poetry, was made in one of the earlier and saner works of
Nietzsche,[937] written while he was still in philological harness and
before he broke with Wagner. Art, he thinks, depends on the enduring
strife and occasional reconciliation of two opposing forces which the
Greeks embodied in Dionysos and Apollo. Apollo finds expression in
sculpture, in the individual work of art, Dionysos in the impersonal art
of music; the genius of Greece united these two in Attic tragedy. Apollo
is the personification of that _principium individuationis_, the
deification of man as artist, as the solitary boatman whom Schopenhauer
imagined[938] driven and tossed in this frail bark of individuality upon
a sea of troubles. Now “individual” is as much as to say bounded,
definite, restricted; hence the Hellenic dislike of exaggeration, its
love of artistic reticence and restraint, and that “Know Thyself” as
final word of the god who is simply a deification of the individual. But
there is the other side. From time to time, say in intoxication, which
has its god in all popular mythologies, or in those great upheavals of
communal emotion due to victory, to love, to the coming of spring, rises
the Dionysian impulse and shatters all sense of the individual. Such a
movement made the chorus of the Greeks as well as the St. John and the
St. Vitus dances of mediæval Europe. Man the individual, so Nietzsche
puts it in his own dithyrambic style, sinks back, a prodigal son, into
the bosom of that nature which he has deserted. “By song and dance man
shows himself a member of the higher unity; he forgets how to walk, to
talk; he is on the way, dancing and leaping as he goes, fairly to fly
aloft. His gestures tell of the magic which holds him.... _He is no
longer artist, he is art_,”—and all this in the communal, Dionysian
frenzy, the folk as a whole, and the individual lost in the throng.
_Turba fit mens._ Here in spontaneous song, dance, gesture, of the crowd
is the opposite of that reticent, deliberative Apollinian art; “this
demonic folksong” is set over against the “artist of Apollo, chanting
psalms to his harp.”[939] The Greek dramatic chorus, Nietzsche goes on
to say, is simply the old Dionysian throng, once transformed by their
spontaneous excitement into satyrs,[940] pure nature and instinct, now
conventionalized and brought under artistic control; the separation of
chorus and spectators is artificial, for at bottom there is no
difference between them, and all make a single body of dancing and
singing satyrs,—that is, the greater part of the throng now dance by
deputy.[941] We are absurdly narrow, he thinks, in applying modern ideas
of authorship to primitive conditions. “Dionysian ecstasy,”—and
Nietzsche’s fantastic style[942] should not hide the soundness of his
idea,—“Dionysian ecstasy can give to a whole throng this artistic power
of seeing itself ringed about by a host of spiritual forms with which it
feels itself essentially one.” This passing into another character on
the part of a throng, homogeneous of course and instinctive, is the
beginning of the drama, and differs from the work of the rhapsodist.
“All other choral lyric of the Greeks,” says Nietzsche, “is only the
Apollinian solitary singer intensified; but in the dithyramb there
stands before us a community of unconscious actors[943] who see one
another as transformed.” The drama, in short, came from the union of a
Dionysian spontaneous, communal song, in itself chaotic outburst of
passion, and the ordering, restraining, artistic, deliberative spirit
which breathed order into this chaos and is known as the spirit of
Apollo. Thinking on the functions of this artistic, Apollinian spirit,
one is reminded of De Vigny’s definition of art, as “la verité
choisie”[944]; while it is clear that in the cadences of his verse, and
in the emotion that surges through it, the poet is still a part of that
Dionysian throng. In a word, the Apollinian process, which is the only
process one now connects with one’s idea of art, or of poetry,
intellectualizes and therefore individualizes emotion. An instructive
essay by Dr. Krejči[945] regards the fundamental dualism of poetry as a
contrast between the involuntary or mechanical element, and the element
of logical or voluntary creation. As we follow back the course of
poetry, he asserts, the voluntary and creative element decreases, while
there is a steady gain in the automatic, the mechanical, and the
spontaneous,—a gain which is made still more probable by Bücher’s theory
of rhythm. If one could see the conditions and hear the songs of a
primitive time, one would find poetry, so Krejči makes bold to assert,
entirely swayed by the unreflective, mechanical, and spontaneous
element.[946] In this sense, Apollo is thought mastering emotion, art in
control of that spontaneous, chaotic, and yet rhythmic expression of the
Dionysian throng.

Instinctive and spontaneous expression, then, is to be assumed for
primitive song; but the communal idea involves something more. It
demands a homogeneous body of people. Again tradition points this way,
as in the case of rhythm and of the dualism between nature and art;
again, as before, voices are raised in protest; again M. Tarde is in the
field with a formula directly opposed to the formula of tradition; and
again we must turn to modern science for some definite answer, only to
find it fairly in favour of tradition and backed in this respect by
ample evidence from ethnology and literature. Modern psychology, it
seems, leaves one free to conceive a throng of primitive men so
homogeneous that a common emotion would call out a common and
simultaneous expression. Thoughts diverge, and thought, or purpose,
controls modern art as it controls modern emotion; but primitive folk
did little thinking, if one may here trust ethnology and the savage,
backed by the controlling evolutionary facts of literature.[947] Savage
thinking is limited to the few objects of the savage world, and any
effort beyond this is painful; the wild man complains of headache the
moment he is forced to “think.” Deliberation implies memory, and purpose
regards future complications; but we saw that the Botocudos have no
legends, and we know how accurately care for future needs marks progress
in culture; barring those ancestral shadows, as with Eskimos, it is true
of all savages that they have no history at all. So utterly disappears
our sharp individual thinking as one touches savage life. Herodotus was
surprised to find a tribe “that had no name”; but, as Schultze notes,
Bushmen now do not know one another by any individual appellation. The
language of all savage tribes reflects this lack of individual thinking
in our sense; and it is to tribal emotion, instincts of tribal life and
their social expression, that one always looks for what must pass as the
intellectual life of the savage. The individual savages do not think,
but they feel; and feelings, unlike thoughts, tend to converge. Nor,
again, a most important point, is the communal elation of the primitive
throng to be confused with the imitation of a modern crowd, yielding,
after individual mental suicide, to the suggestions of a leader who does
the thinking while the crowd acts out his thought. Ethnology records the
fact, but few if any scholars have noted its significance, that savages
are formidable and command civilized respect in proportion as they act
in mass and as a unit, while modern man is contemptible in the mass;
modern man is formidable as an individual, while the individual savage
is little better than an idiot. Detached from the throng in which and by
which he thinks, feels, acts, he is a silent, stolid fellow, into whose
silence romantic folk like Châteaubriand and Cooper have read vast
philosophies, and from whose forced conversation, uncentred and mobile
as a child’s, missionaries have drawn most of their conflicting and
suspicious statements about savage myths, customs, beliefs, and ways of
thought. Evidence about savages in the mass, about their communal life,
on the other hand, is nearly all straightforward and consistent. Hence a
conclusion of vast reach and meaning for the beginnings of poetry: just
as individuals are superior now, just as the mob, the masses, the
_profanum volgus_, what not, are objects of contempt in these latter
days,[948] so this mob, these masses, were far and away superior to
individuals in conditions of primitive life and at the start of social
progress. By the very terms of the case, and in the struggle for
existence, social man was forced to win the early fight by social
consent, and this was the overwhelming fact to which all individual
considerations had to yield. This superiority attached, of course, to
what the mass did and said and sang as compared with individual
utterance. Human nature remains unchanged, but human conditions are
always changing. One must not treat primitive man, with regard to the
conditions and outcome of his life, in terms of modern man. The mob, the
masses, exist for us mainly as the raw material of social and political
factions. Lack of bread, of work, or the infringement of fancied rights,
leads to a common and intense emotion, the first requisite of mass
movement; a leader of some sort, with a plan which comes of more or less
thinking, sways the mob to a definite act. But the behaviour of a mob,
the doing and expression of a mob, are now in sharp antithesis to that
doing and expression of individual men at the bidding of individual
thought, of deliberation, plan, and definite purpose. Conditions of
primitive life, so all evidence goes to prove, reversed this order; and
it is a totally evil process when one transfers the value of a modern
mass of men to the communal throng, the horde, if one will, which began
our social progress. Hence the error in Tarde’s ingenious argument.[949]
Attacking the idea that a mass of men ever created language, he
conceives the mass in terms of a mob, language in terms of our highly
intellectualized and individualized speech; and he applies the same
impossible test to religion and to poetry. Who, he cries, “ever saw a
masterpiece of art ... planned and wrought out by the collective
inspiration of ten or a hundred poets or artists?” None of us,
certainly, save in some form of survival hard to recognize, has seen
such a thing. Primitive man, on the other hand, knew nothing of a
poetical masterpiece in M. Tarde’s sense. When communal “inspiration”
was dominant, when the throng absorbed the individual, when thought
hardly dared to show its solitary visage before a solid communal
emotion, the masterpiece of art, that is, of individual planning, hardly
had a place; under modern conditions of individual thinking, communal
emotion is just as unproductive in the æsthetic realm. The masterpiece
waited for the master; and one remembers M. Tarde’s delusion about the
origins of all poetry in some “great book.” In stating his case for the
artist, which is perfectly true for modern conditions, he is really
stating the case, by implication, for primitive communal song.

But was this throng really homogeneous? Are the facts in accord with
this theory of communal conditions and the outcome of them? Mr. Spencer,
as every one knows, laid down the law that all social progress is from
the homogeneous to the heterogeneous;[950] and M. Brunetière has adopted
this principle as a guide to the study of literary development,[951]
regarding it as the one doctrine of evolution, held by Spencer as by
Haeckel, which stands the test of criticism and is beyond the reach of
doubt. The history of culture, so M. le Bon thinks,[952] points the same
way; “counter to our dreams of equality, the result of modern
civilization is not to make men more and more equal, but to make them
more and more different.” Comte assumed that the common trait of biology
and sociology is this passing from the whole to the parts; and although
Mr. Spencer, with his doctrine of cells, has largely set Comte aside,
that part of the old system is intact. Popular books, supposed to sum up
the best results of science, are to the same effect. In primitive times,
says Reclus,[953] “all felt, thought, and acted in concert. Everything
leads us to believe that at the outset collectivism was at its maximum
and individualism at its minimum. The individual,” he declares, “was not
the father of society; society was the mother of the individual.”
Studies of prehistoric man, as in the stone age, point to a sameness of
individuals now quite impossible to imagine.[954] Hennequin is not with
Tarde on this point; the primitive community was homogeneous, and its
members “were all nearly exactly alike in body and in mind.”[955]
Gumplowicz is explicit for the beginning of society in homogeneous
hordes.[956] A recent writer who has made a study of the horde and the
family in primitive development,[957] and who is by no means of the
extreme school,—he rejects promiscuity, for example,—declares the horde
to have been the starting-point of social progress. Grosse, casting
about for a state of savage life which shall give the best idea of the
life of primitive man, finds it in a “homogeneous, undifferentiated
mass,” thus backing Spencer at least in his sociological assertion;[958]
and the best authorities bear out this view. The hordes which serve, in
lack of better ethnological material, as the type of primitive man, are
small and scattered; they have no arts, no division of labour;
individual property is almost unknown, and the one piece of property,
their hunting-ground, belongs to all the adult males in common. As
little difference of rank exists as of property; seldom are there any
leaders, and where, in a few cases, these are found, their authority is
pitifully small. The only individuals who break this “homogeneous and
undifferentiated” monotony are the supposed possessors of a magical
power.[959] So runs the certainly unprejudiced account of Grosse. Even
by Sir Henry Maine’s extreme patriarchal views, the family itself, the
first social group, was a homogeneous and undifferentiated mass in those
characteristics with which the student of poetry must deal. Mr. Tylor’s
group of Caribs,[960] with uniformity of physical and mental structure,
amply bears out the communal and homogeneous argument for earliest song;
but perhaps the shortest way with dissenters is a passage by Waitz,[961]
where he sums up the evidence for this uniformity of the individuals in
a horde and in social groups of a low order. All their relations of
life, he says, are simple, and are bent in one direction, the procuring
of food; there is a maximum of instinct and common appetite, and almost
no stir of mind such as follows the division of labour; and this uniform
mental habit works upon the outward person, so that, physically as well
as intellectually, the single man fails to stand out from the mass.
Waitz, who quotes Humboldt to the same purpose, thus explains why the
Romans, with their complicated civilization, found the Germans all
looking alike, all of one type.[962] Wherever the horde is visible, even
in a comparatively civilized case, as with the Scottish clans, there the
resemblance of individuals, the emphasis of a type, is unmistakable; and
it is precisely under these conditions that we find the survivals of
communal song. Primitive man, moreover, dependent on the nature about
him, and acting in his horde like other creatures in the face of a power
which they fear, surrounded himself with a like horde of spirits,[963]
themselves as little differentiated or distinguished in any way as the
human horde which conceived them. Even under the highest civilization
such conditions of the horde survive in communal worship. True, the
informing power of Christianity is its individualism, its “flight of the
one to the One”; but the litany, the general confession, the spirit of
congregational worship, are suggestive not so much of the “O God, I” as
of the “O Spirits, We,”—homage once paid by all the living souls to all
the souls of the dead, and still lingering as a shadowy survival in two
great festivals of the church. Religious emotion is still the strongest
communal element in modern times, particularly when it takes the form of
a great revival.

Against all this in general and Mr. Spencer’s theory in particular, M.
Tarde, as was noted, set up his theory of the infinitesimal and the
cell; against the narrower idea of differentiation in poetry,—epic,
lyric, and dramatic regarded as developments from an earlier compact
form in which the three were still united,—Professor Grosse,[964] who
was so bold in his assertion of homogeneous life, asserts heterogeneous
poetry from the beginning. Yet he presently lays down[965] the larger
truth, which carries with it a confusion of his own particular denial on
poetic grounds. “In the lowest stage of culture,” he says, “art appears,
at least for us, simply and only as a social phenomenon.... In the
higher stages, however, along with the influence which art exerts upon
social life, there comes more and more into view the value of art for
the development of individual life.... _Between the individual and the
social function of art is a deep antithesis._” In other words, he proves
by his admirably selected facts, throughout the whole book, that the art
of primitive times was mainly social, whereas the art of modern times is
mainly individual. Moreover, he is very sure that primitive society was
homogeneous. The inference is inevitable. Dr. Wallaschek, we saw, set
down the “collectiveness of amusement” as main characteristic of
primitive life. These things cannot be said in one breath, only to be
followed in another by such amazing contradictions as the implication of
Grosse[966] that the egoist in man is the first of poets, or the jaunty
talk of Scherer about primitive poets and their public, their royalties,
their authorship, when only a few pages away he tells us that “mass
poetry,” poetry of the throng, is the differencing element in primitive
æsthetic life. Posnett, to whom all students of poetry are under deep
obligations for his vigorous sketch of comparative literature, does
justice to the communal element in early song and reduces the
individual, heterogeneous element to a minimum; his formula for poetic
development is “the progressive deepening and widening of
personality.”[967]

It is to be conceded that a superficial view reverses this order of
progress. What does one meet oftener in history and song,—

O nimis optato saeclorum tempore nati,
Heroes, salvete, deum genus[968]—

than talk of a “heroic” age in the remote past, and of the commonplace,
average-ridden present, the epoch, as Le Bon calls it, of crowds?
Against the mediocrity, the hustings, the juries, the lynching-bees, the
“suffrage of the plough,” the dead level of uninteresting masses, there
floats up a vision of the knight on his quest, of the solitary hero at
odds, like Hercules, with divinity itself, of the good old king who sits
to judge his people in the gates. Have not we moderns the homogeneous
mass, and was not the individual a child of the early world? Wilhelm von
Humboldt[969] finds the secret of Homer in his “sense of individuality”
and “individualizing impulse.” Haym, a careful writer, talks of the
individualism of the Middle Ages as opposed to modern times.
Blémont[970] admits that democracy is individualism, but contends that
it makes for anything rather than for individuality, and simply levels
human life; the mind ceases to be free, and men act in masses, simplify
everything, make life monotonous. Against this, however, one needs only
to recall that quotation just made from Le Bon: the process seems to be
toward sameness, but is really toward diversity. Men may dress alike,
may show concerted action, may discourage the unusual and set up a god
of averages; but the individual is stronger than ever before, and he
does more thinking for himself. Men move in masses, true; but it is less
and less the herd instinct and more and more the voluntary coherence of
thinking minds. Instinct has yielded to thought. The history of
civilization is the making and unmaking of communities; society means
more than it ever meant; but this is not denying the fundamental law of
progress from homogeneous to heterogeneous, from communal to individual
and artistic. One must not juggle with these terms. It is true that an
army, a group of men for any purpose, which marches as one man, is the
end and not the beginning of communal effort. It is true that the savage
is notoriously fitful; there is anything but splendid purpose in his
eyes; combined action, under certain conditions—that is, conditions of
civilization—is difficult even for members of one tribe; their
prevailing force seems to be individual and centrifugal; the bond that
binds them to the community often seems slight beyond belief; as to
their feelings, just now assumed to be almost a unit, “emotional
variability” is the report of many a traveller.[971] This has been
extended to primitive life, and to the moral side of the case; early
man, says Pulszky,[972] was ruled by “unqualified selfishness,” and
asserted “his individuality in every respect.” The same author speaks of
“a gradation, the first word of which is selfishness, and the last,
public sentiment.” Where in all this coil of caprice and incoherence is
the homogeneous community expressing a common emotion by a common
utterance? The answer is clear enough. Escape from this caprice, this
incoherence, this centrifugal force, is found primarily in social
consent, in the communal utterance which began the long struggle against
purely selfish ends; and communal utterance begins, as has been shown,
in the consent of rhythm. Strong as the selfish impulses were, so strong
the need for at least an incipient check upon them in social action; and
from social action and utterance sprang all those altruistic virtues
which Pulszky lauds—patriotism, piety, duty to kin and to the race. The
end of society is to take brute man and make him a civilized man, to let
“the ape and tiger” in him die; man when nearest ape and tiger, at the
beginning of social union, was individually brutish, stolid, selfish,
idiotic, fitful, in a word, individually bad; and just so far as he
submitted to social consent, lived for the horde, the clan, kin,
country, so far he was socially good. Hence it is easy to see that in
this homogeneous society all the beginnings of civilization, art,
poetry, religion, would be overwhelmingly homogeneous, social, communal;
the condition of their existence was the abnegation of the individual
man in favour of the social man. In a word, society itself began in this
social consent, and since it had such tremendous forces of selfishness
arrayed against it in the primitive individual instincts,[973] the only
way in which it could make its way was by utter suppression of the
individual in so far as he was a party to the social bond itself. Hence
a contradiction that is only apparent. The savage as a creature of
animal instinct is as capricious and centrifugal as one will; as a
creature of social act, emotion, thought, he has no individuality, and
puts none into his expression; for it was precisely this tuition of
social consent which little by little gave him the impulse to deed,
feeling, deliberation, as member of society. Here is the solution of the
problem. Arab boatmen who can not pull ropes in unison,[974] sing and
dance together with a consent that astonishes the traveller. They are
capricious, fitful individuals in regard to the new kind of work, but
compact, communal society in regard to the festal consent which united
their wandering hordes thousands of years ago. Descriptions of the
savage state easily bear out this contradiction and this solution, if
one will analyze the facts; and this is why one finds Spencer and Grosse
asserting on one page the homogeneity and collectiveness of savage
communities, and on another page the heterogeneous, capricious,
individual, selfish traits of the savage himself. In literature we do
not so clearly see both sides. Throng-poetry is rarely recorded; one
merely describes a village or tribal chorus,—and takes down the
individual song. Luckily, however, the “collective character” of
primitive amusement is made as certain as such things can be, by the
ethnological evidence considered in the chapter on rhythm, by the
evidence of popular survivals collected in the chapter on communal song
and dance, and by the evolutionary curves of poetry itself. Considering
all this evidence, one escapes the snare laid in one’s path by the idea
of individualism in the savage. That “emotional variability”[975] is
individual indeed, and disappears precisely as the communal expression
of emotion comes into play. It has been proved, too, that, like speech,
rhythmic utterance and rhythm itself in the sense which Bücher gives to
it, are not so much the outcome as the occasion of social union. The
sense of this union, “the consciousness of kind” as Professor Giddings
calls it, is at bottom a sense of order, and the “instinct for order” is
best expressed in rhythm; rhythm, it was seen, is not invention and
imitation, but discovery and consent. Anterior to any process of
invention and imitation, which is a social act, must be the condition
which makes this act possible,—a consciousness of kind and a social
consent. Instinctive emotions of a homogeneous horde felt in common on a
great occasion gave birth to a common expression in which the separate
individuals discovered this social consent. Invention and imitation,
begun as early as one will after this social consent, gave them the
conditions of their activity; but they must not be put before it, nor,
for considerable stretches of social development, could they be said to
have an important place, since they grew with the growing importance of
the individual in society. If one may dogmatize on the matter, one may
think of three gradations in social progress. First, there is the
consent due mainly to external suggestion working on instinctive
movements: in the dance it is due to that festive joy of victory and
that “rhythmic beating” outward, that rhythmic impulse inward, which
Donovan describes; and in labour, as Bücher thinks of it, it is either
the consent of a solitary labourer with the labour itself, or, more
often, the consent of several labourers with those instinctive and
necessary movements. Vocal and significant cries went with the movements
in each case. Secondly, but contemporary with the other, one may figure
a less festal occasion and a more active personal agency; five or six
men marching abreast fall into step and find the labour of marching is
lightened,—not a very different matter from the dance, but less communal
and more unrestrained. Imitation comes slightly into play, but it is
wholly subordinate to consent. Thirdly, imitation and invention get
their rights where the individual discovers or invents an isolated act,
in various degrees of artistic and social significance, from the jump
over an obstacle by the leader in a row of men marching in Indian file,
the sheep-over-a-fence process, as Mr. Lloyd Morgan calls it, up to the
clever throwing of a spear, the tying together of two vine branches, the
fashioning of a spear-head, which are invention outright, triumph of
individual thinking, plan and deliberation detached from communal
emotion. The leader is on hand; the “headless” hordes have heads.
Spontaneity, instinct, the automatic, still dominant in communal dance
and song, in reminiscential rites of every sort, have yielded in active
life to thought and purpose of the individual, to division of labour, to
that power to plan a protracted piece of work and carry it out in detail
which makes for progress. But before this formula of invention and
imitation can apply, before one talks of the leader and the led, there
must be a coherent body which can resolve itself into these relations of
parts; and precisely here is the beginning of society in social consent,
and here, too, the beginning of poetry in communal and rhythmic
utterance.

One thus faces a seeming paradox in the conception of poetry as at once
the highest expression of the differentiated, deliberate, artistic
individual, and, at the same time, the fullest expression of a
homogeneous, spontaneous, automatic mass; the paradox vanishes at once
if one will only see in rhythm consent and emotional cadence of a
dancing, singing multitude, and in artistic phrase and thought the
deliberate control and plan of the individual,—Apollo in the foreground,
and the background filled with a festal Dionysian throng. Why refuse to
see this social background, or, in another figure, this communal
foundation of poetry? Guyau puts beyond doubt the essentially social
character of the art, even under modern conditions; but one makes a
phrase, and returns to the old way. A long succession of deliverances on
solitary genius has befogged the critical vision and blotted this
lode-star of social conditions from the sky. In other fields such a
mistake is unknown. The student of political science would never deny
that a representative in Congress, as his name implies, is the deputy of
a throng that once, say in the forests of Germany, would have come
together as a compact legislative body and settled questions of state.
But in poetry the poet ends and the poet began, a creature of solitude,
now in commerce with the immensities and infinities, and now holding out
his hat to the public for a _honorarium_,—the public’s only part in the
poetic process. If the public is brought in, it is to explain the poet,
as with Sainte-Beuve and Taine, or to explain the gentle reader, as with
Hennequin. Poetry is a whisper, a confidence, to this gentle reader.
When the throng, not to speak of the silence about its active functions
in poetry, catches up a poem that it likes, and roars it, as it roared
Mr. Kipling’s _Absent-minded Beggar_, over all England, this is very
salt in the wounds of the critic, who declares, with some justice, that
here is no “poetry” at all; while the same author’s _Recessional_, with
its individual appeal, its recoil from popular sentiment, its assertion
of thought over emotion, is set down, and rightly, as “poetry of a high
order.” Judging poetry by the standard of modern conditions, which are
wholly individual, artistic, intellectual, the critic is right. The
war-song of to-day, all lyrics of the throng, have a hollow and unreal
ring in them; even Tennyson’s _Light Brigade_ somehow gives the effect
of armour which is laced with bonnet-strings. The real song of war in an
age of communal poetry was heard at that moment which Müllenhoff calls
the supreme moment of all Germanic life, when the images of the gods
were brought out, when the wedge was formed,—leaders of battle at the
thin forward end and women and children in the rear,—the whole community
at hand; with the hurling of Woden’s spear, all swept into the fight,
chanting the great chorus of war. Here is the folk communal in
organization to great extent, but not quite homogeneous; not a
leaderless horde, but still holding to elements of that primitive life;
here is still poetry of the people. Communal elation still furnishes the
main cause of poetic utterance; the utterance is immediate; and
development of the individual has not yet sundered the making and the
hearing of a song.[976]

CHAPTER VII

THE EARLIEST DIFFERENTIATIONS OF POETRY

That primitive horde with its uncouth but rhythmic dance, its well timed
but seemingly futile song, has now, let us hope, found its justification
as the source of poetry. Not like the dance and song among Botocudos and
Veddahs, a thing of degeneration or at least of sterile and unpromising
kind, was this beginning of the beginnings; rather a feat of vast moment
for the coming race of men, an achievement not to be measured by
ordinary phrase. In the long reaches of growth and differentiation which
stretch from this beginning to the present time, we are now to take our
steps forward; the backward mutters of dissevering power which sought to
resolve poetry unto its communal elements must now yield to a record of
its progress; and our first task is to catch sight of the poet, the
master of his art, as he detaches himself from the throng and sets out
upon that path which leads him to his present state of grace. Another
and an interesting question concerns the waning communal element, how it
loses its hold upon poetical production, and how far it still modifies
the poet’s work.

Where and how, then, does the poet appear? Coöperation, however unlike
what one now understands by coöperation, was the beginning of social
progress, and the discovery or perception of rhythm had to play the main
part in this first communal act whether of work or of play. Rhythm is
the expression of a sense of coherence; and the first coherence was of a
kind to suppress the individual: all evidence goes to show this fact.
The Veddahs live mainly in isolated pairs, a brutish existence, except
when some great tribal interest brings them together; at such a time
that monotonous, leaderless dance about the arrow, man clasped close to
man in an almost solid ring,—the Botocudos, too, and many other tribes,
are pictured as thus forming a fairly compact mass, with only a part of
the individual body free to move in unison with the same part of every
other body,—is the way by which the clan or horde finds itself in this
unwonted relation. Then the individual detaches himself from his singing
with the throng, and for a verse or so sings to the throng; but how
tentative, how momentary his effort, and how short his range away from
the repeated communal chorus! For this individual is not acting as
individual, acting freely in isolated life, but as member of a body
which is just beginning to be a body and to understand its power of
social and therefore of mutual influence. Moreover, as Spencer points
out, primitive imagination is purely reminiscent, not constructive; the
earliest working of what may pass as poetical imagination, then, is an
individual utterance reminiscent of communal utterance and prolonging it
with shy and tentative variations. This is precisely what one finds in
the song of Veddahs and Botocudos. In the Eskimo singing-house the
soloist has come to greater importance; he sings always a song of his
own making, while the women join in the chorus “_amna aya_, the never
failing end of each verse.” In this singing-house “almost every great
success in hunting is celebrated ... and especially the capture of a
whale.” When the soloist is not singing these adventures, or satiric
songs, also great favorites, the flyting or song-duel is in order.[977]
Great, however, as the independence of the singer seems compared with a
bard of the Botocudos, the chorus is still imperious, and no one singer
is eminent. Everybody sings,—not only in chorus, but in his turn as
soloist; and everybody makes his own song. How utterly alien to this
conception of early social life is the monarchical idea, the great man
idea, human history begun by the tyrant of a submissive band! Take a
half civilized state of society, as among the Germans described by
Tacitus; here it is evident that democracy prevailed in peace, while in
war, with concessions to men of “royal” blood, the strongest and boldest
men acted as chieftains gathered in the thin end of the wedge, going
into battle as exemplars and leaders, but not as generals, not as
commanding, overseeing genius of a deliberate plan. As with government
and war, so with property. Grosse[978] notes in those tribes that
approach primitive ways few marks of individual ownership, but a mass of
marks which denote claims of the horde or clan. So, too, with language,
a problem which nobody in these days is fain to undertake;[979] but
surely the mystic style of Donovan’s article must not hide the soundness
of his views,[980] already noted, on the festal origin of human speech.
Religion, however, may have offered an earlier chance for centrifugal
forces. It is probable that the medicine man, the shaman, with his
visions, his abnormal states and doings, closely connected with that
perilous stuff which every man of the horde had upon his individual
heart in ordinary dreams, furnished the earliest example of a commanding
personality acting in such an eccentric way as to make sharpest contrast
with the coherence of communal action. Here, said the community, here is
a man with a “gift,” a man apart; and his use of wild dance and song in
exorcism may have begun at a very early date. Later, too, something of
the sacred and the mysterious inherent in a shaman’s vocation may have
been transferred to the poet; priest and singer alike came to refer
their ecstasy to a divine source. Yet magical ceremonies, whatever the
advocates of prose-poetry may say, offer no good opportunity to observe
the actual beginnings of the poet. We can see him detaching himself, not
as magician or in special rites, but as a simple singer and dancer, from
the singing and dancing throng; and this is the proper point of
departure in our study, for the good reason that here is a fissiparous
birth. Offspring of the communal chant by the simplest process, his own
chant merely continues that of the community, which for an instant or so
turns silent and passive for his profit. Again, this first of singers is
no artist in verse, favourite of the muses, no man apart, son of the
golden clime and solitary wanderer over Parnassus; he is every member of
the throng in turn. To prove this vital point, we must not only take
ethnological evidence, here conclusive as well as abundant, but must
also follow that method which has led to some good results in foregoing
pages of this book; we must try to connect the evidence of savage life
with those survivals in an advanced stage of culture which by their mere
survival indicate the persistence of a habit rooted deep in human
history and human nature. We must study by this double light a few facts
in regard to that improvisation in which Aristotle found the beginning
of poetic art.

The fissiparous birth of individual from communal poetry is confirmed by
the process observed everywhere among savage tribes. Solitary
performance has come there to a considerable pitch of skill, but it
yields always in importance to the chorus, and along with profit and
reputation of a sort it often involves a kind of shame. Prostitutes do
the individual singing and dancing in many parts of the Orient;[981]
singing-women and dance-girls, even in advanced stages of culture, pay
dearly for their eminence; and something of this decline in caste clings
to the most respectable solitary performances, now and here, of the
skilled “entertainer.” The mimes of the Middle Ages were often held to
be without the pale, not only of the law, but of the church itself;[982]
and while other causes worked to this end, something must be conceded to
that attitude of every public to its entertainer or even
teacher,—extravagant praise and delight, extravagant rewards, but with
it all a sense of aloofness, an inclination to wave away this
centrifugal element which has set itself over against the communal body,
now an indulgent contempt, where mere pastime is concerned, and now
dislike and distrust at an exhibition of independent thought.

It has been repeatedly shown that short improvisations are the earliest
form of individual poetic art, and are sung in the intervals of a
chorus, or to relieve the monotony of labour, where again they detach
themselves from the parent refrain, modify it, add to it, and so build
up a song. There is no need to dwell on the evidence for savage
improvisation. The African is amazing in his power to turn an event into
verse; it is a communal affair for the most part, with a chorus in the
background. At public dances the Indians of America improvise, man for
man, indefinitely, leaning also on the monotonous refrain. Throughout
the South-Sea Islands[983] improvisation of songs is as common as
speech; even the children improvise. The lower the level of culture, the
more general this gift of improvising; “among the Andamans every one
composes songs.”[984] The same holds of Australia, of far Siberia, and
throughout the savage world; moreover in all these cases the habit is
not solitary but festal. The oldest poetry known to tradition among the
Afghans was improvised in reply to an insulting verse;[985] but the
professional singer is on hand, and improvisation has become an art. The
history of poetry among civilized races always shows a surplus of
improvisation in the initial stage known to the records; so it is with
the Greek _skolion_, as well as with dramatic beginnings; and so, to
take a different case, with the Arabs, where improvisation long held
almost absolute sway,[986] although drama had no place and a subjective
spirit reaches back to the earliest tradition. Again, where a literature
is undeveloped, although under civilized conditions, improvisation is
the main force; in this case are the Basques.[987] In fine, it is not a
vain tradition which puts a general gift of improvising verse before the
development of any national literature; and Plutarch, in his treatises
on Music and on the Pythian Oracle, speaking of a time when all formal
utterance was in poetry, and when even men without poetic fire were wont
to make verses on any subject, is telling not a fable but something very
close to truth. The proof is not far to seek, and comes from
ethnological as well as literary sources.

Improvisation in this early and general sense, however, must be
distinguished from the later sort which was purely professional, an art
which Schlegel[988] calls “poetic rope-dancing” and sunders from the
older and nobler gift, from “natural and partly amœbean, extemporaneous
poetry, which was and still is a source of social entertainment.” The
drama, he notes, began in this way.[989] As a social gift, indeed,
improvisation lingers long with civilized folk; a hundred years ago the
poet was ready with his “impromptu on seeing Miss —— asleep in the
moonlight;” and games were common enough where every one had to make
verse. Lady Luxborough[990] wrote to Shenstone: “It is the fashion for
everybody to write a couplet to the same tune—an old country dance—upon
whatever subject occurs to them.” The couplets, it would seem, were
satiric; and here, of course, is a late stage of the flyting. Then there
was the clever man of society, like Theodore Hook,[991] who would
improvise you verses on anything; but this phase of the art is best
studied in Italy. It is to be noted that such verses were generally
sung;[992] and, indeed, they come close to the professional
improvisation which is to be considered below. For the present we are to
look at the older and more communal stage, where art is just putting on
a show of independence and learning to walk alone.

The question is not of the fact of improvisation in primitive stages of
culture, familiar to every student in this field, but of the manner in
which improvisation begins, grows, hardens into a profession, and dies
out in vain rivalry with song of a more deliberate art. A mass of
improvised verse could be quoted which differs from the refrain and
chorus of the throng only in respect of a trifling variation in language
and a trifling addition to the matter. Leaving this fissiparous
offspring, we turn to that form of improvisation which shows an organic
structure of its own, and keeps the refrain at greater distance,
discarding, too, the more persistent forms of repetition. Mungo
Park[993] tells one story of his African wanderings which may be assumed
as a faithful report of the facts; for it is to be believed, or hoped,
that Park’s pen, unlike the pen of many travellers in general, and the
pen of Mr. Brooke of Middlemarch in particular, was not “a thinking
organ” apt to run into adventures of its own. The wanderer, wet and
tired, was taken into the hut of a native woman, who gave him food and a
mat for bed, going on with the other women to “spin cotton” most of the
night. “They lightened their labour[994] by songs, one of which was
composed _extempore_,” says Park, “for I was myself the subject of it.
It was sung by one of the young women, the rest joining in a sort of
chorus.... The words, literally translated, were these: ‘The winds
roared and the rains fell; the poor white man, faint and weary, came and
sat under our tree,—he has no mother to bring him milk; no wife to grind
his corn. _Chorus_: Let us pity the white man; no mother has he,’ etc.”
Here the young woman seems to lead the chorus and suggest its words,
while in the more primitive type of improvisation it is the chorus which
supplies the main theme, and the tentative, momentary singer only adds
his flourish. Here, too, is the element of the _honorarium_; for Park
was so affected that he gave his landlady “two of the four brass buttons
which remained” on his waistcoat, and surely the poetess could claim one
of them for her poetry. We have all read far worse at far higher rates.
True, the chorus or refrain is still very potent; the little
contemporary event is the sole suggestion of verse which looks neither
before nor after; but the incremental factor is less hampered and less
timid, and a touch of reflection and sentiment—provided this was not the
product of Park’s reminiscent mood—is at hand in the sympathy for a
motherless man.[995] Australians, too, though lower in the scale than
Africans, make songs on the spur of the moment which “refer to something
that has struck the attention at the time,” and add a bit of reflection.
Actually subjective and reflective poetry among such people, now and
then reported by missionaries,[996] may be rejected with confidence as
either mistaken in the hearing or else as echoed from hymns or pious
stories told to an excessively imitative folk. It is still the tribe,
clan, horde, for the party of the first part, and an event, an emotion,
affecting this body as a whole, for the party of the second part, which
gets into the communal verse even when sung by a single deputy.
Individual emotion as a thing for itself is nowhere in the case. Indeed,
if there were time for it, a raid upon philological ground would show a
tendency to avoid the first and second person singular in all primitive
speech; surely that observation of Schleicher[997] is not antiquated,
along with his other theories, when he says that the varying stems of
the personal pronoun point at a deliberate process aimed to avoid
expression, “as indeed often in language one finds a shyness to use the
_I_ and the _thou_.” Romanes,[998] too, notes that “in the earliest
stages of articulate utterance pronominal elements, and even predicative
words, were used in the impersonal manner which belongs to a hitherto
undeveloped form of self-consciousness.” Perhaps this belated individual
expression came into poetry in the guise of robust satire, which at
first clannish and collective, like the songs of the maids about
Bannockburn, like the mutual satire of rival villages even now, like the
mocking songs sung by African girls at a dance, passed into the
particular mood as a kind of flyting. An excellent survival of this
clan-satire turned upon an individual member occurs some hundred years
ago. Pastor Lyngbye,[999] long a resident among the Faroe islanders,
tells, without the faintest desire to advance a critical theory,
precisely how a ballad was made in a throng and under circumstances
which were primitive in every respect save the accident of date. The
whole community meets on even terms to spend a few hours in sport. The
expression of communal feeling is first and foremost the dance; and to
this dance, as was once the universal custom, they sing their own songs.
Now the song may be one about Sigurd or other hero of yore; and in this
case one can determine, so far as possible, whether the “common fund or
patrimony” of race tradition furnishes the theme or whether the story is
borrowed from abroad. But the song is not always about Sigurd; and
Lyngbye’s simple story of one which is local, spontaneous, communal,
should be taken to heart by comparative literary accountants. Some
fisherman has had a misadventure, whether by his fault or his fate, and
comes to the public dance. Stalwart comrades seize him, push him to the
front, and before the whole community dancing and swaying to a
traditional rhythm, stanza after stanza is improvised and sung, first by
a few, then in hilarious repetition by the throng; and so, verse by
verse, the story of the accident “sings itself,” with the hero dancing
willy-nilly to the tale of his own doings. Now, adds Lyngbye, if this
ballad takes the fancy of the people, it becomes a permanent thing,
repeated from year to year. Here, indeed, is what may well pass as
“objective” poetry;[1000] an absolute antithesis to the subjective and
reflective poetry with which modern conditions of authorship have made
us so familiar that we ignore the fact of any other kind.

Similar makings and traditions of the improvised song of satire come
from the Highlands; witness the words of J. F. Campbell.[1001] “It was
quite a custom in the Highlands, and that not long ago, to meet for the
purpose of composing verses. These were often satirical, and any one who
happened not to be popular was fixed upon for a subject. Each was to
contribute his stanza, and whoever failed to do his part was fined.
Whenever a verse happened to be composed that was pretty smooth and
smart, it took well ... and spread far and wide.” Campbell notes the
corresponding habit of Icelanders, as told in the _Njalssaga_. All this
is still fissiparous offspring of the festal dance and song; but just as
all mankind now loves a lover, so in more robust days it may be assumed
that all mankind most loved a fight; and the fight in alternate stanzas
of a song-duel concentrated attention on the fighting pair, spurred them
to independent effort, and brought about an organic, individual song.
This flyting is a venerable affair; and every one knows the dual combats
in verse so common among the Eskimo, a pretty makeweight to amœbean
verse under the Sicilian skies. In Iceland not only were sarcastic
verses made upon one another by professed poets like Gunnlaug
Snake-Tongue, but at the dance _mansöngvar_, that is, satiric stanzas
exchanged by men and women, were in vogue for every one, and in their
Fescennine license often called out futile protest from the
church.[1002] Civilized Europe itself is covered from end to end by
traces of a custom once, it would seem, universal among folk of low and
high degree; and it is beyond doubt, save with theorists who decline to
look at the evidence of comparative literature, that amœbean verse of
the classic kind, rude dramatic beginnings, survivals like the
_strambotto_ and _stornello_ of Italy, the _coplas_[1003] of Spain, the
_stev_ of Norway, the _gaytas_ of Galicia, the _schnaderhüpfl_ of
Germany, all go along with these rough flytings of half-civilized and of
wholly barbarous races as offshoots of communal song where the
individual singer detaches himself from the chorus and sings stanzas
which mainly incline to rivalry with another singer. Moreover, this was
once a universal gift. Wherever communal conditions survive, there
survive also traces of a time when one could talk of a “folk in verse”
as well as of a folk in arms. Improvisation is a fairly easy process
with Esthonians, Lithuanians, Finns, where classic tradition is out of
the question, just as it is an easy process with the peasant of Italy.
The substitution of love for hate or satire, of frank erotic stanzas of
the times when the way of a man with a maid was matter of communal
interest, is easy to understand, if hard to date and place; even now,
rustic love-making at picnics is conspicuous for epithets that might
easily be understood as belonging to a quarrel. The publicity of these
amatorious stanzas still survives in games and country revel. A game now
played among the young people of Swedish Finland, “Simon i Sälle,” was
described by a native to the present writer; in a dancing ring of both
sexes, with chorus and refrain, a youth steps up to a girl and says he
has something to give her. What has he, is the more or less defiant
question; and he must improvise his stanza descriptive of the gift,
while all the other young men continue dancing forward and backward as
he sings, the girls standing. When a girl has to improvise, the other
girls dance and the young men stand still.[1004] This universal
improvising power must be put in the clearest possible light, in order
to show that the formula of exceptional bucolic wit, rustic bard, simple
but noted singer of the countryside, as offset to the polished singer of
a better time and place, is utterly inadequate to explain the
beginnings, growth, and decline of what is called popular poetry.
Communal labour, of course, echoes in these improvisations as well as
communal satire and love. Until recent days, people in the Scottish
Highlands gathered at a farmer’s door on the first night of the year,
singing a few lines in Gaelic, while one of their number dragged a
cowhide and the rest beat time with sticks; in this fashion they marched
three times round the house. Then all “halt at the door, _and each
person utters an extempore rhyme_, extolling the hospitality of the
landlord.”[1005] Workmen in Dunkirk[1006] still improvise verses to a
favourite tune, singing the chorus with great energy:—

Ali, alo, pour Maschero!
Ali, ali, alo,—

and in solo, improvised then and there, a line such as,—

Il boit le vin et nous donn’ de l’eau,—

with another choral “ali, ali, alo.” In fact, when one comes to a
certain class of peasant life, improvisation is as universal a “gift” as
it is among the savages, and as it was by general consent of
ethnologists[1007] among all primitive folk. For a glimpse at the past,
Cædmon is evidently a case of improvisation—it was expected of the
merest hind, one sees—lifted to literary performance. When Anglo-Saxon
laws[1008] say a priest must not get drunk and “turn gleeman or
ale-bard,” they mean that he is not to improvise convivial songs, and
they have no reference to the professional minstrel; he is to resist a
common temptation and refuse a traditional duty of every reveller, much
like the duty of the Greek to make and sing his _skolion_ at the
banquet. So, again, it is inversion and perversion of the plain facts
when one thinks of Welsh _pennillion_ as scattered brands from the old
Eistedfodd fire; it is the growth of a professional class of bards out
of the general turn for improvising which is to explain the Eistedfodd,
and it is the survival of old and universal habit when Welshmen even now
sing one _pennill_ after another in rapid alternation. Professor
Schuchardt[1009] heard such a friendly contest not long ago, and was
struck by the close resemblance of these quatrains to the German
_schnaderhüpfl_ and the improvised stanzas of Italy. Improvisation is
the first step and not the last step in art; theories that the ballad is
a belated bit of art taken up by countryfolk after the lords of letters
have flung it aside,[1010] that songs of the people echo old opera tunes
and concert ditties, and all easy little _dicta_ of the sort, are
confuted by a study of comparative literature both in the genetic and in
the sociological phases of it. Peasants who make verse-combats their
source of entertainment might be regarded as imitating a troubadour
_débat_, if one did not consider how universal and primitive a custom
this is known to be. Eskimo song-duels are not borrowed from the
troubadours. Italian peasants might be said to derive their _strambotti_
from amœbean verse like that of Vergil, were it not for the fact that
Roman peasants loved and practised this sort of thing from the
beginning. As Horace says, speaking of the old breed of Roman,[1011]—

/# Fescennina per hunc inventa licentia morem versibus alternis
opprobria rustica fudit, libertasque recurrentes accepta per annos lusit
amabiliter ... #/

a festal and communal affair. This rustic communal interchange of satire
in improvised verses works up to the level of art not at first by aid of
the poets, but by singers of note, men who began to take a pride in
their special gift of improvisation, as will be shown in the following
pages. Meanwhile a specimen of the verse-contest under partly communal
conditions can be found in an Irish _carmen amoebacum_, as Mr. Hyde
calls it, improvised alternately by a guest and his hostess. The latter
has the hard end to carry, as she must finish the quatrain which the man
begins; and no wonder she yields, especially as the Blarney Stone has
evidently lent aid to her gallant visitor.[1012] It is clear, then, that
idyll and eclogue in degeneration are not to explain the verse-combats
whether of savages or even of peasants; the Roman and Oscan farmers
improvised such songs in their _satura_ and in their rough comedies,
innocent of all literary influences; and the Italian peasant of to-day
keeps up this custom wherever schoolmasters and other plagues of
civilization bide afar off and leave him to his own communal devices.
What Theocritus[1013] and Vergil did was to use these rude
improvisations as suggestion or even foundation for their art.[1014] For
rustic survivals these _strambotti_ and the _coplas_ of Spain, with
other quatrains of the sort, made in and for the dance throughout the
length and breadth of southern Europe,[1015] are less useful for
purposes of study in primitive song than the _schnaderhüpfl_ and the
_stev_, one German, the other Scandinavian, of northern lands. As to the
former, J. A. Schmeller’s brief account,[1016] made sixty years ago, is
still authoritative, though much has been written about these quatrains
since; most readable as well as most learned is the essay of Gustav
Meyer.[1017] Collections and discussions[1018] are plentiful; and it is
to be noted that the name of this sort of verse is not constant, being
now disguised as “songlet,” “dancer,” and the like, and now as
_rundâ_.[1019] Schmeller defines the _schnaderhüpfl_ as “a short song
consisting of one or two riming couplets, _but in any case of four
lines_, which is sung to certain local and traditional dance-tunes, and
is often improvised on the spot by the singer or dancer.” Singer _and_
dancer, of course, is the primitive form, and this as hendiadys: “the
singing dancer.” A typical quatrain of the sort, so far as this
consideration goes, comes from Vogtland:—

I and my Hans,
We go to the dance;
And if no one will dance,
Dance I and my Hans.

Hinterhuber[1020] describes the modern process; the waltz goes on
awhile, then in a pause the throng sings a few stanzas, then the dance
is resumed and youth after youth improvises, without ceasing, to a
traditional tune. “_They never sing the verses of local and popular
poets, but all is original._” What is of particular interest in this
process is the communal scene and occasion, mainly a village dance, the
traditional tune, the frequent chorus, and, against this background, the
individual performance of the singer. We seem to find here the point of
departure for artistic poetry; for in the actual quatrain one seldom
meets repetition, that inevitable note of the refrain and of the
fissiparous single song which detaches itself, as among savages, from
the refrain; and while the reapers’ song may be behind all this rude
lyric of the hills, it is no festal recapitulation of communal labour,
no echo of work or village triumph, that one hears, but rather the
personal sentiment, either erotic or defiant, of the individual singer.
Moreover it is always from one person and mainly to one person.
Nevertheless, it must have dance, throng, communal conditions through
and through, or it is not the _schnaderhüpfl_. So interesting a case as
this excuses some breadth and detail in the treatment of it.

The home of the _schnaderhüpfl_ is centred in the Bavarian Alps,
spreading thence in many directions and to some remote districts, which
may all be found described in the careful summary of Gustav Meyer; the
concern now is not with the vogue but with the thing itself. It is
slowly degenerating and even disappearing, in spite of its tenacity, its
vigour, and the love for it felt by the peasants of those conservative
regions. As with the rural refrain, so here, lewd fellows of the baser
sort lay hold upon it as the communal and universal character of it
lapses; near Weimar one may still hear peasants singing these quatrains
in a kind of emulation, but the frankly erotic has become licentiously
rotten. Here and there, however, it lives in its old estate, but by a
very feeble tenure; singing societies, friends from the city, concert
tunes, what not, are hounding it from its last retreats. The quatrains
now gathered are mainly traditional, not freshly improvised like those
of earlier days, and it is interesting to note how many variants can be
found of one theme. Direct borrowing occurs, of course; but a more
frequent process is the use of a popular initial line which is continued
in varying fashion into a corresponding variety of verses. Something
like this, but not really the same thing, is or was common in cheap
theatrical exhibitions, where some catching but meaningless refrain
introduces a series of local “hits.” The _schnaderhüpfl_, however, has a
far more dignified way, reflecting a nobler mood whether of joy or of
grief. Thus a pair of quatrains, perhaps amœbean in origin, from near
Salzburg:[1021]—

When it’s cold in the winter,
And snow-tempests whirl,
How cozy and warm
In the room of my girl!

When it’s cold in the winter,
Go warm you a while;
And the love that is old
Cannot easily spoil.

Close to the amœbean, and with two lines essentially the same, are
these,[1022] in mild satire:—

No mountain so high[1023]
But the chamois can pass,
And no youngster on earth
Can be true to his lass.

No mountain so high
But the chamois climbs over,
And no girl is so fair
But she’ll take to a lover.

This is improvisation on crutches. Often, however, the standing line has
variations; for example:[1024]—

No sea without water,
No wood without tree,
And no night when I sleep
Without dreaming of thee.

No night without star,
And no day without sun,
And no heart in the world
But beats for some one.

But we are nearing the “keepsake” and “annual” tone; it is well to hold
the dance in plain sight and hearing, where one gets either the mood of
Eros:[1025]—

O sweetheart, be wiser,
And dance with no tailor,—
Dance only with me,
And my love is for thee!—

or the mood of Anteros:—

I thought you were pretty;
It’s false, I declare;
You’re goitred and crooked,
A girl with red hair,—

one specimen out of many, but quite sufficient, for that lyrical
exchange of compliments at the dance which has satisfied the sense of
humour in rustic and even savage communities everywhere; a nearer echo,
even, of the dance, in the spirit of the Miller of the Dee, is in this
quatrain:—

I’ve a cow and a calf
And a donkey, all three;
And what do I care
Who the leader[1026] may be?

So the dancing youth, at Innsbrück, flinging his money to the musicians
for a good turn, likes to proclaim to the throng his own self, not
forgetting his guild:—

What needs has a hunter?
A hunter has none,
Save a girl with black eyes,
And a dog, and a gun.[1027]

Or a girl proclaims her lover’s prowess:[1028]—

My lover’s a rider,
A rider is he;
His horse is the kaiser’s,
The rider’s for me.

So, too, the rude compliment:—

You girl with the black eyes
And chestnut-brown hair,
When you look at me so,
I turn fool, I declare.

Easy and silly, one says. Precisely. Easy because made by everybody and
still close to the repeated refrain of the throng, and silly in the old
meaning of simple and plain. All the great lyric poets know that they
must be silly in this sense, or they are mere ink and paper, divorced
from life and the lilt of communal song; Goethe, Burns, Heine, will tell
that tale plainly enough, and let one compare Matthew Arnold’s _Geist’s
Grave_, not to speak of Wordsworth’s and Landor’s triumphs, with the
genuine pathos but irritating intricacy of T. E. Brown’s _Aber
Stations_. Perhaps this bit from Salzburg[1029] shows the improvisation,
still simple to a fault, working up to the note which one demanded for
real poetry:—

My heart is a clock,
And it stops now and then;
But a kiss from my lassie
Can start it again!

Or with a little pressure on the form, with hint of art, this from
Steiermark:[1030]—

You are fair, you are dear,
But you are not my own;
You’d be fairer yet, dearer yet,
Were you my own!

Familiar as a source of quatrains is the youth pleading or querulous
outside of the fair one’s window, and the maid doubtful or scornful
within; there are a few English fragments of this sort which are printed
in Chappell,[1031] and some are still heard in the rural parts. The
Salzburg youth pleads thus:[1032]—

Ah, love, lift the latch,—
Here the wind is so bleak;
With thee in the house there
How cozy and sweet!

From this, with hundreds of the sort, runs a lyrical path, if one could
but trace it, to the elaborate ode of Horace,[1033] imitated, of course,
from the Greek, and its type long become the conventional treatment of
an unconventional situation, but no doubt at the start expanded from
shorter and more vivid songs of “the excluded lover,” of which one finds
a scrap in the other and more famous ode on the courtesan’s old age:—

Audis minus et minus iam
“_Me tuo longas pereunte noctes,
Lydia, dormis?_”[1034]

One has heard the Salzburg youth; and the Salzburg maid is explicit in
her reply:[1035]—

Go away from my window,
And leave me alone;
The door I’ll not open
However you moan,

a striking contrast to the complacency of a _schnaderhüpfl_, said to be
one of the oldest recorded, taken down by Tobler at Appenzell, in 1754:—

Mine, mine, mine, O my love is fine,
And to-night he shall come to me;
Till the clock strikes eight, till the clock strikes nine,
My door shall open be.

But one must stay by the dancing throng, the rivalry of the singers, the
question and answer, a succession of stanzas thus tending to group about
a theme given by the occasion and kept in mind by a constant suggestion
of rime and repeated or slightly varied verses; from all this it is
highly probable that one will learn something of the communal origins of
lyric poetry. Thus there is nothing immediate or suggestive of the dance
in a detached quatrain with question and answer like this:[1036]—

Why crying, my pretty,
By the tree there alone?
Why should I not cry
When my sweetheart is gone?

But the dance and the throng are not far away from saucy bits of another
type:[1037]—

Black-eyed and bright one,
Were I not the right one
For you of them all ...
If I loved you at all?

Or this:—

You lass with the black eye,
Now leave me alone;
I’m not your Darby,
And you’re not my Joan.

Similarly there comes from Carinthia a challenge of youth to youth, with
audible lilt of the dance, too often prelude to a grim struggle not in
Touchstone’s version of the code, but based on Touchstone’s theory of
“mine own”:—

You will not, you will not my lassie be loving,
You will not, you will not a simpleton be;
You’ll have to, you’ll have to go find you another,
You know well, you know well my lass is for me!

What now is to prevent these quatrains, whether in question and answer,
or in a succession of related and varied harpings on one theme, to form
a little poem, a lyric? Professor Brandl says it does not so happen, as
if solitude and paper and emotion at second hand always had to be in the
case; facts, however, say that the process is not only probable in
theory but definitely before one on the record. To begin with, a
quatrain of undoubted communal origin, a genuine _schnaderhüpfl_, often
finds its way into a folksong; so with this from Alsace:[1038]—

’Tis not so long ago it rained,
The trees are dripping yet;
And I had, I had a lover once,
I would I had him yet.

There is a pretty little English ballad called _The Unquiet
Grave_,[1039] which begins in the same tone:—

The wind doth blow to-day, my love,
And a few small drops of rain;
I never had but one true-love,
In cold grave she was lain....

and the ballad goes on with a dialogue between the lover and his dead
sweetheart.[1040] On the other hand, amœbean forms of the
_schnaderhüpfl_ could easily lead to such alternate stanzas as one finds
in the pretty ballad, common in France, to which Child supplies “a
base-born” English cousin, _The Twa Magicians_,[1041] with a catching
refrain suggestive of the dance. So plain is the connection between
these _schnaderhüpfl_, the _stev_ of Norway, all similar isolated
quatrains, and the actual songs of situation, question, and answer, that
Landstad declared for the quatrains as _débris_ of longer poems. But
Gustav Meyer[1042] is surely right in his energetic rejection of this
way of looking at the process; his proof seems convincing to a degree.
Nobody will say that the artistic lyric as we have it, or even the later
communal ballad, is made by direct union of scattered stanzas; but it
seems clear enough that these isolated quatrains furnish the material
for such poems, and that part of the process could be achieved in the
grouping of quatrains improvised about a common subject and on a
communal occasion. Those repeated questions why the forsaken lass is
crying, still echo in a lyric like Scott’s _Jock of Hazeldean_:—

Why weep ye by the tide, lady,
Why weep ye by the tide?

and it is demonstrable that improvised quatrains give a situation, and
so group themselves into a little poem; Meyer[1043] quotes such a song
of two stanzas which has been made in this way, and yet could be easily
foisted upon Eichendorff or some poet of the sort:—

My lover has come,
And what did he bring?
For the evening a kiss,
For my finger a ring.

The ring it is broken,
The love is all gone,
And out of the window
The kisses have flown.[1044]

A little more circumstance, a touch of nature, a touch or two of art,
and out of the question and answer in improvised quatrains comes a
ballad, with the help of that neglected but so unjustly neglected
refrain, for which notice has been demanded already as for an important
communal element in poetry. So one might guess the origins of the pretty
ballad of the sickle:[1045] given a traditional refrain of the reapers,
and a couple of _schnaderhüpfl_ improvised in the familiar strain of
question and answer, and why not such a poem?

_I heard a sickle rustling,
Rustling through the corn;
I heard a maid, had lost her love,
A weeping all forlorn._

“O let the sickle rustle!
I care not how it go;
For I have found a lover
Where clover and violets blow!”

“And hast thou found a lover
Where clover and violets blow,
’Tis I am weeping lonely,
And all my heart is woe!”

_O rustle, sickle, rustle,
And sound along the corn!
I heard a maid, had lost her love,
A weeping all forlorn._

No stress, of course, is to be laid on this particular case, which
simply serves to show how unquestioned improvisation of quatrains on one
of the little tragedies common in rural life could be combined with the
traditional refrain of a reapers’ dance, and so pass into popular lyric.

Often this making of a lyric calls in the aid of repetition, and an
iterated line serves as thread to tie the quatrains together; such poems
have been noted already,[1046] and were called more or less artificial.
But they certainly suggest now and then the improvisation of quatrains
at the dance, and belong there originally; a clear case may be given
from Steiermark.[1047]

To thee I’ve gone often
So happy and gay;
To thee I’ll go never,—
Too long is the way.

Too long is the way,
And the wood is too thick;
God keep you, my sweetheart,
I wish you good luck!

I wish you good luck,
And all blessings at need,—
For the times when you loved me
I thank you indeed![1048]

Gustav Meyer has followed this combination of quatrains into a popular
song,[1049] perhaps sprung from improvised collaboration, or else
rivalry, at the dance, with a pretty but cynical stanza added in the
process of oral tradition,—itself a quatrain heard singly in Tyrol,
while the others, also sung separately, seem to be of Swabian origin.
The song may follow as a farewell to these _schnaderhüpfl_, now rapidly
passing into a memory of simpler days.

When the Dingelstädt bells ring,
The street seems to shake;
And I wish you good luck
For another fine mate.

And I wish you good luck,
And all blessings at need;
For the times when you loved me
I thank you indeed.

The times when you loved me
Need give you no pain,
No thousand times shall you
Think on me again.

A little bit loving,
A little bit true,
And a little bit faithless,—
What else could you do?

“The most genuine of all folksongs, and almost the only kind which is
still made,” as E. H. Meyer says of it, this _schnaderhüpfl_ is a single
strophe of four lines,[1050] complete in itself, always
improvised—though it often becomes traditional—and always in the native
dialect; it is not a fragment of some older and longer song, but rather
lends itself to combination into a popular lyric of oral
tradition.[1051] Careful comparison shows that similar quatrains,
probably of similar origin in the dance, occur not only in Welsh, in
Italian, French, and Spanish, in Lithuanian, in Hungarian, in Roumanian,
Greek, Russian, Polish, everywhere in European speech, but even in
Syrian, in Malay, and such distant languages. It is known in Chinese.
Most closely related to it are the _stev_ of Norway, of which
Landstad[1052] gives a small collection in his book of Norwegian
ballads. Granting that the real _stev_ must be improvisation, he is too
quick to connect them with the old scaldic poetry and with earlier and
longer poems, regarding these quatrains—he hesitates, however, in
stating the case—as wreckage of ancient ballads and once an effort of
the bard. The theory of _débris_, thus tentatively asserted, is
successfully answered by Gustav Meyer, as it is by a consideration of
the _schnaderhüpfl_ quoted in these pages; and it fares no better here
than it does when applied to Italian _strambotti_ and the artistic work
of Theocritus and Vergil. Indeed, Landstad’s own account of the _stev_
confutes his theory about them. Making these quatrains, he says,[1053]
was once a universal social custom, and lingers even yet.[1054] His
picture of the peasants gathered for a winter evening’s amusement,
guests and especially the older people sitting at tables which run along
the walls, men at one end, women at another, while the young people
dance in the middle of the room; the “drinking” staves sung as the ale
cups go round, where women often answer to rough but jolly quatrains
from the other end of the tables, and where every person must sing his
stave; the rude compliments and vivacities of the dance: all this points
to a survival of primitive custom. Traditional verses often serve to
open the contest nowadays, but improvisation begins with the personal
combat, and the fun grows fast. These older staves have a standing
refrain for the second and fourth lines of the quatrain;[1055] but the
modern kind are like the _schnaderhüpfl_ and are improvised throughout.
A touch of “sentiment and reflection” is not unusual; for
example:[1056]—

I know where to look for my bridal mirth,—
In a coffin black deep down in the earth;
I know where my bride-bed soon shall stand,—
Deep in the earth in the grit and sand.

Verse of this sort points to the improvisations already treated in part
under the _vocero_[1057] and to the songs which go with refrains of
labour, not so much the swift and jovial verses of flax-beaters and
other workers in bands, as the often tender and melancholy songs of
women grinding at the mill.[1058] But enough has been said and quoted to
show that improvisation, as it detaches itself from communal refrains,
tends to be individual, sentimental, reflective, and so artistic and
lyrical in the modern sense. The quatrain sung by youth to maiden in the
dance is still communal in its connotation; detached, it smacks less and
less of the public occasion, tries a deeper note of sentiment, has more
and more of the reflective and confidential; so one can come to the
mingling of passion and art in an ode of Sappho, in a lyric of Burns.
Moreover, parallel with this change of quality, runs a process of
grouping into songs. The scattered traditional stanzas, once improvised
as isolated quatrains, gather at first in pairs,—the prevailing type is
question and answer,—to which a stanza or two is added explanatory of
the situation and the season, often with that refrain which is
recognized as belonging with the original occasion; and this is the
communal lyric, or, as it is called in a stricter use of the term,
folksong. Henceforth, the difference between a folksong and a lyric is
mainly between oral, traditional origin and the deliberate and artistic
composition of recorded literature.

This study of the beginnings of lyric has dealt mainly with sentiment,
hostile or erotic, as expression of an individual, slowly detaching
itself from expression and interests of the clan. But reflection,
another note of what passes now for lyric poetry,[1059] the element of
thought, comes into poetic expression just as sentiment comes, and seems
to be of equal date. As the individual erotic song may go back to the
concerted dances, cries, gestures, of a whole horde, at periods of
sexual excitement which were probably once of uniform occurrence, so the
reflective note of a lyric poem could be traced to early communal
thinking. “Communal thinking” is perhaps a vile phrase; comment on
doings and interests of the horde, as distinguished from those chanted
verses merely descriptive of the event or fact, ought to be less open to
objection. As a feat of primitive epic, the statement of what the horde
has just accomplished, whether in hunting or in war, has been found to
be a constant element in the songs sung by savages to their communal
dance; while gesture, shout, recapitulation in cadenced movement, of the
same feat, has the dramatic note. Now it is well known that little
sentences detached from the story or acting of the event, but suggested
by it, belonging to it, are often sung by these same savages, now in
chorus, and now in individual improvisation. “Good hunting to-day!” sang
the Botocudos; which is a very different matter from particular
recapitulation of the hunt, as in a buffalo-dance or the like. These
sentences, like gnomic poetry at large, are of most ancient date;[1060]
but it is clear that they soon passed under control of the acute
thinker, and shunned the fellowship of choral song:—

Einsam zu denken,—das ist weise;
Einsam zu singen,—das ist dumm.

It is also clear that this element of thought and meditation would help
very materially the change from a sung to a recited verse, and hasten,
wherever it could act upon poetry, the disintegration of communal song.
Of course, an alliance with sentiment was inevitable; the acute thinker
deserted verse for prose and science, and with the lapse of communal
singing and the rise of solitary reading, lyric came to mean three
things: a subconscious harmony of rhythm, legacy of the consenting
throng; sentiment, as the expression of individuality, fostered by this
confidence between solitary poet and solitary reader; and reflection,
which is now the comment of the individual on the doings of the world as
a whole, on the burden and the mystery, that final horror, expressed by
Leconte de Lisle, at the idea of unending human woe,—

Le long rugissement de la vie éternelle.[1061]

This at one end of the chain, and the Botocudos’ choral reflection,
“Good hunting to-day!” at the other; a link midway, perhaps, is the half
individual, half choral expression of pity which those African women put
into their song about Mungo Park, and dwelt upon in their refrain.

So much for the beginnings of modern lyric poetry, as an individual and
artistic expression, compared with the lyric of a communal dance, the
iterated refrain of a throng. “Modern,” of course, is a relative word;
and the whole process has been hinted rather than described. Holding
fast, however, to the facts of earliest and rudest improvisation among
savages, holding fast to the facts of universal improvisation as
observed among European peasants, and to the making of single songs out
of groups of these improvised stanzas, we are warranted in asserting
that the process is one from communal to individual conditions, and
begins on a level of general, if not equal, ability to make and sing
verse, preferably in the form of a single couplet or quatrain, which is
at first subordinate to the chorus of the throng, then meets it on even
terms, and at last, losing its general origins and its particular
individuality and coming to be part of an artistic poem, drives the
discredited chorus from the field.

As regards epic poetry, the relations of the ballad and the choral
refrain have been studied in preceding pages. This ballad, or narrative
song, holds far more closely than the lyric to conditions of communal
making. It abhors sentiment and reflection, for it keeps to the
impersonal, public path; it is averse even from the arts of variation
save in the form of incremental repetition, and it clings to the
communal refrain and to the communal dance. For this reason the ballad
is without rival among recent forms of poetry as a field for the study
of surviving communal elements; joined with the materials of ethnology,
it gives the soundest reasons for constructing that curve of evolution
which marks the steady increase of lyric, individual, emotional, and
reflective characteristics in poetic progress. With its relations to the
epic there is here no space to deal in any satisfactory way.[1062] The
epic, however, is now conceded by every one to belong to times which by
no means can be confused with the beginnings of poetry; M. Tarde and his
theory that literature begins with a “great book” like the Bible or the
Homeric poems,[1063] can hardly expect an answer on any serious and
scientific ground. The narrative song or ballad goes back, of course, to
that universal gift of people in low levels of culture, the power to
turn a contemporary event into song, into the rhythm of the communal
dance, as is still done by Samoans and by nearly all savage tribes. All
was momentary in this initial act. The rhythm was there in cry and beat
of foot; the event was there; and the bridge of articulate words to
connect these two elements was of the shortest and simplest kind. The
variation, the incremental repetition, are obvious advances; but it is
worth while to note that the almost endless repetition of a verse or
two, describing some event or situation close at hand, is diminished in
corresponding ratio to the growing power of tradition, as if the memory
of yesterday’s poetry, of last year’s poetry, gradually took the place
of this contemporary repetition,—the “stretched metre” coming in course
of time to be the “antique song.” Everywhere among savages, when the
improvised song at feast and dance finds favour, it is passed down as
part of the traditional stock. And so one comes to that state of things
where, as Ten Brink has put it so well, song oscillates between
production and reproduction, that is, between improvisation and memory.
This is the period of the early epic. When deliberation and conscious
art come in, and yet the old alliance of spontaneous production and
living memory is not broken up, then is the golden age of epic verse;
then Homer, whoever or whatever he may be, can work out the perfect
union of art and nature.

Turning to the drama, one asks whether improvisation can also be found
in this form of poetry, taking it, as in the case of epic and lyric, out
of communal control into the province of individual art. Aristotle has
answered the question in that interesting account of Greek drama quoted
above; and he has distinctly affirmed the passage from a communal origin
in a wild chorus through rude improvisations up to the triumphs of
Hellenic tragedy. Nietzsche, in a book also quoted above at considerable
length, has studied this transition as a contrast of the Dionysian and
Apollinian elements of poetry. Latin drama, of course, is a copy of the
Greek; but the imitations of a foreign and finished model were preceded
among the Romans by rude improvisations at the festivals of the
countryfolk, where anything like copy and importation must be ruled out
of the case.[1064] In Italy this rude improvisation of comedy lingered
later in survivals that were of course mingled with many literary
influences; so too the rough drama of the fairs in France,[1065] the
popular plays in Germany, and even mysteries and moralities as played by
the guilds, retained much of the old communal character and were long at
the mercy of improvised speeches, however fixed and intricate the plot
and scenes. Many of these survivals—such as the mummers’ plays—became
also fixed in the words, but that was when the plays had gone to fossil
and the custom itself lingered as by a sort of inertia. Italian comedy
for some time had a dialogue “mainly extemporaneous”;[1066] and as these
plays grew into urban favour, the improvised dialogue was graced by a
higher tone and a more dramatic purpose, lasting almost into the
eighteenth century. The _commedia dell’ arte_, in other words, is simply
the improvised play of peasants passing into artistic and professional
control, but still holding to certain communal features.[1067] The
realistic elements of dialect, satire of certain professions, and the
like, point back to the satiric quatrains and songs at the dance; and
the dance is always at hand in farce and low comedy down to this day. In
Spain the _coplas_ took a dramatic turn; improvised question and answer,
with the situation to fit, easily became a kind of drama, although the
records are by no means full or accurate, and other influences played a
conspicuous part.[1068] The dance and play, described in _Don
Quixote_,[1069] at Camacho’s wedding, may be a “beautified” country mask
with more or less extemporaneous songs and dialogue. The main point
about these popular plays is their testimony that the drama passed from
communal chorus,—dancing, song, gesture, and refrain,—by the way of
improvisation, into its new estate of art; even under Elizabeth the
theatre was no stranger to extemporaneous dialogue, and that pathetic
appeal, in which, perhaps, Shakspere more completely drops his “irony,”
his objective mask, than anywhere else, not only testifies to a nobler
conception of the drama, but to the clinging abuse. It was not the
clowns alone who spoke more than was set down for them; though their
fooling was most hurtful because they made jests offhand with persons in
the audience,[1070] and sang irrelevant doggerel verse. Some of these
verses have perhaps crept into the text of _Lear_. Often, however, the
jester had full license to entertain the crowd by a piece long known as
a jig. Tarlton, the famous jester,[1071] “was most celebrated for his
extemporal rhyming and his jigs,” which were a combination of improvised
song and a dance, accompanied by tabor and pipe. But the jig was also
used for songs in dialogue, with a dramatic leaning; “a proper new Jigg,
to be sung dialogue wise, of a man and woman that would needs be
married,” is preserved among the Roxburghe Ballads. Amplified a little,
the jig was carried across the water by English comedians, and meeting
similar native forms of more or less extemporaneous verse, with dance
and farce, became the _singspiel_.[1072] But the improvisation of one’s
lines to fit the “plot” or _scenario_ of far nobler performance was
common on the English stage,[1073] and may have had Shakspere’s
indulgence if not his sympathy; Von Stein[1074] goes so far as to say
that the formal character of Shakspere’s dramatic work is “a fixed
mimetic improvisation,”—whatever that may mean. Of the fact, however,
there is no question. Tom Nash, in his _Lenten Stuffe_,[1075] telling of
the trouble he had from that “imperfit embrion of my idle houres, the
Isle of Dogs,” explains this description of his play by saying that
having “begun but the induction and first act of it, the other foure
acts, without my consent or the least guesse of my drift or scope, by
the players were supplied,”—a source of mischief for all hands. It was
from Italy that the custom came to improvise even tragic speeches; and
the passages in the _Spanish Tragedy_,[1076] where Hieronymo is
preparing his play, show what was expected:—

It was determined to have been acted
By gentlemen and scholars too;
Such as could tell what to speak....
Here, my lords, are several abstracts drawn,
For each of you to note your parts,
And act it, as occasion’s offered you.

Italy, to be sure, may have influenced the habit of improvisation in
formal drama; but the custom is a survival rather than a growth, and the
statement that Sir Thomas More in his youth—the tradition is preserved
also in a tragedy which bears More’s name as the subject—showed
extraordinary power of improvisation in a play, must not be taken[1077]
as indicating a tendency in Henry VIII’s time which came to be a
widespread habit under Elizabeth. Such skill of improvisation in plays
diminishes as artistic and deliberate drama comes to the fore. So with
the mask. At first a dance, with songs and improvised dialogue for the
maskers, it offered great opportunities for artistic work; Ben Jonson
and Milton can tell how the process went on, and with what results.

Improvisation in the drama of comparatively modern times could be
followed into remoter places, for example into Persia, where the
comedies are mainly in extemporaneous dialogue. Even in Tahiti what
passes for drama is improvised;[1078] and all evidence makes for this
state of things in the primitive play. The earliest form of the drama
consists mainly of action and gesture in the dance,[1079] so as to
repeat a contemporary event of communal interest,—war and the chase, or,
with farming folk, and more in reminiscence, the doings of seedtime and
harvest; it is clear that the rude songs and shouts that went with step
and gesture[1080] and mimicry must have been improvised. In late stages
of tribal life, certain dances and the songs that go with them become
absolutely fixed, a ritual calling for unusual care in the learning of
it; such is the American buffalo dance.[1081] But in the earliest drama
dance, gesture and choral song were the main elements, and the variation
from those repeated shouts took, so it would seem, the path of short
improvised and individual utterance. Those improvised stanzas, to be
sure, which plagued the frustrated Faroe fisher, dancing perforce to his
own shame before the dancing and singing throng, led to a narrative
song, a ballad, and so in time might lead to an epos; but in the making
of the stanzas, along with mimicry and dance, there is more of the
dramatic than of the epic element.[1082] The improvised song-duel, of
which so much has been said, is incipient drama; and all those songs
sung in cadence by groups of workers in the wine-press, at reaping,
pulling, even when marching, and rushing into the fight, have the
dramatic trait so far as they go with the appropriate action. So, too,
the festal recapitulation of labour, with its appropriate songs and
movement, would lend itself to dramatic improvisation more easily and
hence earlier than to narrative; the art of telling a tale, as may be
learned from ethnology as well as from the observation of children’s
games, is an accomplishment which comes much later than the art of
mimicry and rude improvisation at the dance. The improvising singer and
dancer detaches himself from the throng to give an isolated part of the
action,[1083] and may put it into words to suit his gesture and steps;
or two persons may dance, gesticulate, and sing alternately in what
answers dramatically to the amœbean song,—an actual fight may have found
this kind of recapitulation at a very early stage of the poetic art.
True, as was noted above, Wallaschek will not allow that this primitive
form of drama had anything to do with poetry; it was pantomime, he says,
without words, like the mimic dances of the Damaras, the Fans, and other
savage tribes. But it is beyond question that rude songs are often sung
along with the acting and the mimicry; and every consideration[1084]
makes it probable that the pantomime pure and simple, with distinct
repression of the desire to give vent to the feelings by shout and word
and song, is an artistic not to say artificial development[1085] of the
original drama along the lines of a painful, concentrated imitation, and
is almost a professional affair. Then there is the “speaking pantomime,”
so called.[1086] In short, the communal origin of the drama was surely
where Wagner declared it to be, in a combination of gesture, dance, and
song, the whole man active “from top to toe,” and also, one may add,
active as a member of a thoroughly and concertedly active throng. Even
the animal and bird dances, favourite among savage tribes, and supposed
to be pure pantomime, have the imitated cries of the model in time with
the dance; and this is a kind of poetry, lingering in refrains like
Walther’s _tandaradei_. More than this, it is fairly certain that word
and gesture[1087] went together in the early stages of speech. As
Letourneau points out,[1088] the word was too uncertain to stand by
itself, and needed the bodily movement that went with it;[1089] while
the sounds instinctively uttered in tune to the cadence of labour and
play were felt to lend force to the dramatic representation and fill out
the mere suggestion of gesture. An artistic series of movements
alone,[1090] an artistic series of words alone, would be a later
triumph; improvisation of new words to the traditional cadence, and to
the given, and in a sense obligatory gestures, would mark early progress
in the making of this primitive kind of poetry.

Drama, then, in the widest sense, is the “imitation” of life by means of
remembered and repeated movements, induced by the feeling of social
elation, and made possible by the cadence of social consent in the
dance, accompanied by sounds which instinctively follow this cadence of
the action and find their stay as well as their suggestion in the
regular recurrence of rhythm. It must have followed hard upon the
discovery of consent in common step and common cry, which, if one
choose, one may call primitive lyric; the other may pass as primitive
drama. In perspective they seem almost contemporaneous in origin. The
question of priority, debated with so much warmth, thus becomes a
question of names, and not a very important question at best. It is a
matter of differentiation and growth from a common origin, which may be
described as dramatic or lyric, according as one understands the terms,
and which certainly had both elements in it. It was rhythmic, and it was
an outlet for communal emotion; it was imitated action, with momentary
and spontaneous suggestions; and it can be called narrative or epic only
by unwarranted stretching of the words, though the slightly reminiscent
factor in the case may be called an epic germ. Finally, the
differentiation and growth from this communal poetry of a primitive
stage of culture must have been mainly the work of improvisation, or
individual assertion, acting on the communal elements, and leading to
disintegration and new combinations in processes which varied with the
conditions of race and environment.[1091] One suggestive fact, however,
is to be noted. The drama, in a broad sense, is the beginning of poetry;
it is also the end and perfection of the art, and this by a communal
reaction. There are centripetal as well as centrifugal forces; if the
individual is forever breaking away from the throng and carrying poetry
into lonely paths of deliberation, sentiment, artistry, the throng,
mainly by that subtle suggestion of consent in rhythm, is forever
calling the poet back to his communal point of departure. We have seen
how slowly the communal beginnings of poetry,—to us like geological
periods, because they have sent down to us no records, and only a few
hints of their existence,—yielded even to the tentative progress of
individual art, and what long ages must have contented themselves with
songs of the horde and the iteration of the refrain in a tribal dance;
it is equally true that the communal instinct still summons poetry back
from its hiding-place with the poet in that “ivory tower,” and bids it
tread the ways of open and crowded life. In the drama poetry may,
indeed, find its final form, as Goethe declared, but it is also coming
back in some degree to the instincts and habit of its prime; it is
recalling its forces from the scattered and lonely paths of individual
thought for a distinctly communal reaction. Even the opera, the
ballet,[1092] though in less marked degree, show this reactionary
communal spirit. The communal elements of action, dance, music,
scene,[1093] all of which Aristotle had reckoned along with drama and
epos as a part of poetry, are thus variously restored. Narrative is
banished in favour of the plot, which at least seems to be natural
action; deliberate lyric effort, the solitary thought, is rejected for
what at least seems to be improvised or spontaneous speech of the
actors; dancing and festal expression may or may not be present, and so
with music, but the rhythm is deputy for the cadence of dancing feet;
and finally there is what seems to be the real world of men, the scene.
These realistic effects, these chariot-races and locomotives on the
stage, whatever one despises most heartily in the degenerate drama of
the day, are the reaction from excesses of subjective poetry toward
actual life and the tendency toward communal conditions which art always
shows when it deals with a public and abandons the confidences of author
and reader.[1094] It is perhaps too much to assert that the drama was
done to death through excess of that “lyric cry,” and by a tendency
which developed character at the expense of action; but the counter
movement has been toward the mass and rude effects of force. In the eyes
of some uncritical folk, the lack of distinct individual characters, the
effect of a homogeneous mob of actors, the crude but vigorous course of
events, in early histories and miracle plays, would make better claim to
the title of drama than the subtile characterization of Shakspere and
the humours of Jonson; _arma_, they might maintain, should come before
_virum_ for the playwright; and if any comfort can be gathered from our
deplorable modern drama, it may possibly lurk in this idea of the return
to communal art. In any case, it is the price which our age has to pay
for the piercingly subjective character of its lyric poetry. Epic, in
any objective and vital form, has vanished, and the drama, desperate in
its struggle for life, turns to demos as to a long-forgotten friend.

Before one leaves the beginnings of poetry, its earliest disintegration
in point of treatment and theme, and goes back to that improvising poet,
in order to glance again at the beginnings of artistry and the decline
of communal power, one has two elements of the main subject with which
it is well to come to terms. Besides the subject-matter of poetry, there
is its style, its form; between the style, or figurative element in
poetry on one hand, and on the other hand, its material divisions of
drama, epos, lyric, is that vast and ill-defined province assigned to
myth. Now claimed as metaphor, and offspring of earliest language, now
as drama of nature, now as the tale told by primitive fancy in response
to primitive curiosity, now as the lyric or hymn which embodied man’s
first religious impulse, this fugitive and exquisite creature has had as
many masters, has been dragged over as many paths, and has kept as
unimpaired beauty, as that famous daughter of the soudan of Babylonia,
affianced to the king of Garbo. Of all these temporary masters none is
so comprehensive in his gallantry as A. W. Schlegel,[1095] who hails
myth as the source of poetry, of philosophy even, as the soul of
primitive language, as “nature in poetic robes,” and goes so far as to
say that modern physical science could easily be stated in terms of
ancient mythology. Myth, indeed, is such a wide word with Schlegel that
it covers the romances of Arthur and Charlemagne;[1096] and when one
reflects that folklore has since claimed its share of mythological
territory, while, on the other hand, brutal folk who speak for a new
euphemerism call myth an impudent baggage with no religion in her and
only a touch or so of poetry, the case is complicated. Over a path so
riddled with pitfalls one is not anxious to walk; but to treat the
beginnings of poetry without touching myth is out of the question, and a
few steps must be made if only to secure a point of view. We shall
consider myth in its relation to primitive verse, and shall then turn to
the kindred topic of early figurative language and poetical style.

Concerning the source and function and meaning of myths[1097] a long
battle has been waged, and noise of it is still ringing in our ears; but
the fiercer struggle seems just now to have come to a kind of truce, and
the warriors, as in that other contest over the origin of language,
appear to be lying on their arms. The more one knows of early
civilization, it would seem, the less one feels inclined to dogmatize
about the source of myths; while with regard to their meanings, that
exhilarating and harmless pastime, where scholar after scholar came
forward with his solution, where Bacon in older days turned classic myth
into the wisdom of the ancients, and where, in later times, Simrock gave
a _haec fabula docet_ for every shred of Germanic fancy and fable;[1098]
where Uhland, in his beautiful book on the Myth of Thor, blew one of the
most exquisite and iridescent bubbles that ever delighted the poetic eye
and broke at the touch of common sense; where Max Müller and his friends
converted the primitive Aryan now into a fellow of the prettiest and
most fanciful habit of mind, with his interest in sunsets, and stars,
and vanishing dewdrops, now into a resolute and saner Lear bent on
knowing the cause of thunder; a pastime, finally, in which even Jacob
Grimm, for all his “combining” powers, refused to join,—this mania for
the direct interpreting of myths has had its day and ceased to be. The
end came with the establishment of two facts, one negative and one
positive. Anthropology, ethnology, a close study of the history of
culture, of social institutions, of religion, led to the sound
conclusion that whatever else it might be, the mythology of early man
was not conterminous with the religion of early man;[1099] for religion
in those stages is chiefly a matter of ceremony and ritual forms.
Suppose a person ignorant of the rites of the Roman church undertaking
to get a notion of its ceremonies, and of the heart of its faith, by a
study of the _Legenda Aurea_, or any such body of tales! That was the
negative fact; the myth is not primitive religion, and is rarely
primitive creed. Again, anthropology, notably through its great exponent
Professor Tylor, established the positive fact that myths are due to a
kind of poetic faculty in primitive man, the habit of animating, or, in
modern phrase not quite accurate for early stages of culture, of
personifying what went on about him.[1100] Mr. Andrew Lang, while
following Professor Tylor in principle, has made room for the obscene,
the brutal, the silly, which can be found so plentifully in savage myth
and sporadically in the myths which we call classical. To these ways of
thinking came the sturdy Müllenhoff, and after him, Mannhardt, an avowed
student of customs and popular thought; with Mannhardt’s later work,
myth-guessing, in which he had once been as wild as any,[1101] came to
an end. It is now conceded that the source as well as the meaning of
most myths is veiled in the obscurity of early animistic processes,
while their later development belongs to the poet altogether. “I have
learned,” wrote Mannhardt[1102] to Müllenhoff, “to value poetical and
literary production as an essential factor in the formation of
mythology.” Indeed, it is not considering too curiously when
Burckhardt[1103] declares that the renaissance in Italy so thoroughly
revived the gods of old pagan belief, that poets made new myths in the
ancient spirit.

It is a great mistake, however, to infer with certain bold followers of
Mr. Herbert Spencer—the German Lippert, for example—that myths have
nothing to do with primitive religion and belong altogether to the
poetic or fantastic instinct. True, myths of the classic kind, barring
the names of god and goddess, were pretty well divorced from faith; but
Homer and Hesiod told tales unknown to the primitive worshipper of
Greece, and he had myths of his own. Schwartz, a valiant guesser, but
rational on certain lines, pointed out forty years ago[1104] that
perspective must be observed, and that the origin of a myth must be held
apart from its development; often, indeed, by a hint here and a survival
there, one can feel one’s way back from the graceful, celestial romance
to a rude myth with all the awe of belief upon it. It may be said with
confidence that early myth excluded mere tales of nature, drama of the
shifting seasons, the flash of sunlight on the waves, and all the
romance of blushing dawns and shepherded or wandering stars; these tales
of later origin belonged to the poet and his fantasy. Early man did not
go about commercing with the skies, nor did any spur of occasion put him
upon the telling of a natural process, duly observed, in terms of a
human history proportioned and duly recorded. That is a definite
poetical or allegorical process, and means that the mind has a clear
idea of two separate systems, and can hold apart the world of fancy and
the world of fact, welding them together in conscious purpose. It is
poetry,[1105] not primitive myth, which sees the heavens as the psalmist
saw them: _in them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun, which is as a
bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to
run a race_. Myth, indeed, may now and then lie at the heart of such
poetical achievement; but that elementary myth, the work of unconscious
animism, is rude and shapeless by comparison with this finer stuff.
Primitive myth is a block of marble with more or less resemblance to
some creature, a kind of fetish; poets come and carve it into definite
shape, individualize, idealize, polish; next is formed the group, the
celestial romance, figures as on the frieze of a temple, with the loves
and the quarrels of the gods; and then, last stage of all, allegorical
and satirical poets, a Lucian, a singer like him of the Norse
_Lokasenna_, make free with those fragments of myth where no awe of
belief can linger and hardly even the vital grace of imagination. In all
this coil but one stage has interest for us; what can be said of the
beginnings of poetry in their relation to the beginnings of myth?

A good test for the primitive stage of myth is first the necessity, not
the possibility of it, and secondly, the unconscious character of the
animating process. Dawn, starlight, and laughing waters put no stress of
questioning upon early man; but the bolt from a stormcloud which laid
low the sheltering tree, or struck down members of the horde, a nameless
Terror bursting out of the unknown, came in more questionable shape, and
must have found expression in those statements which a communal chorus,
as was seen in the case of the Botocudos, is fain to make about the fate
and doings of the horde itself. Mere ancestor-worship is not enough to
explain such a case;[1106] every analogy of human action fails in the
presence of this flash and roar and destruction; the unknown was there,
as with modern phrase—“it” thunders[1107]—and the statement, repeated in
indefinite chorus, had in it the awe and fear and yearning about the
unknown which still go a long way to make up the idea of religion. But
it was unconscious, this process of animism; before one consciously
attributes personality to a force of nature, one must have the two
distinct ideas before the mind, and for early man such a clear view was
out of the question. Moreover, the idea of a definite force, a definite
personality, hardly belongs to the primitive stage of myth; one must
look at environment[1108] and the social organization. It is known that
even the sacred bull, and still more the “father” of the spirits, the
chief god, reflect nomadic life under a leader; while the leaderless
horde is girt about with a horde of spirits, the “they” of primitive
worship corresponding to the “we” of the social group.[1109] In this
stage of culture only the horde itself, the social group, can be in the
case; poetic fancy on one side, ordered bands of deities, high and low,
with a supreme god over all, on the other side, must be excluded.
Earliest myth is simply communal emotion, in choral statement, provoked
by some overwhelming act of vague and unseen powers. Early poetry is
always “occasional”; what strikes, like this thunderbolt, into the life
of the horde,[1110] is a theme quite as solicitous as good hunting, or
the fight with rival clans, to fill a refrain with repeated statement of
fact, and, in time, to tempt the improvising soloist into a phrase of
wonder, awe, pity, propitiation. Here, then, is a common ground for the
beginnings of poetry and the beginnings of myth,[1111]—in communal,
choral statement. True, explanation of these doings of nature may be a
fertile source of myth in the later period when poetry and science are
allied in a search after causes; but it is clear that stating a fact is
a process anterior to any explanation of a fact. Is there not for modern
man himself a comfort in the lucid statement of things even before the
things are explained? The lawyer who states his case clearly has half
explained it and has prepared the jury to accept his explanation of the
facts. Scherer says that myth is due to some primitive genius who
listened to a thunderstorm, wished to explain it, and conjectured that
“the gods were fighting,”[1112] a theory adopted by the fellow-citizens
of this genius, who thus had “founded” a myth. But communal statement,
with unconscious animism in the terms of it,—communal, that is, in its
expression, and religious in its source,—is the only formula for early
myth which will agree with the conditions of primitive life. To the
cadence of the dance, in iterated refrain, the horde as a social group
took comfort in getting the facts into a coherent statement; to repeat,
in a rhythm which made repetition easy and coherence possible, that the
“they” in question had done things which the “we” were now recording,
was a process not far removed from the iterated statement that “we” had
found a good hunt, made a good catch, or what not. From the awful and
inevitable, this communal choral statement could pass to less
destructive doings; and from the pandemonium, the rout of spirits, step
by step with differentiation of the horde, with the rise of tribal
leaders, with the coming of an improvising singer, this statement could
pass to the pantheon[1113] and hierarchy of gods.

That myths of this sort, statements based on the feeling for animated
nature in its more obtrusive forms, were as early as the worship of
ancestral spirits, is denied by Mr. Herbert Spencer and his school, but
without good cause. It is illogical to affirm the beginnings of reason
and in the same breath to deny the beginnings of fancy. If
ancestor-worship, belief in “them,” was one of the earliest inferences
of the human mind, if one of the first conclusions which man made
outside the round of his daily struggle for food and safety was to
animate an unseen world, as early an act, earlier indeed, was to animate
the world he saw. Statements about the doings of an animated nature, a
horde of echoes, movements, violent activities, girdling the horde of
men, were thus in all probability the earliest form of myth. This
statement, however, had less of that scientific leaning than Scherer
would make one believe; childish fear of harm and childish hope of gain
is a more likely attitude of mind in primitive folk than childish
curiosity about causes. The choral statement, one may assume, took most
easily a reference to human needs and so became a hymn. The hymn is
essentially choral, and even under literary conditions implies a
congregation; the majesty and power of a real hymn like Luther’s is out
of all proportion to its merit as a poem. It is the source of the hymn
in a communal emotion, and the direction of it to unseen forces, that
give it this majesty; and the poorest words gain might from these
conditions alone. A rude hymn of the horde to those spirits unseen but
felt, was therefore the probable beginning of myth,—not a performance of
the shaman before a passive throng, and not a tale of celestial doings
invented by some early genius who took it upon him to pry into the
mystery of things. Of course there are fetish myths which have come to
be brutal and obscene, but were not brutal and obscene when they were
first formed;[1114] there are also myths invented in a later stage of
culture to account for a ritual or a belief[1115] come down from early
and obscure origins, often with something of the fetish in them, as is
probably the case with the myth of Rome and the wolf; and there are
crude tales, due to as crude scientific instinct, to account for
physical phenomena, popular everywhere and in all times down to the day
of Uncle Remus. But all evidence of ethnology, all the facts which have
served to trace the line of poetical evolution, go to make probable the
social and communal and choral beginnings of the myth which has the awe
of belief upon it. As might be expected, fragments of this old choral
refrain which bound the myth to the community and to its religious
emotion, have come down to us embedded in later and poetical myth; and
it has been shown that a refrain of grief[1116] for the loss or
departure of a god, demigod, hero, has often been made a proper name and
the nucleus for a new myth. This choral cry of the horde has great
interest for the student of myths; and if the etymology be probable
which makes the word “god” mean “one that is called upon,” here is more
beckoning that way. Heavier stress should be laid upon the choral hymn
as expression of emotion from a homogeneous horde of men toward a
homogeneous horde of spirits, and upon the dance and symbolic action
which went with the song, taking in time now a ritual and now a dramatic
guise.[1117] In other words, this choral hymn, danced and sung,—if one
will, danced and sung about some symbol of animated and superhuman but
by no means individualized or “personified” powers, and with
accompaniment of sacrifice, with festal recapitulation, even, of action
inspired by the help of these powers,—was on one hand the source of
religious ceremony, which later, in its mutilated and incomprehensible
refrains held so stubbornly in festal worship, with the worshipped
powers hovering about unseen, and, on the other hand, source of a
secular drama, where, as in Greece, only an altar remained as visible
hint of sacred origins, and only the intervention of gods and the
abiding sense of fate kept alive the old purpose of the hymn. This
chorus, dealing with the doings of spirits, like the chorus that dealt
with labour and hunt and communal experience at large, was also the
beginning of myths which, like the older refrain, fell under the power
of improvisation and so passed into poetic control, keeping pace with
the tribal development of hero, chieftain, conqueror, king, blending
with legend, and at last finding record in the epos.

The impression of natural forces upon man, and the reactionary process
which imposes man’s imagination upon natural forces, have another side;
they make up not only the material of poetry, but also its manner, its
style. The second process, when it animated nature with something like
human will, human passion, human fate, and while it did this with the
awe of belief upon it, has been seen to pass into myth. Roughly
speaking, one may say that the early and unconscious process is myth,
and the later, conscious process, when directed not to a statement or
story but only to a word or phrase, is the figure or trope of
personification. The first process, however, where human life is treated
in terms of nature, is conveniently known as metaphor, although
precision in the use of these terms is not so much observed as desired;
and metaphor, too, must be regarded as first an unconscious and then a
conscious process.

Myth and personification need no further comment, and we shall now
consider the metaphor as mainstay of poetical style; one word, however,
may be in place for an early and unconscious form of personification,
which deals with language rather than with fact, and so must be sundered
from myth—the grammatical gender of words.[1118] A bit of myth may lie,
of course, in those expressions which hover between the natural and the
grammatical gender, and is not always easy to explain from the primitive
point of view, however appropriate the choice may seem to a modern mind;
why is the sun feminine in all Germanic languages, and the moon
masculine? Day is masculine, night is feminine; earth seems always
feminine, and “mother” is no new epithet for her. Death, pestilence,
sickness, have personifications that are more than gender; Servians
think of the plague as a woman in white who steals upon her victims, and
to modern Greeks sickness is also a woman, blind and old, who feels her
way from house to house.[1119] But even now the process may be
unconscious, as one observes in languages like English, which have lost
their inflections and can give gender only by pronouns; Grimm’s
elaborate categories for the three genders are sadly baffled by the
habit which calls a ship a “man-of-war” and bids the bystander watch
“her” sail by.[1120] Again, there is transfer to reckon with; the first
name for an object, as will be shown presently to be the case with
metaphors, yields later to a name more precise; and when a ship, or the
like, is in question, motion and seeming life could give one vague name,
while later and nearer acquaintance found an appellation in technical
qualities. On the whole, it will be best if we leave gender to animism,
to incipient myth, unconscious metaphor, and whatever other forces went
to the making of words, and turn to metaphor itself.

To those who hold with the Abbé Dubos[1121] that poetic style is the
most important factor in differencing poetry from prose, and demands the
greatest genius in the poet, it may seem a hard saying to call the early
stage of figurative language unconscious metaphor. The habit of
describing primitive poetry in terms of modern verse imposes on these
early stages a teleological element quite foreign to the conditions
which ethnology and the sense of evolution compel one to assume for the
beginnings of such an art. Poetry, says Cardinal Newman, in his little
essay,[1122] has to adopt metaphorical language as “the only poor means
allowed for imparting to others its intense feelings,” which refuse “the
feebleness of ordinary words”; and with this _raison d’être_ for the
metaphor, one goes on to inquire how it is made. The transfer from a
literal to a figurative or metaphorical expression, one finds, is made
on the basis of a comparison and an observed resemblance, so that a
metaphor is compressed or abridged simile, and the simile must be the
fundamental figure in poetry. So the schools have taught time out of
mind.[1123] Even Scherer,[1124] eager to hit the new note, and fixing
his gaze on primitive conditions, is sure that poetical figures spring
from the innate love of comparison; even Dr. R. M. Meyer,[1125] studying
old Germanic poetry, finds that its metaphors prove the fundamental
character of the simile from which they spring.[1126] A little
reflection, however, ought to convince candid minds that in the
chronological, if not in the logical, order of development, the metaphor
comes first and the simile is an expanded metaphor; this is proved not
only by the psychological argument, but by the facts in the case. Those
similes from Polynesian poetry given by Letourneau[1127] represent no
primitive stage, and to the long comparisons of Homer[1128] no wise man
will now appeal as examples of the artless and natural in poetic style.
Savages, like Mr. Shandy, may dearly love a comparison; but it is a
logical process, a kind of incipient science, in any case subsequent to
the unconscious stage of metaphors. For, as a matter of fact, wherever
one finds verse which all tests of value show to have the primitive
quality, similes and the comparative impulse in general conspicuously
fail; this is the case with ballads,[1129] with choral and refrain of
communal origins everywhere, and with the ruder stages of our old
Germanic poetry.[1130] Anglo-Saxon poetry, though all its artistic and
literary influences urged it to comparison, simile, allegory,—the latter
a peculiarly Christian invention,—is absolutely hostile to the simile
except in passages copied almost slavishly from a literary source; and
this consideration led the present writer[1131] twenty years ago to find
ground for opposing the traditional doctrine of metaphors as founded in
the first instance upon an observed likeness. Everybody grants that
early metaphor differs from late; a child calls the bird’s nest a house,
not because it compares the nest with a house, but because it has the
idea of house and has not the specific idea of nest; and so it would and
does call the horse’s stable, the rabbit’s burrow, what not, a house,
until wider knowledge and specific information give a distinct name for
each. Then, and not until then, with two separate ideas before the mind,
is the metaphor based upon a definite comparison, and the transfer a
conscious process. In other words, the metaphor was not a metaphor at
the start, save in the unconscious force of it; so with the early myth,
where there was no thought of comparing a force of nature and a human
act, but simply an effort to express the force along the only possible
path, the path of animism. This, moreover, is at first nothing but
direct statement. In all primitive verse, including its survival, the
ballad, it is simple statement, and not metaphor in any modern shape,
that constitutes the style. One cannot express the literal by the
figurative until one has got a conception of literal and figurative as
discrete things; the first stage of metaphor, then, is unconscious, a
confusion, if one will, or, better, a flexibility in application of the
small stock of words. In a little article[1132] on metaphor and poetry,
the writer proposed this sequence of development in poetical figures:
metaphor pure and simple, what has just been called the unconscious
metaphor, stands first;[1133] then comes metaphor with the literal
peeping through, that is, where literal and figurative are joined, but
in a separable fashion, the literal statement involving but not
expressing contradiction in its terms; lastly the quite conscious
metaphor, where both terms are expressed, and where the mind is fully
alive to the gap between reality and trope, a metaphor which may be
either the implied simile (“he is a lion”) or the stated simile (“he is
_like_ a lion”). Evidently now, there comes a stage in poetic expression
where that need for freshness and force sends the poet back over this
path; the logical expression of resemblance is too literal, and he turns
to the metaphor again, and so justifies the standing definition of it as
a compressed or abridged simile. That, however, is not the history of
its evolutionary growth.[1134]

Turning to the nearer subject, we may now ask how the differentiation
came about in poetic speech, and where it belongs in the beginnings of
poetry. It is more than probable that earliest language was social in a
sense now hard to understand; so tremendous was this step from brute
forms of intercourse to human speech that it must have taken place under
a social pressure infinitely removed from conditions of what now passes
for “conversation.” As with the earth itself, these psychical changes
were volcanic. The refrain of concerted labour, upon which Bücher has
wisely laid such stress, the refrain of festal emotion over a victorious
fight, the cadenced sounds in concert with consent of individual
energies alert for a common cause,—it was under such vast and unusual
social pressure that the greatest of social triumphs came about. Hence
it may well seem absurd to talk of earliest song in words as a
“heightened” or emotional speech, speech raised above the level of
ordinary conversation; for what needs could have produced ordinary
conversation before the wholly imperative and extraordinary occasions
which called out the greatest resources of social effort? It is to be
denied, therefore, that “poetic” expression was lifted out of ordinary
and conversational expression; and it may well have been that choral
hymns with earliest statement of myth,[1135] choral song with earliest
statement and gestured imitation of communal achievement, and choral
refrains of labour, formed the beginnings of speech, which was mainly a
recapitulation of action, and therefore mainly a matter of verbs. It is
conceded that verbs came before substantives, for action, as in labour,
is easily paired with gesture and sound; names for things, the
substantives, the singular forms of the pronoun, are a different affair,
and lend themselves more readily to the individual and to improvisation.
A statement of action, subjective or objective, contemporary or
reminiscent, is easily made by a chorus, whether of primitive men, or of
modern children with their “Now we go round the mulberry-bush”; and the
statement as naturally repeats itself as refrain to the dancing or
whatever cadenced motion is in the case. This is the communal or
centripetal impulse. The centrifugal, individual impulse lays hold of an
unvaried repetition of rhythm,[1136] and evolves couplet and stanza,
with variations of rime, assonance, and the like; laying hold of the
expression itself, and by a parallel process applied to style instead of
to form, this impulse leads to variation in expression,[1137] to
something in one verse very like the corresponding part of the preceding
verse, yet different. Step by step, with the aid of the “Apollinian”
instinct, metaphor becomes conscious of itself and of its own effort; it
works out a poetic dialect, which, contrary to the common notion, is an
increasing and not a decreasing factor in poetry. It begins with
flexibility of application, unconscious of a difference, for there is no
difference; sees at last a gap between itself and the literal, which has
been formed by the rise of a conversational and “ordinary” language;
avoids this literal, and shuns this ordinary, until in absurd excess it
reaches the scaldic kenning, or finds a pedant[1138] making dictionaries
of metaphors proper for the poet to use in this or that case. Finally,
it returns upon itself, seeking simplicity, if it can find it, with a
Wordsworth, but still refusing to join hands with the talk of everyday
life.[1139] Be all this as it may be, the metaphor of the verb is both
older and more communal than the metaphor of the substantive, which
better fits the inventor’s case and may well have been the origin of the
riddle,[1140] conceded to be a very ancient form of literature. As in
the beginning, so even now. The more individual, artistic, and
subjective poetry becomes, the more it tends to deal in intricate
metaphor, the less it has of the simplicity due to statement of action
in simple because communal phrase; and whenever reactions set in toward
that communal state of things, action comes to the front, intricate
figure vanishes, verbs have more to do, substantives less, and
adjectives almost nothing.[1141] A reactionary movement of this sort
lies before us in the verse of Mr. Kipling.

CHAPTER VIII

THE TRIUMPH OF THE ARTIST

From this brief raid upon the territory of poetic style, we return to
the fortunes of improvisation and its defeat at the hands of a more
deliberate art.[1142] Among the countless passages in which the poet has
talked of his profession, not the least notable is that _impromptu_ of
De Musset in which he says:—

Faire un travail exquis, plein de crainte et de charme,
Faire une perle d’une larme,
Du poëte ici-bas voila la passion,—

that is, of the poet whom one takes seriously, the artist, the solitary
maker of things beautiful. Quite different is the idea of the poet
implied in a pleasant little jest that passed between De Musset and
Sainte-Beuve. The critic had declared that in the majority of men there
is a poet who dies young while the man himself survives; whereupon De
Musset pointed out that Sainte-Beuve had unwittingly put his thought
into a good Alexandrine, and thus had helped to prove that the poet in
the case was not dead but asleep. Between this poet who dies young or
slumbers in each of us, and the artist in verse who makes pearls out of
tears, there is now only a fantastic and fugitive connection; in
mediæval times, in rude agricultural communities, and under primitive
conditions, this slumbering poet was awake and active, and the step from
his ranks to that of artistry was of the easiest and shortest kind. The
story of the poet is simple. Detaching himself from the throng in short
improvisations, he comes at last to independence, and turns his active
fellows into a mute audience; dignity and mystery hedge him about, his
art is touched with the divine, and like his brother, the priest, he
mediates between men and an imaginative, spiritual world, living, too,
like the priest, at the charges of the community. This was the upward
path; another path led the minstrel into ways of disrepute, where
dignity and mystery were unknown, where the songsmith was made a sturdy
beggar and an outlaw by act of parliament, and where there was little
comfort even in being the singing-man at Windsor. With the upward path
there is no space here to deal; the poet by divine right, moreover, has
had chroniclers enough and to spare, and it only remains to note the
later stages through which his communal brother passed on the way to
what seems an everlasting silence.

As the chosen singer stands out single from the throng and the throng
lapses passive into the background, so the poem which this singer makes
becomes a traditional and remembered affair, with epic movement and an
interest which causes art and substance of the song to outweigh any mere
expression of contemporary emotion. This, indeed, lingers in the chorus
or refrain of a ballad; but even the choral impulse passes away as the
story and the style of the poem increase in importance, and it
disappears behind the rhapsode,[1143] who chants or recites his verses
to a listening crowd. With permanent record, with the making of
manuscript,[1144] poetic art at its best ceases to be a matter of voice
and ear; two silent men, the poet and his reader, communicate by means
of the written or the printed page, itself the result of solitary
thought, and subject, at the other end of the process, to the same
deliberation and inference in the appreciation of it as the poet
employed in the making.[1145] But the obvious advantages of immediate
contact, of living voice, gesture, personal emotion, in the poet, and
palpable interest, whether active or passive, on the part of the
audience, made the disintegration and decay of this primitive group a
very slow affair. It survives even yet in the popular “reading,” and,
with higher pretensions, on the stage; but a far more interesting
survival, and more complete, is found among that people of strong poetic
impulses who gave the _improvvisatore_ his place of honour down to quite
recent times. The art was so common that it got the compliment of
parody; Pulci imitates the _improvvisatori_ in his _Morgante_,[1146] and
worse yet, the luckless bards who made extemporaneous verses at the
table of Leo X were whipped if these verses were not of the smoothest.
But this is only the shady side of the art. Quadrio[1147] thinks that if
the human mind anywhere puts forth its noblest powers, it is in that
craft called _canto all’ improvviso_;[1148] this, he says, was the
beginning of poetry, and is still one of its best achievements; and he
goes on to give some hints for the ambitious. Every one knows the
romantic figure of Corinne; but a better example for the present purpose
is Perfetti, an actual _improvvisatore_ whose feats drew attention
abroad as well as at home. He is mentioned in Spence’s _Anecdotes_; and
a few facts about him[1149] may be given here in order to show how the
fatal breach between poetry of mere entertainment, now in full process
of degeneration at the hands of the minstrel and balladmonger, and
poetry of creative and imaginative art, now veiled in mystery and seen
of none but consecrated eyes, was thought to be healed by the rapt
strains of these improvising poets of Italy. What grace, they argued,
could be lacking to one that was crowned at the Capitol, and stood in
the stead of Petrarch? Son of a cavalier and a noble lady, Perfetti
began very early his office as a bard; his Latin biographer, with vast
gravity, says the child made “what in our tongue is called rime” at
eleven months; small wonder that he became famous when still a youth,
and was welcomed at parties of every sort, weddings, social discussions,
what not, where he exercised his gift of extemporaneous song. Of a
summer night[1150] he would improvise songs in praise of some family,
singing under their windows, an amiable fancy. Cianfogni heard him on
these occasions, and says that the poems were often taken down in
writing by persons concealed from the poet’s view; but he rarely wrote
verses of his own, finding that sort of composition by no means to his
taste. He refused to undertake an epic, though the pope urged him thus
to rival Tasso and Ariosto. _Ottava rima_ was his favourite verse, and
he was fond of a musical accompaniment. His memory, too, was prodigious;
in brief, Cianfogni hopes that this Moses will lead poetry back from its
exile in a land of paper and print to its old glories of the living
voice and the hearing of the ear. The Latin pamphlet, which has some
interesting remarks on related matters in poetry, says that Perfetti
learned his art at Sienna from one Bindius “poeta extemporalis,” who
excelled in that sort of verse which Berni composed, and which was
called from its founder Bernesque. Come to his full powers, Perfetti
shunned no kind of poem, and excelled in every branch of the art. His
songs were repeated on all sides and passed current among the people;
while, for the rest, he could sing _majora_ too, winning applause from
the pope himself, and getting crowned at the Capitol in a function of
unusual splendour. Physically, his poetic ardour was formidable and
“almost passed belief,” eyes aflame, brow contracted, panting bosom, and
a flow of words so vehement and swift that his harp-player was often
left far in the rear; the song done, Perfetti could hardly stand for
exhaustion, and slept but little on the ensuing night.[1151] So
strenuous a life told on his health, one must think; at any rate, he
died of paralysis in July, 1747.

This account of Perfetti is amusing, but much may be learned from it.
Significant is the fact that he always sang his verses as he composed
them, kept to one fixed rhythm, and had a harp to accompany him,—music
once more in her original function as muse. Significant, too, is his
aversion from pen and paper, his sensible refusal to try epic and poems
of great length. That physical excitement and that reaction, too, are in
line with the old communal elation, and are at no great remove from
similar states of the body in medicine men, magicians, priests of the
oracle, and even the rapt poet of a traditional prime. Significant,
finally, is the feeling on the part of his friends that with him poetry
was going back to first principles, and could thus bathe in the fountain
of youth. But it was not to be. The communal fashion of poetry was
already a lost cause. _Soli cantare periti Arcades_; the “poet in every
man” is passive and not active; and the gift of improvisation comes now
in vain, for the conditions which once gave it sole validity are
vanished beyond recall. Shakspere’s kindred three, the lunatic, the
lover, and the poet, once frankly accepted as public and privileged
characters, sacred even, must now play the fool nowhere but in their own
houses.

* * * * *

Whatever it gained by the process, poetry has been forced to give up its
immediate power over men, and to console itself with what Herder called
a “paper eternity.” This triumphant artist, who now holds its destinies
in trust, stands at such a remove from its beginnings, his very art
seems so opposed to rude songs of the prime, and the public making of
verse[1152] has become so deject and wretched, that one must face again,
and this time in conclusion of the whole matter, a question of identity.
Is it all one and the same art? Has all this pother about refrain and
rhythm concerned the beginnings of actual poetry, or only hints and
forewarnings as alien to poetry itself as the brute beast is alien to
civilized man? Three answers may be made to this question. With
Aristotle, or rather with what one takes to be the meaning of Aristotle,
one may sunder as into two distinct arts the improvisation of primitive
throngs and the deliberate poetry of maker and seer. Here, of course, is
a denial of identity. Again, with Scherer,[1153] one may ignore
improvisation by throngs, recognize only the difference between oral and
written record, and assume for earliest poetry conditions analogous to
those of modern times,—the need for entertainment on the part of a
“public,” and the answering performance of an “entertainer” who
languishes or thrives according to the state of the literary market.
Here is identity outright, but far too much of it. Whatever the merits
of his _Poetik_, and it has great merits, Scherer was doomed to failure
from the first, because, as Bücher[1154] rightly objected, no one can
arrive at the spirit of primitive art by setting out from the categories
of modern art. Moreover, Scherer flies in the face of facts, while the
facts which go with that Aristotelian theory are surprisingly accurate.
Not a syllable in Aristotle’s brief account of poetic origins has been
assailed by all the evidence gathered for modern ethnology, and by all
the historical and comparative work undertaken on the basis of this new
material. Nevertheless, one hesitates before the Aristotelian theory of
absolute difference, just as one hesitates before the notion of absolute
identity. True, one must sunder the epoch of instinct, of throngs, and
of improvisation, from the epoch of deliberate and solitary art; but
this does not warrant one in granting to the second epoch alone the name
and fact of poetry. There is a third answer to the question, reasonable
in every way, which would neither transfer modern conditions to the
remote past, nor yet blot out one of the two periods of poetry, but
would see in all manifestations of the art, early and late, the presence
and play of two forces, one overwhelmingly conspicuous at the beginning,
the other overwhelmingly conspicuous now; forces which, in their
different adjustments, have conditioned the progress of song and verse
at every stage.

For it is clear that two forces[1155] have been always active not only
in letters but in human life, and that these forces answer to the
communal influence dominant in early poetry and the centrifugal,
individual tendency in modern verse. One phase of this dualism in poetry
has been discussed above;[1156] it is now in order to look at it not
with separation and analysis in view, but rather with an eye to the
higher synthesis. No one questions the antithesis between man solitary
and man social; and few will question the relative dominance of this or
that type for any given age of the world. There are times so stamped by
the individual impulse that all kinds of covenant, system, institution,
are attacked, and nowhere more fiercely than in affairs of religion and
of state. Seventeenth-century England is a case of this kind;
individuals rush off to the wilderness to think and dream, and then rush
back again to found a new sect. On the large stage the state is
Cromwell, and on the small stage Quakerism is George Fox. Again, and for
the other view, seventeenth-century France[1157] is a place of order,
tradition, and collective peace. True, names are also current along with
creed and rule, Bossuet, Boileau, and the great Louis himself; but it is
dogma and order, not disintegration, that they proclaim. Consent is
supreme here, as dissent is supreme across the Channel. In any line of
human effort, and at any given time, one of these forces is dominant.
But after all, it is only of a relative dominance that one can speak,
and these labels that the historian puts upon his entire epoch are good
until another historian, with another phase of it in mind, takes up the
brush. There is constant play of those opposing forces, and if the
collective spirit brought order, tradition, cohesion, to the late
seventeenth and the early eighteenth century, the individual spirit even
then fostered, as never before, the idea of a great man as mainspring in
social progress. So, too, if disintegration ruled in seventeenth-century
England, there was no lack of the collective and communal force; witness
the social organization and religious democracy of the Quakers
themselves. It was a time of sects and schisms; it was also a time of
commonwealths spiritual, political, and social.

With this constant play and change of the two forces in mind, one may
return to poetry itself and attempt a summary of the whole case, noting
the alternation of communal and individual impulses, and seeking, by a
study of their manifestations, to bring the beginning of the art into
line with its present condition. It has been shown how easily confusion
besets a discussion of that savage culture which is now declared
communal in every way, and now painted as individual to the extreme of
brute selfishness. So, too, when one says that early poetry was
overwhelmingly choral and communal, that modern poetry is overwhelmingly
individual, one has full warrant of facts; but it is well to remember
just what these facts are, and so avoid ill-considered criticism. Poetry
was a social creation and essentially communal at the start; although
some of the most careful investigations in the early history of
man[1158] are now putting stress upon the fact that for perhaps
thousands of years humanity was hovering on the far border of communal
organization, and led a mainly selfish and unsocial life. Man of this
period did not have to unite with his fellows for purposes of mutual
help and for defence against a common foe; like many wild animals, he
could have roved about in smallest groups, each member of which got its
own food for itself, often, as in favoured climates, with a minimum of
exertion. Hence, too, for long stretches of time, no need of organized
labour, of any economic system. But these needs all came at last;[1159]
and when primitive man confronted them, he began his social history, and
communal life was a fact. Here, too, in these rude communal beginnings,
consent and rhythm played their parts. Now it is no argument whatever
against the assumption that earliest poetry was strongly communal to say
that earliest social man himself was only feebly and tentatively
communal; the point is that where he was communal it was to a degree
rendered utterly impossible for the present, and almost incredible for
the past, by reason of the very social progress in which that communism,
that consent, formed the first step. So, too, when it is said that the
individual element in primitive poetic art was at a minimum, there is
nothing counter to this assertion in the fact that early man was close
to the absolutely individual and centrifugal state; whenever the
individual made himself felt in poetry, it was as an individual bound by
the new social tie, and his individual expression was a part of the
communal expression. But, as was just said, the new communal element, so
far as it went, was communal to an almost exclusive degree; not until
after long ages of alternating collective and individual forces, working
within the social union, was the individual socially free to make
himself master in a wholly social art. It is a fact full of significance
that the nearer social groups, like the Veddahs and the Botocudos, stand
to the brutish, unstable, isolated, and wandering life of earliest man,
so much the closer and more emphatic is their tentative expression of
social consent in the dance, which is almost a continuous ring of
humanity, with just two prominent characteristics: the tightest possible
clasp of individual to individual, and the most exact consent of rhythm
in the limbs that are free to move. Yet when the dance is past, and the
ring is broken, its individual members go back to a life marked by
hardly any social traits. As to labour, Bücher[1160] puts stress on the
priority of women in gregarious songs of toil; while men were stalking
game, the women combined in movements and chorals of work,[1161] and a
certain antithesis is not far to seek which would give women the primacy
in early stages of poetry, while men lord it almost exclusively in these
latter days. No woman, with the doubtful exception of Sappho, has
crossed the bounds of what is known as minor poetry; no woman, though
women sing and have most need of song from the cradle to the death-bed,
has been a great composer; no woman, not even George Eliot or any of her
clever cousins in New England, has yet laid hold of that quality which
goes with triumphs of the individual poet, the quality of humour. Why
women were so prominent in the communal poetry of the beginnings, is
easily answered and is a question to be asked; why women fail as
individuals to reach the higher peaks of Parnassus, is a question
perhaps not to be asked, although the answer might well seem a distinct
recognition of woman’s great services to the art. At certain stages of
poetry women have been nursing mothers without whose love and zeal for
song poetry would have fallen into evil ways indeed. In any case, woman
looms larger than man in that shadowy world of beginnings; her life was
more consistently social, and her quicker emotional nature, whatever it
may seem to modern eyes, gave her an advantage over the more stolid and
more solitary male.

How is one to bind these beginnings to the present condition of poetry?
With that alternation of social, choral impulses and impulses of the
individual, poetry is not simply swinging back and forth between two
positions, but makes a steady advance. As in social progress, at each
fresh occasion on which the individual isolates himself from society, he
takes with him the accumulated force that society, by its main function,
has stored up from traditions of the past, and as whenever he returns to
society, he brings back as his own contribution a fresh strength derived
from more or less unfettered thinking over vital problems, so it is with
communal and artistic forces in poetry. For the mere case of poetry as a
body of literature, on one hand, and the poet as an individual on the
other hand, this relation is plain enough, and speaks for itself. Poetry
does even more for the poet than the poet does for poetry. But when one
passes from materials to conditions and elements, asking for what is
social or communal in the modern poetry of art at its best, few answers,
if any, are to be heard. Some answer, however, is demanded, and it must
try to rise to the height of so great an argument. Where, then, is the
trace of direct communal elements in great poetry?

The modern artist in poetry triumphs mainly by the music of his verse
and by the imaginative power which is realized in his language, often
merely by the suggestion in his language; for poetry, as Sainte-Beuve
prettily remarked, lies not in telling the story but in making one dream
it. For present purposes, then, it will be enough to look at the formal
quality of rhythm and the more creative quality of imagination. Assuming
that the second chapter of this book proved what it set out to prove,
one must see in rhythm, or regularity of recurrence due to the
consenting cadence of a throng, the main representative of communal
forces; although repetition in its other forms goes back to the very
condition of choral poetry itself. Because the critics take rhythm and
verbal repetition largely for granted in the work of any great poet, and
look rather to his excellent differences in thought and in variation of
style, one must not ignore the immense significance of those communal
forces in the poetry of art. It is not the mere rhythm, grateful,
exquisite, and powerful as that may be, but it is what lies behind the
rhythm, that gives it such a place in poetry; it appeals through the
measures to the cadent feet, and so through the cadent feet to that
consent of sympathy which is perhaps the noblest thing in all human
life. The triumphs of modern prose are great, but they fail one and all
to take the place of rhythmic utterance; they fail even to do at their
best what poetry often does in its mediocrity. The short story commands
pathos to an almost intolerable degree; Balzac’s heartless daughters
bring old Père Goriot close to the plight of Lear, so far as this pathos
is concerned; and when Ibsen wishes to touch the quick of things in a
play, he does well, from his point of view, to discard jingling verses
and to use the prose of common conversation, thus bringing one face to
face with the pathos of bare and actual life,—very actual and very bare.
Pathos, indeed, all these prose triumphs show, and pathological is the
word for them. They belong to surgery. Poetry, recoiling from bare and
actual life, has a very different function. Significant is the popular
use of this word, poetry; when one says that the poetry has gone out of
one’s life, one means that something very like Ibsen has come in, that
one can no longer idealize life and can see in it only its flatness and
bareness. The cadence of those feet has ceased, and with it the hint of
consent and sympathy. For when the Veddahs leave their solitary and
often desperate search for food, come together, cling each to each as
close as may be in that arrow-dance of theirs, and sing for hours their
monotonous chorus, it is certainly not done in order that they may see
bare and actual life, but rather that they may escape it and forget it.
It is not surgery they seek, but medicine, and this either tonic or
opiate; indeed, the twofold function of poetry could be ranged under
such a head. Tonic were the cheery chorals of actual labour, old as
social man, songs of battle and the march, festal recapitulation of hunt
and work and fight. They idealized life; they appealed to sympathy, and
heartened the solitary by a sense of brotherhood. So, in these latter
days, tonic are the passages which stir the heart of a young man who
reads wisely his Goethe, and tonic too—why not?—all those jingling
platitudes beloved and quoted of the youth who make valedictory speeches
in the village school; tonic, in fine, whatever _gedenke zu leben_ rings
out from poets of the virile and the sane. And from the beginning to the
end, this tonic poetry falls naturally into the rhythm of a march. On
the other hand, poetry is an opiate; the solitary man ran to a choral
throng not only that he might find brotherhood and sympathy, but also
that he might forget himself,—a task which the wild chorus of Dionysos
could accomplish no less surely and thoroughly than the very grapes and
vintage of the god. Like these, poetry helped man to forget his
troubles; like these, the whirl and motion of cadenced dancing brought
about a kind of intoxication; and the graceful words with which Sir
William Temple concludes his essay on poetry have gained a deeper and
yet a more literal meaning through the researches of ethnology and the
proof which now lies before us of the extent to which primitive man has
found in dance and song a refuge from the bare hideousness of life. For
this early art, for this soothing and flattering function of it, the
main force lay in rhythm; and if one wishes to call rhythm the
conventional part of poetry, one degrades it not a whit by the name.
Early poetry was exactly that,—a conventional affair, an idealized view
of life, now tonic and now opiate in its aim. But whether to hearten or
to soothe, stimulant or sedative, poetry found its initial source of
energy in rhythm; most intimate of all the arts, and nearest to the
heart of man, poetry will part with this pulse of rhythm only when the
sea shall part with its tides.

Rhythm, then, binds in a single bond both the beginning and the end. But
its formula is one which any rimer can use with more or less skill, and
modern verse makes far wider and deeper claims, claims which no one has
thought to carry back to the beginnings of poetry. Where, in those early
days, was that rare quality of imagination to which the critic now
appeals when he sets off a masterpiece of poetry from its rivals? To
answer this question, one cannot cite mere history; chorus and refrain
and shards of rustic rime must be left aside; and one must even beg a
little help from æsthetics itself: _so muss denn doch die Hexe dran_.

Described in its simplest form, the quality of modern poetic imagination
seems to be a power, by suggestive use of musical and figurative human
speech, to put the solitary reader into the mood which would arise
naturally in him under the pressure of certain actual events or of a
certain actual scene. To repeat the phrase of Sainte-Beuve, “la poésie
ne consiste pas à tout dire, mais à tout faire rêver.” Even primitive
poetry was an idealization, an abstraction, a narcotic, a kind of waking
dream; modern poetry is also a dream, but with deeper and wider issues,
and with a purpose far more clearly defined. Now the great passages of
poetry, such as those which Matthew Arnold used as tests for excellence,
easily fall into one of the two categories; they revive, even create,
the mood felt either in the pressure of actual events or in the presence
of an actual scene. That beautiful line which Arnold quotes from Dante
is simply the imaginative and conventionalized sense of beatific worship
such as all men have felt in varying degree; while for the thousand
cases where nature is treated, there can be no doubt whatever of the tie
which binds even the most imaginative and solitary poet to the old
singing throng. Nature is nothing without man to interpret it; and
neither man nor nature could stand in this mutual relation had not
social consent and social processes created these abstract ideas, this
very “man,” this very “nature,” by the reciprocal working of communal
and individual forces. It was thus a social process which brought man to
read his condition and fates in terms of nature, or else to read nature
in terms of his own condition and fates. His own condition and fates
were ideas that came to him through a kind of social reflection; and
nature grew “poetic” only by reason of man’s social organization, which
sprang from consciousness of kind, took shape in consent, and has
begotten first the communal idea and then the idea of humanity. Only the
eye “which hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality” can see the “poetic”
side of nature; and even man’s mortality is a fact which came home to
him in this poetic sense only when social organization had put the
notion of humanity before his mind. So much is said of being “alone with
nature” as a necessary condition for the enjoyment of its poetic side,
and for sympathy with it, that one forgets what sympathy means. The
social foundation is now forgotten; without it, however, there would be
no poet’s solitary rapture at all. Sympathy of the poet at its highest
is only rising to a new pitch in the sense of kind; and although the
prayer of St. Francis[1162] has been quoted nigh unto death, one may be
allowed to revive it, not merely because of its wide sympathy, embracing
“my brother, the sun,” and all created things, but also because this
sympathy is the poetic expression of an idea which St. Francis put into
actual working on earth, in that community of brothers in the bonds of
divine and human love.

Nature, however, and the fates of man are not always so stupendous or so
abstract in their relations. There is a close, familiar tie, now cheery
in its kind, and now sad, in the coming and going of the seasons. How
much of modern poetry is bound up with this simple and obvious motive;
and how easily one finds here the connection between new song and old!
In a preceding chapter it was the difference we sought; here it is the
identity, not merely of rhythm, but of imaginative force. Much has been
said of that lyric appeal to the season and to the scene with which rude
songs of the dance, and, later, actual ballads, were wont to begin:
_Sumer ys ycumen in_, and _Lenten is comen with Love to toune_, are
fossil bits of English verse in this kind. So, too, as the coming season
was welcomed, the parting season had its lyric regret. What more is done
by the most imaginative poem of our day, than to revive in the solitary
reader that immediate delight or sorrow of the singing and dancing
throng? When one says that the poet ennobles this actual scene, and adds
something which was not present in sunshine and woods and waters and
green earth, not even in the song of the birds, what else does one mean
but that the poet has brought these things under the spell of human
emotion, precisely as the human emotion of the dancers mingled with the
scene of their festivity? Nothing is more common in folksong than lament
for wintry desolation, for the silence and absence of the birds. Walther
von der Vogelweide touches the old motive and the old cadence with
slight but graceful art; and it is “I” instead of “we,” although the
communal emotion is not far away. Then comes the full power of
imagination in a certain sonnet, and in a certain line of it:—

Bare, ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang.

Take away the “ruin’d choirs,” and of course one takes away Shakspere;
but there is another alternative. Take away the older festal throngs of
summer, the sorrowing throngs at its close; take away that cadence of
consenting feet which echoes in the verse; take away the human sympathy
which was so fostered by this consent,—and those “ruin’d choirs” are
left as purposeless and idle as the void of space.

So, too, with other forms of imagination in poetry. Nature apart, and on
themes as abstract as one will, great artistic poetry is still powerless
to sever its connection with this communal imagination of sympathy and
consent. Some of the strong passages in later poetry derive their energy
from despair. “Man’s one crime,” says the Spaniard, “is to have been
born;” while between Fitzgerald and the tentmaker lies the credit for
that verse which bids God take as well as give pardon for the wickedness
of mankind. This is called sublime. When the savage beats and breaks his
gods, or reviles them in reiterated verse, he is called silly; but
perhaps his disillusions, put into choral statement, may bring him
something of that grim comfort which civilized man finds in a rhythmic
defiance not absolutely different in kind. Nor, again, was the passing
of a god, or of a system of gods, the same thing for communal chorus
with those mounting races in the prime, as with these belated and
stunted hordes. Defiance, however, apart, on the positive religious side
choral praise is still a fact; and choral comment on the ways of God
with man, that enthusiasm for which imagination is only a substitute,
that _sursum corda_ of congregational singing, that lapse of the
individual and that triumph of the community, are enough to check one’s
impulse to think of early communal singing in terms of a Gilbert and
Sullivan opera. It is hard, indeed, to pass back from conditions of
solitary and artistic imagination to conditions of communal imagination;
but the process is not impossible. If one will simply open a Shakspere
and read aloud the passage where Ophelia tells her father how Hamlet
came to her closet and bade her that silent farewell; the praise of
friendship chanted so finely by Hamlet to Horatio; the parting at dawn
of Romeo and Juliet; the declaration of Portia;[1163] the last speech of
Othello; Macbeth arming for the final fight; Prospero at the end of the
mask: familiar as these all are, the mere series of impressions will
give one a new sense of the varied creative power to be found in a
single field of poetry. Then, with all this ringing in one’s ears, let
one read aloud the shorter version of _Sir Patrick Spens_, and compare
its imaginative range with the imaginative range of Shakspere. Neither
simplicity alone, nor the change from drama to ballad, will cover this
difference.[1164] The strongest differencing element is the antithesis
of individual artistic imagination in widest range, and of sympathy
concentrated upon a small, but compact group. It is a step from the
great world to a little canton, from humanity to a clan; spaces have
shrunk, and sympathy almost lies in that actual touch of hand and hand,
which once did for primitive poetry what imagination now does for the
poet. At the heart of them both, however, drama and ballad, is this
sympathy and consent of kind. True, the ballad is late and has its share
of art; but the line drawn to it from the drama is a curve to be
projected into prehistoric conditions, and able to connect the crude
sympathy of kind expressed in choral repetition with noblest imaginative
achievements of the perfected art.

To create the communal elements, poetry had to pass through ages of
preparation. Dreary ages they seem now, and rudest preparation, in
contrast with present verse; but it may be said that the poetry was not
insipid for its makers and hearers, and the art was not crude for the
primitive artists. One must ignore with equal mind the romantic notion
of a paradise of poetry at the prime, as well as a too fondly cherished
idea of ethnology that belated if not degraded wanderers on the bypaths
of human culture are to stand as models for the earliest makers of song.
Let one think of that poetry of the beginnings as rude to a degree, but
nobly rude, seeing that it was big with promise of future achievement,
and not a thing born of mere stagnation. Circling in the common dance,
moving and singing in the consent of common labour, the makers of
earliest poetry put into it those elements without which it cannot
thrive now. They put into it, for the formal side, the consent of
rhythm, outward sign of the social sense; and, for the nobler mood, they
gave it that power by which it will always make the last appeal to man,
the power of human sympathy, whether in love or in hate, in joy or in
sorrow, the power that links this group of sensations, passions, hopes,
fears, which one calls self, to all the host of kindred selves dead,
living, or to be born. No poetry worthy of the name has failed to owe
its most diverse triumphs to that abiding power. It is in such a sense
that prehistoric art must have been one and the same with modern art.
Conditions of production as well as of record have changed; the solitary
poet has taken the place of a choral throng, and solitary readers
represent the listening group; but the fact of poetry itself reaches
below all these mutations, and is founded on human sympathy as on a
rock. More than this. It is clear from the study of poetic beginnings
that poetry in its larger sense is not a natural impulse of man simply
as man. His rhythmic and kindred instincts, latent in the solitary
state, found free play only under communal conditions, and as powerful
factors in the making of society.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

INDEX

Accent, 39.

Addison, 136.

Adonis, 236.

Æschylus, 369.

Æsthetics, 119, 468.

Afghans, songs of the, 395.

Africa, songs of, 200, 204, 249 f., 252, 270 f., 289, 329, 394, 397 f.

Albania, poetry of, 217, 228.

Algeria, songs of, 203.

Allegory, 145, 307.

Allen, F. D., 85, 260.

Alliteration, 68 f., 75, 86 ff., 256, 267.

Amœbean, 123, 144, 200, 400 f., 408 ff., 458 f.

Animals, songs of, 8, 100.

Anthology, 32.

Arabic verse, 79.

Arabs, 395.

Arcadia, the, 61.

Aretino, 144.

Aristotle, 1, 42 ff, 113, 132, 136, 369 f., 433, 453, 459 f.

Armenia, songs of, 203.

Arnold, M., 410, 421, 468.

Arval hymn, 69, 260 f., 297 f., 334.

Aryan verse, 85 ff.

Ass, feast of the, 301.

Assyria, poetry of, 261.

Attila, 264; funeral of, 223 f.

Aubrey, 225, 289, 302, 304.

Augustine, St., 222.

Ausonius, 287 f.

Australia, songs of, 171, 330;
_vocero_ in, 248.

Babylon (ballad), 195 f.

Bacon, 33 f., 45, 435, 460.

Bagehot, 36, 169.

Bain, 57, 365.

Baldwin, J. M., 9, 16, 364, 384.

Ballad, 27 f., 64, 70, 72 f., 116, 130, 134, 156, 164 ff., 168 f., 172,
175, 314, 316 ff., 321, 327, 342, 415, 422, 454, 472;
epithets in the, 193 ff;
making of the, 184;
material of the, 179;
passing of the, 164 ff., 177, 211, 271 f., 292 f., 303.

Ballade, 257.

Ballads, not indecent, 169 ff.;
omissions in, 197 f.;
rank in, 177;
recited, 189, 326;
style of, 189 ff.

_Ballati_, 231.

Ballet, 433.

Ball-playing, 97, 337.

Balzac, 466.

Barbour, 265.

Baring-Gould, 168, 342.

Barnes, Dr. Thomas, 50.

Barth, 360.

Bartsch, 242.

Basques, the, 234, 395.

Bastian, 330, 361, 385, 428.

Batteux, 108.

Baudelaire, 32, 59.

Baumgarten, 38.

Beattie, 35.

Beaurepaire, 293.

Bechtel, 449.

Bell, 307.

_Béowulf_, 193, 222 ff., 331.

Béranger, 140.

Berger, A. E., 136, 164.

Bergk, 85.

Bernheim, 362.

Berni, 457.

Bertrand, 32, 59.

Bible, 48, 56 ff., 124 f., 186 f., 226 f., 261 ff., 271, 361, 423.

Biedermann, 75 f., 256.

Biology, 13, 363 f.

Bion, elegy of, 237.

Bistrom, 188, 198, 211.

Blacksmith, songs of the, 276 f.

Blackwell, 131, 454.

Bladé, 203, 218, 233, 234 ff., 279, 341.

Blank verse, preaching in, 80.

Blankenburg, 433.

Blémont, 170, 382.

Boas, 96.

Boat-songs, 98, 265, 272 ff., 289 f.

Böckel, 70, 72, 110, 168, 185, 270 ff., 307.

Böhme, 182, 281, 283, 308, 328, 343, 415.

Bolte, 426.

Borrow, George, 234.

Borrowing in literature, 351 ff.

Bosanquet, 56.

Botocudos, 94 f., 189, 209, 312, 330, 374, 390 f., 421, 439, 463.

Bourdeau, 362.

Boynton, J. H., 317 f.

Brandl, 413.

Brand’s _Antiquities_, 218, 276, 294, 296 f., 303 f., 306 f., 343.

_Branle_, The, 341.

Brazilians, songs of the, 246 ff.

Breath-lengths, 94, 100 f.

Brenner, 406.

Breton ballads, 183.

Bright, J. W., 148.

Brinkmann, 452.

Brinton, D. G., 190, 253, 313 f.

Broadwood and Maitland, 294 f., 302.

Brown, Baldwin, 251, 367 f.

Brown, Dr. John, 96.

Brown, T. E., 410.

Browning, R., 30, 347.

Bruchmann, 64, 70, 171, 428 f.

Brücke, 81.

Brugmann, 445.

Brugsch, 236.

Brunetière, 6, 26 f., 377, 389.

Bücher, 10, 63, 107 ff., 270 ff., 345, 369, 373, 386, 459 f., 462, 464.

Buck, Dr. Gertrude, 446, 448.

Buckle, 127, 175.

Budde, 62, 186, 218, 226 f., 262.

Bugge, 180.

Bujeaud, 166, 258.

Burckhardt, 141, 144, 158, 160, 425, 455.

Burdach, 432.

Burden, 275, 316 ff.

Burette, 346.

Burns, 170, 209, 308, 410.

Bushmen, 90.

Cædmon, 403.

Calmet, 124 f.

Campbell, J. F., 72, 179, 192, 400.

Cante-fable, 71 f., 97.

_Caracolu_, 231.

Carlyle, 51, 59.

Carmen, 68.

_Carmina Burana_, 207 f., 323.

_Carole_, the, 341.

Carstanjen, 359.

Carver, 249, 333.

Casaubon, I., 44 f.

Castrén, 200.

Catullus, 207, 217, 220, 258, 382.

Cell, the, 357 f.

Celts, _vocero_ of the, 239 ff.

Chambers, 323.

Chant, 80, 82 ff.

Chappell, 294, 305 f., 316, 319, 411.

Charles of Orleans, 150.

Charms, 205, 245, 283 f., 300.

Châteaubriand, 60.

Chaucer, 64, 146, 222, 229, 239, 447.

Child, Professor, 70, 164, 181, 307, 317, 319. 413 f.

Children, 9 ff., 102 ff.;
games of, 209, 297, 322 ff., 335 f., 344, 429;
songs of, 284.

China, drama in, 72;
songs in, 282.

Chorus, 27, 67, 70, 83, 86, 91 ff., 100, 105, 186, 219, 221, 236 f.,
238, 249, 257, 260, 262 f., 270 f., 295, 308 f., 315, 332, 420 f.,
422, 425, 440, 442 ff., 450, 454, 467, 471;
cereal, 255, 310;
Greek, 72, 186, 257, 261, 369, 372.

Church, the mediæval, 153.

Cnut, song of, 275.

Coleridge, 35, 51, 421.

Colour in ballads, 213 f.

_Commedia dell’ Arte_, 425.

Communal poetry, 116 ff., 122, 125, 129 ff., 158, 163 ff.;
elements of, 172.

Comparative literature, 352 ff.;
method, 31, 40.

Comparetti, 64, 177, 352, 355, 402, 443.

Comte, 152, 360, 378.

Condorcet, 10.

Consent, communal, 91, 101, 105, 107, 220 f., 255, 332, 348, 364, 376,
383, 386, 440, 461 f., 466.

Cook, voyages of, 331 f.

_Coplas_, 401, 405, 425.

Corsica, _vocero_ in, 231 ff.

Counting-out rimes, 201, 203 f.

Courthope, Professor, 181.

Coussemaker, 226, 280, 302 f., 324.

Crane, 325.

Crescimbeni, 229, 341 f., 456.

Criticism, 6, 31, 216.

Cumulative songs, 98, 200 ff., 278.

Dance, 84 f., 105, 106, 147, 174, 184, 188, 202, 209, 217, 222 f., 231,
246, 248, 250, 260 f., 275, 291, 299, 301, 305, 311 ff., 318 ff.,
322 ff., 327 ff., 354 f., 367, 370, 409, 412 f., 415, 428 ff., 431,
441, 443, 463 f., 466 f.;
in churches, 335;
by pairs, 321, 340 f.;
and rhythm, 69, 78.

Dances, panic, 338;
of the savage, 18 f., 90 ff., 95 f., 328 ff.

D’Annunzio, 60 f., 206, 230 f.

Dante, 45, 122 f., 142 f., 145, 341 f., 361, 468.

Darmesteter, 259, 395.

Darwin, 8, 24, 88, 357 f., 428, 431.

Daudet, 433.

Declamation, 82, 86 f., 99.

Degeneration, 16, 18.

Dekker, 47.

Déor, song of, 147, 266.

De Quincey, Thomas, 58.

Dialect, 190.

Dickens, 276 f.

Dilthey, 141.

Dithyramb, 66, 370.

Dixon, J. H., 294 f.

Donovan, 104 ff., 186, 345, 365, 368 f., 386, 392.

_Don Quixote_, 425.

Döring, 370, 420.

Douglas, Sir George, 167 f., 173.

Drack, M., 424.

Drama, 39, 66, 83, 106, 117, 189, 338, 424 ff., 434.

Drayton, 303.

Dryden, 59, 295.

Dualism, 116 ff., 136 ff.

Dubos, 35, 446.

Dunbar, 146, 151, 161.

Dunger, 406.

Düntzer, 68.

Earle, Professor, 197.

Ebert, 258, 306.

Egger, 215.

Egypt, poetry of, 271, 285;
_vocero_ in, 237 f.

Ehrenreich, 94 f.

_Elements, The Four_, 322 f.

Elliott, Ebenezer, 52.

Eloquence, 53.

Elyot, Sir T., 345 f.

Emerson, 35.

Emotion, 13, 83, 100, 105, 151 f., 155, 266, 364 f., 374 f., 386.

England, ballads of, 168, 183, 187, 326 f.

Enthusiasm, 126 f.

Epic, 39, 66, 117, 174, 179, 189, 324, 420, 422 ff., 434.

Erotic dances, 336, 367;
songs, 8, 20, 88 f., 239, 401 f., 407, 420, 460.

Eskimo, 96 f.;
songs of the, 243, 311, 313, 391, 400.

Esthonians, 272.

Ethnology, 14 ff., 92 ff., 375;
evidences of, 19 ff., 22.

Ethology, 6.

Euphuism, 61.

Evolution, curves of, 26 ff., 84, 163, 172, 178, 422, 472.

Fabyan’s Chronicle, 265.

Fame, 141 f.

Faroe Islands, songs of, 318 f., 337. 399 f., 428 f.

Fauriel, 217, 227, 415.

Fell, Dr., 80.

Festal origin of speech, 104 ff.

Finns, poetry of the, 166, 198, 213, 252, 270, 355, 402, 452.

Firmenich, 204, 219, 287 f., 292, 302, 308, 324, 408 ff.

Flanders, ballads in, 226, 294, 303, 324.

Fletcher, Alice C., 254; Rev. Mr., 308.

Flyting, 144, 200, 212, 227, 279, 287 f., 306 ff., 321, 391, 399 ff.,
429, 458 f.

Folksong (see Ballad), 106.

Fontenelle, 117.

Foresinger, 315, 318 f., 327.

France, songs of, 139, 320, 325.

France, Anatole, 9, 139.

Francke, K., 152, 182.

Freericks, 259.

Freytag, 360.

Fuegians, 253.

Funeral, songs of the, see _Vocero_.

Gab, 331.

Gaelic ballads, 192.

Garnett, 425.

Gascoigne, 45.

Gascony, ballads and songs of, 203, 233, 235 f., 247, 279 f.

Gautier, 33, 359.

Gayley and Scott, 6, 54.

Geijer, 327.

Gender, 445 f.

Genius, 126.

Gerber, 370, 449, 452 f.

Germanic epic, 191, 198, 209, 447 f.;
poetry, 64;
verse, 86 ff.

Germany, ballads of, 168, 182 f., 190, 216.

Gesture, 330, 428, 431.

Giddings, F. H., 360, 372, 385.

Gnomic poetry, 95, 421.

Goethe, 2, 49, 73, 116 f., 118, 315, 410, 433.

Goldsmith, 36.

_Goncourt, Journal des_, 359, 433.

Gorgias, 66.

Gottsched, 10, 13, 64, 124.

Grasserie, R. de la, 76 ff.

Gray, T., 162, 197, 451.

Greek communal poetry, 266, 271, 284 f.;
poetry, modern, 192, 217, 227, 273, 415.

_Greenes Funeralls_, 206.

Grimm, J., 65, 133 f., 136 f., 182, 256, 283, 300, 341, 350, 436, 439,
445, 449.

Groos, 102, 337, 365.

Grosse, 14, 18, 22, 90, 178, 239, 336, 345, 378 f., 381, 383, 385.

Grube, 299, 315.

Grundtvig, 167, 176, 275, 317.

Gruppe, 14, 443.

Guest, 316, 318.

Guilds, 142, 149, 153, 160, 165 f.

Gumplowicz, 15, 359, 378.

Gurney, Edmund, 55, 89, 256.

Guyau, 3, 40, 121, 348, 387.

Haeckel, 9.

Hahn, J. G., 217, 228.

Halliwell, 284.

Hamann, 125.

Hampson, 276, 301.

Hardy, Thomas, 25, 114, 292, 344.

Harmony, 92, 109.

Harrison, Frederic, 56.

Hartmann, von, 361.

Harvest, Highland, 289 f.

Harvest-home, 178, 280 f., 286, 291, 294 f., 309.

Harvey, Gabriel, 207.

Haym, 152, 382.

Hazlitt, 36.

Hebrew prophets, 262 f.

Hebrews, dance of, 336, 346.

Heckewelder, 309 f.

Hegel, 33, 53 f., 423.

Heine, 161, 410.

Heinzel, 159, 177, 209, 448.

Henderson, 181.

Hennequin, 6, 359, 378, 388.

Herder, 119, 122, 125 f., 131 f., 171, 346, 458.

Hero and Leander, 179, 196.

Herodotus, 238, 374.

Herrick, 305.

Hesiod, 216, 437.

Higginson, Colonel, 97 f.

_Hildebrand Lay_, 212.

Hirn, Y., 260, 328, 336, 460.

Historical school, 122 ff.

History, 53.

Hoffmann, 94;
von Fallersleben, 269.

Hogg, James, 173.

Homer, 44, 49, 175, 221, 285, 333 f., 337, 361, 370, 382, 423, 437,
447.

Homogeneous community, 167 f., 176 ff., 244 f., 357, 374 ff., 443.

Hook, Theodore, 396.

Horace, 107, 142, 186, 404, 411.

Hudson, 366.

Hugo, Victor, 49, 121, 142 ff., 362.

Humboldt, W. von, 41, 133, 357, 382.

Humour, 159 ff., 464.

Hungary, poetry of, 64.

Hyde, Douglas, 404 f.

Hylas, 238.

Hymn, 153 f., 442 f.

“I,” in children, 9.

“I,” the, in ballads, 182 ff., 187 f.

“I,” the, in the Psalms, 186 f.

Ibsen, 466.

Iceland, songs of, 318 f., 337, 400 f.

Imagination, 35, 37, 136, 391, 468 ff.

Imitation, 352, 362, 369, 375, 386 f.

Improvisation, 92, 95, 97, 113, 180, 199, 212 f., 222, 227, 234, 240,
273, 275, 287 ff., 292, 311, 355, 369 f., 394 ff., 396 ff., 401 ff.,
404, 415 ff., 418 f., 421, 424 ff., 428 f., 432, 441, 455 ff.;
two kinds of, 396.

Inarticulate sounds, 30, 253, 260.

Indians, American, 93, 189, 245 ff., 253 ff., 273, 309 ff., 313 f., 333
f., 394.

Individual, 139, 141 ff., 151, 153, 155, 183, 212, 371 ff., 377 ff.,
381, 382 ff., 389, 391 ff., 393 f., 407, 421, 429, 432, 452, 464;
and society, 110 f., 116, 126, 147.

Infant, 12 ff., 100.

Instinct, 355 f., 363 ff., 383.

Invention, 349 ff., 361, 386 f.

Iranian verse, 85.

Isis, _vocero_ of, 237 f.

Italy, improvisation in, 424 ff., 455 ff.

Jacobowski, 11 ff., 254, 345.

Jacobs, Joseph, 71, 164.

Jacobsthal, 69, 93.

Japan, poetry of, 64;
songs of, 282.

Jeanroy, 174, 179, 207, 258, 308, 320 f., 341 f., 401, 405.

Jeremiah, 230.

Jessopp, 286, 291.

Jews, poem of the, 205.

Jigs, 342, 426.

Job, 58, 261.

Johnson, Dr., 37, 289 f., 347.

Jonson, Ben, 34, 169, 316.

Junod, 105.

_Kalevala_ (see Comparetti), 64.

Kawczynski, 349 ff.

Keane, A. H., 378.

Keasbey, L. M., 463.

Keats, 157.

Keening, 240 f.

Kenning, 191, 209, 452.

Khorovod, 327.

_Kîna_, the, 226 f.

Kind, sense of, 115, 348, 385 f., 472.

Kingsley, Miss, 254.

Kipling, 388, 452.

Kirn (see Harvest-home), 290 f.

Kleinpaul, 176.

Koester, 221.

Kögel, 74, 189, 218, 220, 261, 298 f., 340, 417.

_Kollo_, the, 339.

Krejči, 373 f.

Krohn, 166.

Labour, songs of, 70, 78, 91, 107 ff., 202 f., 269 ff., 317, 369, 402,
419, 450.

_Lâc_, 340.

Lafitau, 248, 252, 311.

La Motte, 433.

Lamprecht, 360.

Landstad, 166, 414, 418.

Lang, Andrew, 436.

Lang, H. R., 459.

Language, origin of, 392, 450.

Lapps, the, 92, 129.

Largess-shilling, the, 297.

Latin communal poetry, 271, 273, 283, 285, 404 f., 424.

Layamon, 265.

Le Bon, 6, 360, 377 f., 382.

Lefebvre, 2.

Legend, 189.

Lery, 246 ff., 252, 312 f.

Lescarbot, 247, 252, 333.

Lessing, 84.

Letourneau, 7, 11, 42, 308, 430, 447.

Leyser, 46.

_Like Wil to Like_, 342.

_Limburg Chronicle_, 182.

Linos, 236 f., 285.

Lippert, 437.

Literary evolution, 23.

Lithuania, songs of, 116, 242, 269, 292.

Lityerses, 238, 285.

Livy, 424.

Longinus, 53, 58, 79.

Loquin, 167.

Lost arts, 17.

Lotze, 365.

Lounsbury, T. R., 447.

Lowth, 47 f., 262, 346.

Lucian, 219, 222, 324, 336.

Lucretius, 299, 436.

Lundell, 418.

Lyke-wake, 239 f.

Lyngbye, 194, 232, 399.

Lyric, 39, 117, 147, 173, 420 ff., 431, 434;
origin of, 8, 12.

McLennan, J. F., 22.

Maeterlinck, 60 f., 206.

Magic, 67, 283.

Mahomet, 1.

Maine, Sir H., 379.

Mallery, 428, 430.

Malmesbury, William of, 301.

Malory, 56.

Maneros, 238, 285.

Manley, J. M., 337.

Mannhardt, 238, 283, 294, 310, 343, 437.

_Mansöngvar_, 401.

Marcaggi, 229, 231 ff.

Marching-songs, 204, 269.

Masing, 119 f., 256.

Masson, 57.

Matriarchate, 10.

May songs, 281, 305 f.

Meier, John, 164.

Mendelssohn, Moses, 119.

Meredith, 114.

Mérimée, 231.

Metaphor, 161 f., 190 ff., 444 f.

Metre, 180.

Metres, origin of, 110.

Meumann, 81 ff., 88, 99.

Mexico, songs of, 334.

Meyer, E. H., 166 f., 216, 272, 279, 283, 300, 306, 417.

Meyer, Gustav, 172, 181, 405, 407 ff.

Meyer, R. M., 176, 188, 209, 256 f., 259 f., 267, 447, 452.

Michel, F., 183, 234, 395.

_Milieu_, the, 358.

Mill, J. S., 51 f.

Milton, 49, 207.

Minstrel, the, 181, 215 f., 272, 315, 322, 403, 454.

Mitchill, Senator, 19 ff.

Möller, 86 ff., 267.

Mommsen, 464.

Monboddo, 50, 354, 357.

Montaigne, 6, 129 f.

Montanus, 296.

More, Sir T., 427.

Morgan, Lloyd, 121, 363, 365, 387.

Morhof, 124.

Mucke, 378.

Müllenhoff, 154, 218, 222, 267 f., 284, 336 f., 388, 437.

Müller, D. H., 262.

Müller, K. O., 265.

Müller, Max, 136, 436, 440, 455.

Müller, W., 301.

Muse, 106.

Music, as muse, 106;
in poetry (see Rhythm), 55.

Musset, A. de, 453.

Myth, 284, 293, 434 ff.

Nash, Tom, 61, 280, 427.

Nature, 25, 126, 468 ff.;
and art, 118 ff., 133, 135, 137, 165;
in ballads, 188, 192 f., 321, 413.

Nauze, M. de la, 124.

Negro slaves, 97 f.

Neidhart, 323.

_Neniae_, 221, 244.

Neocorus, 218, 318 f., 321, 340 f.

Nerthus, 299 f., 339.

Newell, W. W., 179, 284.

Newman, Cardinal, 446.

Newton, 2.

Nietzsche, 24, 59, 371 ff.

Nigra, Count, 180, 185, 405.

Nisard, 169.

Noiré, 365, 392.

Norden, 65 ff., 74, 87, 145, 403.

Northall, 160, 276, 278, 284.

Northbrooke, 305.

Objective, 139 f., 158.

Ontogenesis, 9 ff.

Opera, 424, 431.

Oratory, 79 f.

Ortoli, 231 f., 279.

Overbury, 277, 291.

Pellissier, 461.

Pantomime, 336, 429 ff.

Parallelism, 62, 214.

Paris, Gaston, 150, 174, 185, 334, 341, 352.

Park, Mungo, 397 f., 422.

_Pastourelle_, 326.

Pater, Walter, 55, 61, 258.

Patten, 147.

Paul, 81, 360.

Peacock, T. L., 1, 10.

Pearson, 8, 10, 216.

Peele, George, 281.

Pennant, 239, 270.

_Pennillion_, 403.

People, mind of the, 360 f.

Percy, Bishop, 181.

Perfetti, 456 ff.

Persia, Comedy in, 428.

_Pervigilium Veneris_, 258.

Petrarch, 2, 45, 145.

Pfannenschmid, 238, 283, 286, 292 f., 343.

Phillips, 118.

Phœnician _vocero_, 236 f.

Phylogenesis, 9 ff.

_Planch_, 229.

Plato, 1, 33 f., 460.

Play, 365 ff., 369.

Play-excitement, 368.

Plutarch, 66, 270, 395.

Poe, 51.

Poet, the, 347, 388, 390 ff., 406, 433, 453 f., 465, 470.

Poetic sentence, 33, 53.

Poetics, 7.

Poetry, art of, 3;
attacks on, 1 ff.;
beginnings of, 4, 123, 464 ff.;
biological basis of, 8;
communal elements of, 433;
defence of, 1 ff.;
definition of, 4, 30, 51, 118, 158;
earliest form of, 210 f., 314;
elements of, 29, 163, 172;
historical treatment of, 5;
Latin, 141;
laws in, 74 f.;
meaning of, 4;
reading of, 63;
and science, 2;
singing of, 64, 72, 75 f., 139, 173, 180, 272.

Poland, songs of, 270.

Pope, 47.

Porthan, 198 ff., 269 f.

Portugal, songs of, 208, 320 f.

Posnett, 7, 142, 257, 260, 265, 336, 381 f., 440.

_Praefica_, 225, 229, 248.

Praetorius, 242.

Prickard, A. O., 43.

Processions, communal, 224, 298 ff., 304.

Prose, artistic, 65 ff;
periodic, 69;
poems in, 32, 38, 41, 59 ff.;
priority of, 63 ff., 75 ff.;
rhythmical, 67 ff.;
and verse, line between, 62.

Psalms, the, 36, 153, 186 f., 209, 261 f., 420, 438.

Psychology, 364 ff., 374 f., 8 ff., 81.

Pulci, 455.

Pulszky, 26, 383.

Quadrio, 43, 455.

Quatrains (see _Schnaderhüpfl_), 213, 418.

Radloff, 71, 211 ff.

Rain-song, the, 300.

Ralston, 166.

Ranke, 360.

Recitative, 91 f., 104, 310.

Réclus, 378.

Refrain, 92, 97, 129, 174, 183, 190, 209, 225, 230, 232, 253 f., 256
ff., 287, 291, 308 f., 313 ff., 354, 415 f., 430, 443, 450;
in Germanic poetry, 267;
in Greek, 266;
nature of, 314 ff.

Refrains, agricultural, 279 ff.

Reifferscheid, 288.

Relativity, 14, 16.

Religious rites, 204, 220, 238, 260 f., 282 ff., 292, 300 f., 305, 313,
333 ff., 338 f., 392, 436, 444.

Renan, 2.

Repetition, 76, 193 ff., 205 ff., 231 f., 236, 245, 251, 255 f., 313,
416, 451;
classes of, 206;
incremental, 194 ff., 198 f., 208 f., 213 f., 252, 254 f., 319, 325
f., 423.

Rhythm, 246, 332, 345, 348 ff., 356, 383, 386, 390, 421, 432, 463, 465
ff.;
and music, 79;
nature of, 99 ff., 109;
derived from prose, 63 ff.;
as a social factor, 93.

Ribot, 100, 104, 140, 151, 364 f., 369, 384.

Riddles, 212, 452.

Rime, 56, 68 f., 75.

Rimed prose, 61.

Ritson, 307.

Robin Hood, ballads of, 327.

Romance, 179 f.

Romanes, 364, 398.

Romans, dance of the (see Arval hymn), 334, 345.

Ronsard, 45, 63, 122, 146, 150.

_Rose, Romance of the_, 362.

Rosières, 258 f., 266.

Rosenberg, 275, 317, 353 f.

Roumania, ballads of, 72.

Round, the, 341 f.

Rousseau, 127, 151, 157, 389.

Rückert, 315.

Rudimentary growths in literature, 17.

_Rundâs_, 406.

_Ruodlieb_, 341.

Ruscelli, 456.

Russia, ballads of, 166, 188, 198, 327.

Sachs, Hans, 281.

Sainte-Beuve, 6, 148 f., 388, 453, 465, 468.

St. Evremond, 447.

St Francis, prayer of, 155, 469.

St. Victor, 231, 233 f.

Saintsbury, Professor, 55.

Sandys, 303.

Sappho, 464.

Sarcasm, songs of, 288 f.

Satire, 404 f.

_Satura Menippea_, 73.

Saturnian verse, 68.

Savages, 9, 11, 13 ff., 19 ff., 65, 82, 90 ff., 95 f., 127, 374 ff.;
character of, 111;
poetry of, 252 ff., 308 ff., 370.

Scaliger, J. C., 3, 34, 43 f., 122 f.

Scandinavia, songs of, 188, 191, 270, 353 f.

Scéaf, 284 f.

Scherer, 8, 88 f., 133 f., 178, 336, 349, 381, 441, 446 f., 452, 454,
459 f.

Schiller, 49, 113, 119, 375.

Schipper, 315.

Schlegel, A. W., 9, 40 ff., 48, 101, 108, 119, 122, 132 ff., 254, 327,
346, 369 f., 396, 415, 423, 432, 435, 437.

Schlegel, F., 5, 38.

Schleicher, 398.

Schleiermacher, 39, 117, 420.

Schmeller, J. A., 405 f.

_Schnaderhüpfl_, 144, 200, 297, 299, 403, 405 ff.

Schoolcraft, 245, 248 f., 308 ff.

Schopenhauer, 371.

Schröder, 68.

Schuchardt, 403.

Schultze, 9, 374 f., 383.

Schwab, 427.

Schwartz, W., 438.

Science, 126.

Scotland, ballads of, 173, 183, 327;
songs of, 265, 273.

Scott, Sir W., 156, 168 f., 173, 181, 414.

Seasons, poetry of the, 470.

Selden, 2, 80.

Sentiment, 25 f., 147 f., 156, 159, 421, 432.

Sermons in verse, 80.

_Serranas_, 459.

Servia, songs of, 299 f.

Seville, dance in cathedral of, 335.

Shaftesbury, 46, 126.

Shakspere, 113 f., 316, 426 f., 470 ff.

Shaman, 221, 244, 338, 379, 392 f., 429, 442 f.

Shelley, Mary, 253.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 10, 336.

Siberia, songs of, 211 ff., 243.

Sidney, 34 f., 122, 130.

Siebs, 74.

Sievers, 62, 86 ff., 267.

Silius Italicus, 336.

Simile, 446 f.

Simonides, 220.

Simplicity, 190.

Simrock, 435.

Sittl, 221, 431.

Skeat, 291.

Skolion, 395, 403.

Smend, 186.

Smith, Adam, 14, 23, 50, 96, 256, 336, 354.

Smythe, H. W., 217, 258, 266, 285.

Society, 220, 368, 449 f., 462 f., 473;
and poetry, 1, 7, 52, 89 f., 101, 120.

Sonnet, 145.

Souriau, 55, 350.

Southey’s _Doctor_, 278.

_Spanish Tragedy_, the, 427.

Spencer, H., 18, 89 f., 243, 328, 350, 365, 372, 377 ff., 383, 385,
391, 398, 437, 442.

Spencer, Dr. John, 346.

_Spens, Sir Patrick_, 172, 472.

Spenser, E., 118, 122, 206, 241.

Spinning-songs, 277 ff.

“Spirituals,” 98.

Spontaneity, 65, 350 f., 355 ff., 369, 373.

Stedman, E. C., 120.

Steenstrup, 187, 190, 327, 343.

Stein, von, 427.

Steinthal, 352, 361.

_Stev_, 401, 418 f.

Stevenson, R. L., 314.

Storm, G., 355.

_Stornelli_, 401, 405.

Strabo, 64, 66.

_Strambotti_, 401, 404 f., 418.

Street-songs, 166, 169.

Style of poetry, 35, 54, 161 f., 189 ff., 434, 444 ff.

Sublime, the, 53.

Sully, 365.

Summer and winter, songs of, 306 f.

Swift, 61, 375.

Sword-dance, 268, 336 f.

Symonds, J. A., 426.

Sympathy, 115, 471 ff.

Syria, poetry of, 218, 227, 236.

Tacitus, 86, 205, 299, 336 f., 392.

Taine, 6, 359, 388.

Talvj, 167, 182, 395.

Tammuz, 237.

Tarde, 137, 348, 351, 356 ff., 362 f., 374, 376 f., 380, 423, 460.

Tartars, songs of the, 71.

_Télémaque_, 38, 46, 60.

Temple, Sir William, 46, 467.

Ten Brink, 176, 213, 306, 326, 361, 403, 424.

Tennyson, 82, 156, 190, 220, 388.

Texte, 359, 389.

Theocritus, 405, 418.

Thought, 83, 113, 139, 152, 374 f., 383, 420 f.

Thucydides, 17.

Tibullus, 277, 299.

Ticknor, 425.

Tille, 276.

_Tirade_, 211.

Tobler, 188, 194.

Tragedy, Greek, 257, 338, 369 f., 371 ff., 424, 444.

Translations in prose, 49, 55, 57 ff.

Trapp, 46.

Turgot, 15, 59, 126.

Tusser, 297.

Twining, 1, 43.

Tylor, E. B., 18, 24, 204, 238, 283, 379, 428, 436 ff.

_Ubi Sunt_, 148 ff.

Uhland, 220, 281, 298, 306, 338, 343, 415, 436.

Usener, 69, 84, 213, 350, 421, 423.

Valentin, 319.

Variation, 194, 209 ff., 213 f., 236, 256, 408 f., 423, 451.

Varro, 66.

Veddahs, the, 330, 390 f., 463, 466.

_Veisa_, 355.

Verbs, 450 ff.

Vergil, 58, 73, 207, 298, 306, 334, 404 f., 418.

Verse, oldest European, 85.

Verse (see Rhythm), 54.

Vico, 10, 128, 460.

Vigfusson and Powell, 257.

Vignoli, 440.

Vigny, De, 154, 373.

Villemarqué, 183 f.

Villon, 148 ff., 161.

Vinesauf, 229.

_Vocero_, 100, 168, 219 ff., 321, 419;
literary form of, 228 f.;
of savages, 243 ff.

Vogüé, E. M., de, 115, 144.

Vossius, G. J., 44, 123.

Vossius, I., 46.

Wackernagel, W., 320.

Wagner, R., 103, 120 f., 171, 327 f., 430.

Waitz, 327, 329, 379 f.

Wakes, 303.

Wales, songs of, 288 f.

Wallace, A. R., 365, 403.

Wallaschek, 13, 91 ff., 99 ff., 260, 328 f., 366, 381.

Walther von der Vogelweide, 430, 470.

War, songs of, 86, 268 f., 311, 388.

War-dance, 311, 331 f.

_Wasf_, the, 219.

Warton, Joseph, 47.

Watts, Theodore, 57.

Webster, John, 59.

Wedding, songs of, 202 f., 216 f., 324.

Weismann, 4, 363.

Werner, R. M., 420.

Westphal, 84.

Whately, 42, 48, 51 f.

Wheeler, B. I., 445.

Williams, Talcott, 16.

Wilmanns, 85, 87.

Witchell, 364.

Wold, 293.

Wolf, F., 71, 167, 176, 257 f., 280, 315, 327, 340.

Wolff, Eugen, 164, 432.

Women, songs of, 199 f., 222, 226, 228, 240 f., 250, 263 f., 269 f.,
329, 339, 341, 397 f., 419, 464.

Woodberry, G. E., 162.

Wordsworth, 150, 155, 162, 451.

Wright, Thomas, 303, 307.

Writing, invention of, 252.

Wundt, 360, 363, 366, 428.

Xenophon, 34, 337.

Zell, 198, 260, 271, 283, 404.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

FOOTNOTES

Footnote 1:

Twining, _Aristotle_, 2d ed., I. 183, thinks the original treatise was
written as a defence against the “cavils of prosaic philosophers” and
the objections of Plato.

Footnote 2:

In his curious book, _La Philosophie du Bon-Sens_, 1737, p. 15,
D’Argens speaks of Aristotle “dont les Ouvrages sur la Poëtique sont
aussi bons, que ceux dans lesquels il traite de la Philosophie sont
peu utiles.”

Footnote 3:

_De Futilitate Poetices auctore Tanaquillo Fabro Tanaquilli filio
Verbi Divini Ministro_..., Amstel., 1697. It was answered by the Abbé
Massieu in a _Defense de la Poésie_ (in _Hist. d. l. Poés. Françoise_,
Paris, 1739), a pious but heavy performance.

Footnote 4:

_Table Talk_, ed. Arber, pp. 85 f.

Footnote 5:

Lord Radnor in Spence’s _Anecdotes_, ed. Singer, p. 368.

Footnote 6:

_Problèmes de l’Esthétique Contemporaine_, pp. 89 ff., 255.

Footnote 7:

Ribot, _Psychology of the Emotions_, pp. 329 ff., rejects Guyau’s
emendation of Grant Allen, and backs Groos in his view of the play
theory.

Footnote 8:

“Gedanken über Musik bei Thieren und beim Menschen,” 1889, in
_Deutsche Rundschau_, LXI. 50 ff.

Footnote 9:

_Athenæum_, III. 67.

Footnote 10:

Criticism has been treated of late with scientific precision. See the
bibliographical array in Gayley and Scott’s admirable _Methods and
Materials of Literary Criticism_, Boston, 1899. From the imperial
critic, the “gentle reader” and patron represented by Montaigne, who
gives no reasons but his own likes and dislikes, as witness that
delightful essay on books, in its opening sentence, through the
official critics, down to M. Brunetière, the scientific critic,
faithful to the doctrine of evolution in general, and attentive to the
law in the particular case, it is to be noted how criticism has been
approaching the sociological domain, the study of poetry as an element
of human life. Sainte-Beuve was still a critic of poets and poems, for
all his “natural method”; Taine crossed the border and studied poetry,
the product, under sociological and ethnological conditions. See
Sainte-Beuve, _Nouveaux Lundis_, VIII. 87 f., 69 f.; IX. 70; and
Taine, _Derniers Essais_, Paris, 1894, pp. 58 f. M. Brunetière, in
carrying on the plan of Taine, and Hennequin, in opposing it, work on
sociological and historical ground, rather than in the old æsthetics.
Hennequin’s _Critique_ is “scientifique”; while a title like M.
Brunetière’s _Evolution of Species in Literature_ can be conceded to
criticism only by taking such liberties with the word as to leave it
practically undefined. Still, these men work for criticism if not in
it, and they give no reason for disputing what is said in the text
about the paucity of books on poetry as an element in human society.
They have the modern poet, the modern poem, in view; they wish to lay
down metes and bounds and adjust the law. Hennequin will found a new
science, “an immense anthropology,” made up of all the vital sciences
(_Crit. Sci._, pp. 185 f.); but his place is with the critics, and not
with scholars in historical and comparative literature. His
_æsthopsychology_ indicates devotion to the poetic impulse rather than
to the product. Mr. Granger (_Worship of the Romans_, p. vii) has
lately called up the word _ethology_, suggested by Stuart Mill (_Logic
of the Moral Sciences_, pp. 213 ff., 218), in line with a hint that
the foundations of comparative psychology must be laid in the study of
the people and of their habits of thought. Something of this sort has
been done by M. Le Bon in his _Psychologie des Foules_, quoted below.

Footnote 11:

Such are the _Comparative Literature_ of Posnett, and the less
didactic work of Letourneau, _L’Évolution Littéraire dans les diverses
Races Humaines_, Paris, 1894. The former was mainly pioneer work,
meant to open and define its subject; and in this it attained its end.
This sociological method has been applied, of course, in a critical
way, to many individual works, and to many periods of literature; not
so, however, with the poetic product at large.

Footnote 12:

There is more to be said for the partial origin of poetry in choral
songs of a sexual character sung after the communal feast of the horde
or clan. This “sex-freedom,” so revolting to modern ideas, left late
traces in history; and Professor Karl Pearson quotes Tsakni’s _La
Russie Sectaire_ to the effect that such license still prevails at
fairs and periodic festivals in Russia, combined with choral
dance.—Pearson, _The Chances of Death_, II. 243. There are Australian
festivals of this sort; and license of May-Day, of Shrove-Tuesday, and
the rest, is familiar in European survival. On the other hand, it will
be found that erotic poetry of the individual and lyric sort is almost
unknown among savages.

Footnote 13:

_History of Creation_, 2 vols., trans., New York, 1893, I. 355,
quoting from his _General Morphology_. He adds that by “tribe” he
means “the ancestors which form the chain of progenitors of the
individual concerned.”

Footnote 14:

_Der Fetischismus_, Leipzig, 1871, pp. 61, 74 f. A pretty little
parallel of savages and children in the worship of images and dolls
was drawn by M. Anatole France in a review of Lemonnier’s _Comédie des
Jouets_. See France, _La Vie Littéraire_, II. 10 ff.

Footnote 15:

_Mental Development in the Child and the Race_, New York, 1895, pp.
15, 335 ff.; _Social and Ethical Interpretations_, New York, 1897, pp.
9, 189, etc.

Footnote 16:

_Vorlesungen_, Stuttgart, 1884, I. 275.

Footnote 17:

_Critische Dichtkunst_, 1737, p. 87.

Footnote 18:

_Esquisse des Progrès de l’Esprit-Humain._

Footnote 19:

Essay on “Ashiepattle” in _The Chances of Death_, II. 53.

Footnote 20:

_Arbeit und Rhythmus_, p. 15.

Footnote 21:

_L’Évolution Littéraire_, p. 81.

Footnote 22:

_Ibid._, pp. 15 f., “répétition, approximative, abrégée surtout; mais
néanmoins elle est une répétition.” But at once he quotes some
striking facts, in order to prove his thesis (that song preceded
speech), and goes back for a child analogy to the book of B. Perez,
_L’Art et la Poésie chez l’Enfant_, a book which the present writer
has been unable to consult.

Footnote 23:

_Die Anfänge der Poesie_, Dresden and Leipzig, 1891.

Footnote 24:

Work quoted, p. 96. Even old Gottsched, _Crit. Dichtkt._, p. 68,
called a child’s weeping “a song of lament,” and its laughter “a song
of joy.” “Every passion,” he says, “_has its own tone with which it
makes itself manifest_,” really a better hint of origins than this
scientific masquerading of Jacobowski.

Footnote 25:

_Primitive Music_, pp. 76, 78.

Footnote 26:

The best objection against this analogy in any definite use is made by
O. Gruppe, _Griechische Culte und Mythen_, p. 199. The child and the
savage, he points out, have each a small range of perceptions; the
ways in which they enlarge this range are diametrically opposed. One
does it productively; the other, receptively. See, too, a bit of
sarcasm over the complacent scorn for the “childish” savages felt by
civilized man, Grosse, _Anfänge der Kunst_, pp. 51 f.

Footnote 27:

Dr. Brown, Adam Smith, Lord Monboddo, and others were leading
Englishmen in the movement to use the savage to explain early man.
Smith and Monboddo enjoyed this literary vivisection, the former once
watching “a negro dance to his own song the war-dance of his own
country, with such vehemence of action and expression, that the whole
company, gentlemen as well as ladies, got up upon chairs and tables.”
See the _Essays_, Edinburgh, 1795, “Of the Imitative Arts,” Parts II.,
III., and the fragment “Of the Affinity between Music, Dancing, and
Poetry.” The main credit, however, belongs to Turgot. In his “Plan du
Prém. Disc. sur l’Hist. Universelle,” _Œuvres_, II. 216, he uses the
savages of America to illustrate the state of primitive man. He is
also strong for the _milieu_. “Si Racine fût né au Canada chez les
Hurons...!” he says, II. 264; and his other illustrations are
suggestive (in the “Plan du 2. Disc.”). II. 265, he notes the
homogeneity of barbaric races.

Footnote 28:

_Outlines of Sociology_, trans. Moore, p. 85.

Footnote 29:

The outright degeneration assumed by Le Maistre need not come into the
account. Human progress is now conceded to be a resultant of opposing
forces of growth and decay. Mr. Talcott Williams has an interesting
paper, “Was Primitive Man a Modern Savage?” in the _Report of the
Smithsonian Inst._, 1896, pp. 541 ff. His main point is, that the
modern savage has deteriorated under pressure. Primitive man was in a
more or less “empty earth,” and was not crowded by his fellows. The
god of war is always a junior member of Olympus. So, too, Professor
Baldwin (_Social and Ethical Interpretations_, p. 214) argues for a
reign of peace, a “sort of organic resting-place,” in the child’s
second period, which answers to social coöperation, “the rest which
man took after his release from the animal.... The social tide then
sets in. The quest of domestic union and reciprocal service comes to
comfort him, and his nomadic and agricultural habits are formed.” One
is reminded of Scherer’s argument for an epoch of peace in early
Germanic culture attested by names which bear that stamp as compared
with the later and warlike Gerhards, Gertrudes, and the rest.

Footnote 30:

It is hardly necessary to warn against fallacies of illustration. Even
Bruchmann goes astray when he says the poem of Goethe is to the
primitive song as a cherry tree in bloom is to a cherry stone just
planted. To primitive man the primitive song was already a tree in
bloom, and his appreciation of it was in line with modern appreciation
of Goethe’s poem.

Footnote 31:

Or, indeed, any one tribe of human beings. Even in the very beginning
of human activity, that activity was, as now, conditioned by the
environment, and there were doubtless several types of primitive
existence. Evidently, then, there could have been different types of
social union even at the outset of social progress.

Footnote 32:

_Principles of Sociology_, 3d (American) ed., I. 93, 96. Dr. Eugen
Wolff is equally severe on the abuse, “Vorstudien zur Poetik,” in the
_Zst. f. Litteraturgesch._, VI. 426.

Footnote 33:

_Anfänge der Kunst_, pp. 33 ff. For falling off in civilization among
Africans and others, see Tylor, _Primitive Culture_, I. 46, 48.

Footnote 34:

_Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society_,
Worcester, Mass., 1820, I. 313 ff.

Footnote 35:

In 1805.

Footnote 36:

See below, on the Darwinian theory of lyric.

Footnote 37:

_Polynesian Researches_, American ed., III., Chap. XII.

Footnote 38:

Waitz-Gerland, _Anthropologie der Naturvölker_, VI. 85.

Footnote 39:

_Ibid._, VI. 606 ff.

Footnote 40:

See R. M. Meyer, _Altgermanische Poesie_, p. 434.

Footnote 41:

_Studies in Ancient History_, First Series, new ed., 1886; see pp. 2,
35.

Footnote 42:

_Anfänge der Kunst_, pp. 21 ff., 32 ff.

Footnote 43:

London, 1795, pp. xlii ff.

Footnote 44:

Nearer to the present subject are Smith’s excellent essay “Of the
Imitative Arts” and the fragment “Of the Affinity between Music,
Dancing, and Poetry.”

Footnote 45:

_Fröhliche Wissenschaft_, pp. 44 f. See also p. 180.

Footnote 46:

Compare Ribot’s idea of what he calls the æsthetic conquest of nature,
_Psychology of the Emotions_, p. 345, with Professor Patten’s
remorselessly economic theory that appreciation of these things
depends on cheap and warm woollen underclothing.

Footnote 47:

Pulszky, _The Theory of Law and Civil Society_, London, 1888, p. 107.
“Selfishness,” by the way, is not a good name for the quality he has
in mind; but the method is relevant.

Footnote 48:

“La doctrine évolutive et l’histoire de la littérature,” _Revue des
deux Mondes_, 15 Fev. 1898. See especially pp. 889, 892 ff. See also
his _Évolution des Genres_, particularly the chapter on Taine.

Footnote 49:

“Louis Bertrand, qui signait en bon romantique Aloïsius Bertrand,”
1807-1841, born at Céra in Piedmont.

Footnote 50:

Now very rare. It appeared, edited by M. Pavie, in 1842. See
Sainte-Beuve, _Portraits Littéraires_, II. 343 ff.

Footnote 51:

C. Asselineau in _Les Poètes Français_, Tom. IV., 1862, p. 697.

Footnote 52:

Sainte-Beuve gives four specimens of Bertrand’s “poems” in prose.
Brunetière, _Questions de Critique_, p. 202, quotes with approval
Gautier’s words: “Vouloir séparer le vers de la poésie, c’est une
folie moderne qui ne tend à rien moins que l’anéantissement de l’art
lui-même.”

Footnote 53:

Italics not in Shelley’s essay.—For these very sentences, so poetical
in their prose, see Hegel (on the poetic sentence), _Aesthetik_, III.
248 f.

Footnote 54:

_Reflexions_, ed. ¹ 1770, I. 508 ff. A poem in prose is like an
engraving; all is here save colour, all is there save verse. The
_Princesse de Cleves_ and _Télémaque_ are poems. Does not colour make
the painting, though? Verse the poem? In the next section he prudently
asserts, “qu’il est inutile de disputer si la partie du dessein et de
l’expression est préferable à celle du coloris.” It is a matter of
taste; _trahit sua quemque voluptas_. Both in poetry and painting
“genius” is the main thing,—so he had decided in earlier sections.

Footnote 55:

“En lisant un poëme, nous regardons les instructions que nous y
pouvons prendre comme l’accessoire. L’importante c’est le style,
parceque c’est du style d’un poëme que dépend le plaisir de son
lecteur.”—I. 303.

Footnote 56:

In the fourteenth chapter of _Biographia Literaria_. He has conceded
the convenience of calling all compositions that have “this charm
superadded”—rhythm and rime—by the name of poem.

Footnote 57:

_Essays_, Edinburgh, 1776, p. 296. “I am of opinion,” he says, pp. 294
f., _On Poetry and Music_, “that to poetry, verse is not essential. In
a prose work we may have the fable, the arrangement, and a great deal
of the pathos and language of poetry; and such a work is certainly a
poem, though”—note the concession—“perhaps not a perfect one.” Verse
“is necessary to the perfection of all poetry that admits of it,”—and
how, pray, is that limitation to be adjusted? “Verse is to poetry what
colours are to painting;” and, quoting Aristotle, “versification is to
poetry what bloom is to the human countenance.” Here are pribbles and
prabbles enough.

Footnote 58:

_Poetry and Imagination._

Footnote 59:

_Works_, ed. 1854, III. 309.

Footnote 60:

As preface to his _Lectures on the English Poets_.

Footnote 61:

M. E. M. de Vogüé has other views. To him _Robinson Crusoe_ is “un bon
traité de psychologie historique sur un peuple,”—an historic
psychology of the English race.—_Histoire et Poésie_, p. 194.

Footnote 62:

_Works_, Hartford, 1889, I. 213 f. Essay on Wordsworth, etc.
Bruchmann, in his excellent _Poetik_, Berlin, 1898, gives up the
attempt to mark off poetry from prose, speaks of a “neutral ground,”
and then defines poetry as “Steigerung durch Form und Inhalt; _die
Form ist Gesang, Rhythmus, Reim_” (p. 53). What more could the
defender of rhythm ask as working test?

Footnote 63:

When only one-and-twenty. _Meditationes Philosophicae de Nonnullis ad
Poema Pertinentibus_, 1735.

Footnote 64:

_Jugendschriften F. Schl._, ed. Minor, I. 99; a study of Greek poetry.

Footnote 65:

_Athenæum_, III. 87 f., in Talks about Poetry.

Footnote 66:

_Aesthetik_, Berlin, 1842.

Footnote 67:

See p. 663.

Footnote 68:

_Problèmes de l’Esthétique Contemporaine_, p. 172.

Footnote 69:

_Ibid._, p. 150,—“ce poëte sans le rhythme.”

Footnote 70:

Gautier, too, thought that Flaubert had “invented a new rhythm” in
prose, and described it; see the report of this, _Journal des
Goncourt_, 1862, January 1. But later, in the same journal (1876,
February 24), Goncourt refers all this sort of thing to Chateaubriand:
“sa belle prose poétique, _mère et nourrice de toutes les proses
colorées de l’heure actuelle_....”

Footnote 71:

_L’Art au Point de Vue Sociologique_, p. 312.

Footnote 72:

See Humboldt, _Werke_, VI. 230 ff.

Footnote 73:

“Briefe über Poesie, Sylbenmaas und Sprache,” first in Schiller’s
_Horen_, reprinted in the _Charakteristiken und Critiken_, I. 318 ff.;
_Werke_, ed. Böcking, VII. 98 ff.

Footnote 74:

_Wettstreit der Sprachen_, Böcking, VII. 199.

Footnote 75:

_Etwas über William Shakspere_, Böcking, VII. 55.

Footnote 76:

See below, p. 134, for a still more noteworthy and yet quite unnoticed
change of front made by Schlegel in the article of folksong.

Footnote 77:

It must be said for Schlegel that he is here—so, at least, it
seems—merely clearing the way for his historical and “genetic” study
of the art, and so is bound to have no hampering dogma, no _parti
pris_ in the case.

Footnote 78:

Notably that division of _epopœia_, “which imitates by words alone or
by verse.” The question is whether Aristotle meant in the first case
“words without metre” or “words without music.” See Twining’s fourth
note.—It has been pointed out that nowhere in the fragment does
Aristotle essay a formal definition of poetry.

Footnote 79:

_Rhetoric_, III. iii. 3.

Footnote 80:

_Aristotle’s Treatise on Poetry_, 2d ed., I. 289. This view of Twining
is upheld in some highly sensible remarks by Mr. A. O. Prickard in a
lecture, _Aristotle and the Art of Poetry_, London, 1891. What
Aristotle clearly meant to say is that “metre is not the most
essential characteristic of poetry, _yet it would be a misuse of
language to call anything a poem which is not metrical in form_.”
(Italics not in original, p. 60.) Mr. Prickard agrees with Whately,
Twining, and many others, that the words of the passage in question,
and the instances given, do not make against this view; and
“elsewhere, Plato and Aristotle invariably assume that only what is
metrical is to be called poetry; nay, that metrical writing and poetry
are, for the common purpose of language, convertible terms. ‘In metre,
as a poet,’ says Plato, ‘or without metre as a layman.’ ‘A good
sentence,’ says Aristotle, ‘should have rhythm but not metre; if it
have metre, it will be a poem.’” See the _Phædrus_, 258, D., and
Aristotle’s _Rhetoric_, III. 8.

Footnote 81:

A clear summary of the case as argued in Italy may be found in
Quadrio, _Della Storia e della Ragione d’ogni Poesia_, I. Bologna,
1739; II.-VII. Milan, 1741-1752. See I. 2 ff. Quadrio is outright for
the test of verse and for a generous rendering of Aristotle. He gives
the names of forgotten pleaders on both sides, and thinks the noes
have it against a traditional Aristotelian view; not to quarrel
forever, “Basta, che nacque la Poesia col Verso e col Canto: né,
propagata fra le nazioni, fu altrimenti mai lavorato che in
Verso.”—Spingarn, _Literary Criticism in the Renaissance_, New York,
1899, pp. 9 ff., points out that Mantuan was for the verse-test,
Savonarola, Minturno, Daniello, against it.

Footnote 82:

“Censet hoc ipsum ... Caesar Scaliger, qui, _quod raro facit, hac
parte ab Aristotele recedit_,” says Vossius, _de art. poet._, § 7.

Footnote 83:

Iulii Caesaris Scaligeri ... _Poetices Libri Septem_ ... 1561, the
first edition, published three years after the author’s death.

Footnote 84:

See p. 3ᵇ: “Poetae igitur nomen non a fingendo ... sed initio a
faciendo versu ductum est. Simul enim cum ipsa natura humana extitit
vis haec numerosa, quibus versus clauditur.”

Footnote 85:

_Ibid._, “Infans quoque prius canit quam loquitur, videmus enim
plerosque haud aliter somnum captare.”

Footnote 86:

See p. 347ᵃ.

Footnote 87:

Gerardi Joannis Vossii _de artis poeticae natura ac constitutione_ ...
Amstelodami, 1647. §4, “Atque ut multi ex solo metro male colligunt
aliquem esse poetam: ita contrà aberrant alii, qui existimant, ne
quidem requiri metrum, ut poeta aliquis dicatur. Haec tamen sententia
à nonnullis ipsi tribuitur Aristoteli ... § 5. At alii censent
Aristotelem numquam agnovisse ullum poema ἄμετρον....”

Footnote 88:

Isaaci Casauboni _de Satyrica Graecorum Poesi & Romanorum Satira Libri
duo_, Parisiis, MDCV, pp. 352 f. “Certum heic discrimen statuitur
inter eam orationem quae poema dici potest, & quae non potest,
discrimen illud est metrum.... _Omnem metro astrictam orationem &
posse & debere poema dici._” The rest is instructive. Borinski, to be
sure, _Poetik d. Renaissance_, p. 66, says that Casaubon wished to
call Herodotus a poet; but a detached phrase of this sort—compare
Scaliger’s epic in prose—goes for little when it fails to force the
barrier and break down the writer’s definition. Dryden, on the other
hand, making “invention” the sole test of poetry, clashes badly with
his opinion (_Essay on Satire_) that “versification and numbers are
the greatest pleasures of poetry.”

Footnote 89:

As Howell translates the not too clear Latin “fictio rhetorica in
musicaque posita,” poetry is “a rhetorical composition set to music.”
See also an article in the _Quarterly Review_, with reference to the
_Convivio_, April, 1899, p. 303.

Footnote 90:

See his works, ed. Blanchemain, VII. 320.

Footnote 91:

The whole dispute about rime shows this “importance capitale” of verse
itself.

Footnote 92:

_Advancement of Learning_, ed. Wright, II. iii. 4 (pp. 101 ff.).
Clearer in the Latin version, his antithesis, “nam et vera narratio
carmine, et ficta oratione soluta conscribi potest,” is not identical
with the proposition that poetry is independent of rhythm. He says it
“is in measure of words for the most part restrained.”

Footnote 93:

_De Poematum Cantu et Viribus Rythmi_, Oxon., 1673. The reference to
origins is interesting: “illud quidem certum omnem poësin olim
cantatum fuisse.... Unde sequitur, quicquid non canitur aut cantari
nequeat, non esse poema.”

Footnote 94:

_Characteristics_, 5th ed., Birmingham, 1763, I. 254, note, and III.
264.

Footnote 95:

_Essays_, “Of Poetry.”

Footnote 96:

_Praelectiones Poeticae_, 4th ed., London, 1760; see I. 24.

Footnote 97:

_Programma de Vera Indole Poeseos Praelectionihus Praemissum_,
Helmst., 1719. See also his programme of 1720 introducing lectures on
the _Ars Poetica_ of Horace.

Footnote 98:

_Œuvres Complètes de M. de Fénélon_, Tome V., “Discours sur le poeme
épique,” pp. 34 ff. There are many discourses on this theme of
prose-poetry in the _Mémoires_ of the Academy of Inscriptions and
Belles Lettres. The Abbé Fraguier is dull but weighty for the test;
Burette, a real scholar, is sensible on the same side (_Mém._ X. 212
f., in 1730). The younger Racine is very feeble; after reading his
contradictory and vapid papers, one has Chaucer on one’s lips—“No more
of this, for goddes dignité!”

Footnote 99:

_A Knight’s Conjuring_, Percy Soc., 1842, pp. 25, 75.

Footnote 100:

_Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope_, anon., London, 1756. The
book is dedicated to Young, and in the dedication Warton gives these
general views of poetry.

Footnote 101:

Pope said, “There are three distinct _tours_ in poetry; the design,
the language, and the versification....” Spence, _Anecd._, p. 23. As
to prose poems, he could read _Telemachus_ with pleasure, “though I
don’t like that poetic kind of prose.” Its good sense was so great,
“nothing else could make me forget my prejudices against the style.”
_Ibid._, pp. 141 f.

Footnote 102:

_Praelectiones_, Pars Prima, Praelect. Tertia: “Poesin Hebraeam
metricam esse.”

Footnote 103:

“Sed cum omni poesi haec sit veluti propria quedam lex et necessaria
conditio constituta, a qua si discedat, non solum praecipuam
elegantiam desiderabit et suavitatem, sed ne nomen suum obtinebit.” It
should be added that Calmet, _de Poesi vet. Hebrae._, p. 15, is
against this verse test, “Essentiale Poeseos quaerimus in certo quodam
sermone vivido, animato, pathetico, figurisque hyperbolicis audacius
ornato. Nec solam versificationem Poetas facere, nec a pedum mensura
Poesin dici persuademur.” Then Plato.

Footnote 104:

_Rhetoric_, III. iii. 3.

Footnote 105:

The younger, of course.

Footnote 106:

_Dichtung und Wahrheit_, Book XI.; Hempel ed., III. 45.

Footnote 107:

“Wodurch Poesie erst zur Poesie wird,”—the _erst_ will bear a stronger
translation. Schiller, too, said that one must put into verse whatever
rises above the commonplace; and Goethe agreed with him: all poetry
“should be treated rhythmically.” Victor Hugo, in his Preface to
_Cromwell_, pp. 33 f., defends verse for the drama; prose has not
adequate resources.

Footnote 108:

Milton is thinking, too, of this in his well-known passage in the
treatise on Education. “I mean not here the prosody of a verse ...”
boys learn that in their grammars; but in time they must be taught the
great things,—“that sublime Art which in Aristotle’s _Poetics_ ...
teaches what the laws are of a true Epic poem, what of a Dramatic,
what of a Lyric, what Decorum is, which is the grand masterpiece to
observe.”

Footnote 109:

_Essay on the Imitative Arts._

Footnote 110:

No. XXXV. of the _Lectures_.

Footnote 111:

_Of the Origin and Progress of Language_, II. 50; IV. 41.

Footnote 112:

See the _Transactions_ of the Society, Vol. I. Warrington, 1785, pp.
54 ff.

Footnote 113:

_Biographia Literaria_, Chap. XIV.—“Poetry of the highest kind may
exist without metre, and even without the contradistinguishing objects
of a poem.”

Footnote 114:

_The Poetic Principle._

Footnote 115:

_On Heroes_, “The Hero as Poet.”

Footnote 116:

III. iii. 3; another part of the passage is quoted above, p. 42.

Footnote 117:

_Dissertations and Discussions_, I. 89 ff., “Thoughts on Poetry and
its Varieties.” The article first appeared in 1833.

Footnote 118:

It would be more to the purpose if one went to the sources of poetry
and religion and studied the survivals of primitive rite. At seed-time
in Brandenburg, the women still go out to the fields and unbind their
hair in sign that the flax may grow as long as their tresses. With
such a ritual act goes nearly always a song, a repeated shout, a cry
to the powers of growth; and this, if one please, is poetry in its
making, while it is easy to think that the symbol would sooner or
later force itself into the words—“make our flax like this hair.”

Footnote 119:

_Aesthetik, Werke_, ed. 1838, X. III.: summary, pp. 269 f.—“So ist
denn jedes wahrhaft poetisches Kunstwerk ein in sich unendlicher
Organismus,” etc.

Footnote 120:

IX. 9. See the translation by Roberts, p. 65.

Footnote 121:

Hegel, work quoted, p. 257.

Footnote 122:

E. S. Dallas, _Poetics_, p. 8, is sound in idea, but less happy in
illustration, when he says that a poem without verse can be no more
than the movement of a watch without its dial-plate.

Footnote 123:

_Literary Criticism_, p. 134.

Footnote 124:

“Als der erste und einzige sinnliche Duft.” The passages to which
Gayley and Scott refer—_e.g._ Hegel, p. 227—do not change this
statement in the present application. Nobody pretends that rhythm is
the soul of poetry; it is a necessary form, a necessary condition.

Footnote 125:

_The Power of Sound_, London, 1880. Chap. III. is on the elements of a
work of art. On p. 51, again on p. 423 f., Mr. Gurney rejects poetry
in prose.

Footnote 126:

_Théorie de l’Invention_, thèse pour le doctorat ès Lettres, Paris,
1881, p. 142.

Footnote 127:

It is perhaps superfluous to point out that imagination is utterly
ignored in this analysis, and to recall Mr. Swinburne’s phrase that
“the two primary and essential qualities of poetry are imagination and
harmony.”

Footnote 128:

A curious passage which follows (pp. 149 f.), treats poetry as a
supply of coal, rapidly used and close to exhaustion, so far as
originality and freshness are concerned.

Footnote 129:

_Choice of Books_, pp. 81 f., 126.

Footnote 130:

_History of Æsthetics_, pp. 461 f.

Footnote 131:

Professor Masson in the _North British Review_, 1853, reviewed the
_Poetics of Dallas_, printing the review later as fifth essay in
_Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats_, London, 1874; the sixth essay “On
Prose and Verse,” repeats a discussion of De Quincey’s prose in the
journal just named for 1854. Poets are led, Masson says, by the “flag”
of imagery and the “flute” of verse; and while he inclines to the test
of rhythm, he comes to no conclusion. Bain (_On Teaching English_,
1887; see Chap. VII. and pp. 249 ff.) also inclines to the test, but
hedges after the manner of his brethren.

Footnote 132:

_Encycl. Brit._, article “Poetry,” which defines its subject as “the
concrete and artistic expression of the human mind in emotional and
rhythmical language.... In discussing poetry, questions of
versification touch ... the very root of the subject.”

Footnote 133:

In the sense, of course, that it absorbed the best labour of two
centuries.

Footnote 134:

The same argument, of course, applies to Plato, as in the “hymns” to
Eros, noble prose indeed; and in less degree to such passages as De
Quincey on the Ladies of Sorrow.

Footnote 135:

_Œuvres_, Paris, 1810, IX. 227 ff., “De la Prose Mesurée.” See also
pp. 185 ff.

Footnote 136:

See his _Petits Poëmes en Prose_, in _Œuvres Complètes_, Paris, 1869,
IV. p. 2,—an interesting preface.

Footnote 137:

_Young Ofeg’s Ditties_, trans. Egerton, London, 1895.

Footnote 138:

_Also Sprach Zaruthustra_, III. “Das Andere Tanzlied.”

Footnote 139:

His defence is very fine and languid and aristocratic,—“inutile
dispute _de mots_,” he protests at last: _Œuvres Complètes_, Paris,
1852, V. 84, 295 (“Examen des Martyrs”).

Footnote 140:

A foreigner is no judge in these things; but he may say how much more
the lucidity of Mérimée, of M. Anatole France, appeals to him than the
poetic prose of Flaubert’s _Salammbô_.

Footnote 141:

Has any one noted in the opening chapter of the _Trionfo della Morte_
a prose refrain, “Gocce di pioggia, rare, cadevano,” repeated with
considerable effect?

Footnote 142:

_Ibid._, p. 396. The structure is strophic and very artistic in its
complication.

Footnote 143:

See D’Annunzio’s dedication of this romance, and his artistic creed,
quite an echo of the preface to Baudelaire’s poems in prose.

Footnote 144:

There is often in these prose-poems, so much praised now, a startling
reminder of the golden style of certain despised folk who wrote
cadenced and coloured prose in their romances three centuries ago. And
not only in romances; Tom Nash tried rimed prose, both with
alliteration and with actual rime, by way of helping the antithetical
clause. See the “Anatomy of Absurdity,” in Nash’s _Works_, ed.
Grosart, I. 6 ff., 24: inferre: averre; praise: daies; nose: rose: and
the lilt of “to play with her dogge, than to pray to her God.” The
_Arcadia_ is not so much a rimed or rhythmical prose, as swelling and
sonorous. For mediæval rimed prose, see Wackernagel, _Gesch. d.
deutsch. Lit._, 2d ed., I. 107 ff., and Sievers, _Altger. Metrik_, p.
49,—the latter for Germanic relations.

Footnote 145:

“Das Volkslied Israels im Munde der Propheten,” in the _Preussische
Jahrbücher_, LXXIII. (1893), 460 ff. See p. 465.

Footnote 146:

Driver, _Introd. Lit. Old Test._, p. 361, says that rhythm, _the
restrained flow of expression_, separates poetry from prose.

Footnote 147:

Professor Sievers has announced “a discovery of the principles of
Hebrew metre,” and his exposition will be welcome. See
_Sitzungsberichte der sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften_, 5
February, 1899.

Footnote 148:

Professional “readers” nearly always kill a poem by reading it as
prose. Tennyson read his own verses almost in a chant. De Vigny,
_Journal d’un Poete_, p. 70, says, “tout homme qui dit bien ses vers
les chante, en quelque sorte.” Ronsard, _Œuvres_, ed. Blanchemain,
III. 12 f., asks the reader of his _Franciade_ one thing: “Be good
enough to pronounce my verses well, and suit your voice to their
emotion, not reading it, after the way of certain folk, as a letter,
... but as a poem, with good emphasis.” So Quintilian; but the
elocutionist has no bowels of mercy.

Footnote 149:

_Geography_, Introd., I. ii. 7, translation of Hamilton.

Footnote 150:

_Corpus Poeticum Boreale_, I. 434.

Footnote 151:

_Critische Dichtkunst_, pp. 70 f.

Footnote 152:

Bruchmann, _Poetik_, pp. 161, 124, 22.

Footnote 153:

Aston, _Japanese Literature_, p. 13.

Footnote 154:

The younger Racine is startling with his assertion that “poetry is the
daughter of nature, while verse is the work of art.” _Mém. Acad.
Inscr._, XV. 307 ff., “De la poesie Artificielle....”

Footnote 155:

Curiously enough, J. Grimm, though not too clear in his statement, is
with the rationalists, in spite of his “divine origin” for poetry and
the “mystery” of self-made song, which he advocates elsewhere; for in
his _Ursprung der Sprache_ (reprint, 7th ed., 1879, p. 54) he says
poetry and music had their origin in the reason, emotion, and
imagination of a poet, and gives a genetic process not unlike that set
forth by Mr. Spencer: “denn aus betonter, gemessener recitation der
Worte entsprangen gesang und lied, aus dem lied die andere dichtkunst,
aus dem gesang durch gesteigerte abstraction alle übrige musik.”

Footnote 156:

_Die antike Kunstprosa_, 2 vols., Leipzig, 1898. Mr. Spencer’s theory,
analogous in some respects to Norden’s, is considered below.

Footnote 157:

This notion itself—see the extract above from Strabo—Norden, I. 35,
refers to a desire to glorify the golden age, and to set its poetry
over against the prose of degenerate modern days.

Footnote 158:

II. 762.

Footnote 159:

_Ibid._, I. 78.

Footnote 160:

_Tam apud Graecos quam apud Latinos longe antiquiorem curam fuisse
carminum quam prosae_, etc. Varro in Isiodor. _Orig._, I. 38, 2,
quoted and discussed by Norden, I. 32 f.

Footnote 161:

“I suppose, of course,” said a writer of considerable reputation, to
whom the project of the present work was mentioned, “you will begin
with Homer.”

Footnote 162:

Indeed, the very arguments from Greek oratory hardly seem convincing.
Let any one read the section of Aristotle’s _Rhetoric_ (III. viii.),
where he speaks of prose rhythm. What is this rhythm without metre but
the quality, far more musically developed in Greek, which one also
recognizes in the harmony of any modern artistic prose?

Footnote 163:

Work quoted, I. 30 f. See also I. 37, note; I. 156 ff.; II. 813 f.

Footnote 164:

See, however, E. Schröder, “Ueber das Spell,” _Zst. f. deutsches
Alterthum_, XXXVII. 241 ff. _Spell_ and _lied_, he says, are related
in terms of epic and lyric charms or incantations, and form the basis
of the common antithesis of “say” and “sing” (p. 258). The epic part
of a charm, he thinks, was recited, while the lyric part was sung.
Unfortunately, Schröder comes to no very definite results; and, like
most writers on early verse, he neglects the communal and choral
conditions of primitive poetry.

Footnote 165:

Düntzer, _Zeitschr. deutsch. Gymnasialwesen_, 1857, pp. I ff., the
unwearied commentator, who has had so much experience in the practical
reduction of poetry to prose, decided for this view, and doubtless
with some show of right. A _carmen_, he said, was anything,—oath,
formula, law, incantation,—spoken in loud and solemn tones. So Livy,
I. 26, on that _lex horrendi carminis_. This may be true for the
medicine man, but it is not true for the throng.

Footnote 166:

The λέξις ειρομένη and the λέξις κατασταμμένη; down to Herodotus the
Greeks, it is said, spoke and wrote in the former style: Norden, I.
37, note. He appeals to specimens gathered from folklore.

Footnote 167:

_Altgriechischer Versbau_, p. 55.

Footnote 168:

“Musikalische Bildung der Meistersänger,” in Haupt’s _Zeitsch. f.
deutsches Alterthum_, XX. 80 f.

Footnote 169:

The reason why a folksong often fails to have a musical effect, says
Böckel in the introduction to his collection of Hessian ballads, p.
civ., is because it is taken down from a single singer, whereas all
these songs are essentially choral, and need the voices of a throng.
This hint is valuable in many directions; for example, see below on
social singing at labour.

Footnote 170:

_Zeitschrift f. Völkerpsychol. u. Sprachwissensch._ IV. 85 ff.
Comparetti is also unfortunate in his use of this essay to prove that
poetic prose came before verse. See his _Kalewala_, p. 37.

Footnote 171:

_English Fairy Tales_, 1898, p. 247. Ferdinand Wolf, a man not given
to hazy and romantic views, dismisses the _cante-fable_ as “jedesfalls
... eine Entartung,” a degenerate state of the communal ballad.
_Proben port. u. catal. Volksromanzen_, Wien, 1856, p. 20, note 2.

Footnote 172:

Alfred Nutt, _Voyage of Bran_, I. 135, citing Kuno Meyer, and saying
that certain prose is “younger in appearance,” need not assume it to
have “suffered from change,” but may take a simpler view. The verse
may well be of older date.

Footnote 173:

This account is taken from Bruchmann’s _Poetik_, p. 217, and
Letourneau, _L’Évolution Littéraire_, pp. 198 f., who gives other
details. J. F. Campbell, _Popular Tales_, etc., 2d ed., IV. 84,
mentions cases of dual performance in the Highlands, where a bard sang
to his harp heroic passages, and a narrator “filled up the pauses by
telling prose history.”

Footnote 174:

_Altgermanische Metrik_, pp. 165, 168.

Footnote 175:

Rudow, _Verslehre und Stil der rumänischen Volkslieder_, Halle, 1886,
pp. 5, 28 f., 31.

Footnote 176:

Böckel, _Deutsche Volkslieder aus Oberhessen ... mit
kulturhistorisch-ethnographischer Einleitung_ (the latter a valuable
collection of material), Marburg, 1885, pp. clxxxiii. f.

Footnote 177:

Mingled verse and prose has always a late, artificial manner; for
example, the _Satura Menippea_, imitated in Latin by Varro and
Petronius (Teuffel and Schwabe, _Hist. Roman Literature_, trans. Warr,
I. 255), and claimed for the half-rhythmical portion of Swift’s
_Battle of the Books_, by Feyerabend, _Englische Studien_, XI. 487 ff.
Some of Feyerabend’s scanning, by the way, is highly adventurous.

Footnote 178:

_Journal_, 12 Mai, 1857.

Footnote 179:

_De Arte Poet._, I. 75.

Footnote 180:

In Grimm’s charming article on “Poetry in Law,” and in Kögel’s
_Geschichte der deutschen Litt._ I.

Footnote 181:

_Zeitschrift f. deutsche Philologie_, XXIX. 405 ff.

Footnote 182:

See Norden’s _Anhang_ on Rime, II. 810 ff. It may be noted here that
the fact of which Norden makes so much, riming of inflectional
endings, was pointed out by Masing, _Ursprung des Reims_, Dorpat,
1866, pp. 15 f.

Footnote 183:

In a review of Bücher’s _Arbeit und Rhythmus_; see _Zeitschr. f.
vergl. Litteraturgesch._, N. F. II. (1897) 369 ff. This is another
darling heresy,—to break up the old tradition of evolution, and to
deny that dance, song, poetry, began as a single art. Yet ethnology,
as it will be seen, supports this tradition; so does a study of
popular poetry. Compare, too, _Iliad_, XVIII. 569 ff., and other
commonplaces, for the classic traditions, and Aristotle’s famous
passage on Origins, for older science in the case.

Footnote 184:

“Dass ... Musik aus dem Gefallen an selbst hervorgerufenen Lärm sich
entwickelt hat....”

Footnote 185:

“Essai de Rythmique Comparée,” in _Le Museon_, X. 299 ff., 419 ff.,
589 ff.

Footnote 186:

Used to explain the actual origin of rhythm by Müller and Schumann,
_Zeitschr. f. Psychol. u. Physiol. d. Sinnesorgane_, VI. 282 f.,
quoted by Meumann, _Untersuchungen_, etc., pp. 10 f.

Footnote 187:

See Hoffmann’s similar theory, quoted below.

Footnote 188:

The old mistake of confounding literal chronology with evolution. As
if the _Avesta_ were primitive!

Footnote 189:

So M. de la Grasserie asserts in an ingenious account of the
retrograde process by which in modern times poetry has retraced its
old evolution, passing from verse back through rhythmic prose to prose
outright. The only use which he now concedes to verse is in ... the
opera. In all other fields,—epic, drama, lyric,—he thinks it is dead
as King Pandion.

Footnote 190:

_Die Entstehung der arabischen Versmasse_, Giessen, 1896.

Footnote 191:

A remarkable passage. See the translation of Roberts, p. 149.

Footnote 192:

Evelyn’s _Diary_, 24 February, 1664-1665: “Dr. Fell, Canon of Christ
Church, preached before the king ... a very formal discourse, and in
blank verse, according to his manner.”

Footnote 193:

The whole passage is interesting with its fling at poetry, not,
however, to be taken as a serious indictment: _Table Talk_, ed. Arber,
p. 85: “’Tis a fine thing for children to learn to make verse; but
when they come to be men, they must speak like other men, or else they
will be laugh’t at. ’Tis ridiculous to speak, or write, or preach in
verse.” Again, “’Tis ridiculous for a Lord to print verses, ’tis well
enough to make them to please himself, but to make them publick is
foolish. If a man in his private chamber twirls his bandstrings, or
plays with a rush to please himself, ’tis well enough; but if he
should go into Fleet Street,”—and so on. He thinks there is no reason
why plays should be in verse; but he rescues the old poets who were
forced to write verse “because their verse was sung to music.”

Footnote 194:

_Untersuchungen zur Psychologic und Aesthetik des Rhythmus_, Leipzig,
1894; reprinted from Vol. X. of Wundt’s _Philosophische Studien_.

Footnote 195:

See p. 77, where he chooses “die Freiheit des declamirten Rhythmus
gegenüber dem allgemeinen rhythmischen Princip der Regelmässigkeit.”
See also pp. 82, 87, 101, and especially 91.

Footnote 196:

For example, classical rendering of verse, and even modern recitation,
as among the Italians. “La plupart des Italiens ont, en lisant les
vers, une sorte de chant monotone, appelé _cantilene_, qui détruit
toute émotion,” says Mme. de Staël, _Corinne_, Chap. III.; but the
“elocutionary” emotion is usually an impertinence in simple and
cadenced lyric.

Footnote 197:

Compare Lessing’s different but analogous antithesis in the _Laokoon_,
XI.: “Bei dem Artisten dünkt uns die Ausführung schwerer als die
Erfindung; bei dem Dichter, hingegen, ist es umgekehrt.”

Footnote 198:

See his article in Kuhn’s _Zeitschr. f. vergl. Sprach._, IX. 437 ff.;
and the second volume of his _Metrik der Griechen_. For the
four-accent verse as popular measure, see H. Usener, _Altgriechischer
Versbau_, Bonn, 1887, a suggestive book. For the same verse in
Russian, see Bistrom in the _Zeitsch. f. Völkerpsychol._, V. 185.

Footnote 199:

Wilmanns thinks the case for this “original” verse has not been made
out in any convincing way.

Footnote 200:

F. D. Allen, in Kuhn’s _Zeitsch. f. vergl. Sprach._, XXIV. 558 ff.,
showed that this Iranian syllable-counting verse, one of the oldest of
metres, is not merely counting, but a rhythmic affair, and that the
rhythm lay in successive equal intervals marked by verse accent.

Footnote 201:

_Zur althochdeutchen Alliterationspoesie_, 1888, pp. 109 ff.,
particularly 146 ff., “über den Takt.”

Footnote 202:

_Beiträge zur Geschichte der älteren deutschen Litteratur_, III., “Der
altdeutsche Reimvers,” Bonn, 1887, pp. 141 f.

Footnote 203:

Sievers, _Altgermanische Metrik_, 1893, pp. 172 ff.

Footnote 204:

That strophic hymns were known in earliest Germanic poetry is shown,
Sievers points out, by the fact that Middle High German _liet_ is the
same as Old Norse _ljóð_, “strophe.” For the old choral poetry, he
says, “wird ein im gleichen Takte fortschreitender Sangesvortrag ohne
weiteres zuzugeben sein,” _Ibid._, p. 20.

Footnote 205:

Above, p. 8, and Grosse, _Anfänge_, p. 233.

Footnote 206:

See above, p. 8, note.

Footnote 207:

Other motions than that of the communal dance may induce rhythm. The
movement of labour will be considered in detail; but it may be noted
here that swinging, a solitary performance, tempts the savage of
Borneo to sing a monotonous song and ask the spirits for a good crop
(Bruchmann, _Poetik_, p. 18).

Footnote 208:

See “The Origin and Function of Music,” _Essays_, 1857; “The Origin of
Music,” in _Mind_, XV. (1890) 449 ff.; and a note on certain
criticisms of this article, _Mind_, XVI. 535 ff.

Footnote 209:

_The Power of Sound_, London, 1880, pp. 476 ff.

Footnote 210:

This is the basis of Wallaschek’s convincing argument against Mr.
Spencer’s theory: _Primitive Music_, London, 1893, pp. 251 ff.

Footnote 211:

_Anfänge der Kunst_, p. 206, note.

Footnote 212:

Wallaschek, _Primitive Music_, p. 11.

Footnote 213:

See the positive statement of Dr. Jacobsthal, quoted above, p. 69.

Footnote 214:

Work quoted, pp. 31, 42, 68, 180 f. 184, 186, 252. The evidence
collected in this interesting book is so varied, so extensive, and so
impartially set forth, that the conclusions drawn by Wallaschek ought
to be convincing.

Footnote 215:

Gustaf von Düben, _Om Lappland och Lapparne_, ... Stockholm, 1873
(colophon), p. 319.

Footnote 216:

As impossible, says one authority, quoted by Wallaschek, _Primitive
Music_, p. 187, “as to separate the colour from the skin.”

Footnote 217:

_Ibid._, p. 186.

Footnote 218:

It is the neglect of choral conditions and communal consent which
takes away the value for general purposes from Dr. Otto Hoffman’s
otherwise praiseworthy study of the _Reimformeln im Westgermanischen_
(Leipzig, 1886, pp. 9 ff.). Man, he says, naturally speaks in
breath-lengths, in periods which tend to be of equal duration.
“Whoever could give to these periods, with their tendency to equal
quantities, the most symmetrical and equal portions of actual speech,
passed for an artist.” To this symmetry in duration was added
similarity of sound; so came the short riming phrases, as well as the
verse-lengths themselves. But poetry did not wait until clever artists
furbished up into verse-lengths and attractive harmonies these
breath-lengths of a spoken sentence. Language itself, as one will
presently see, had more a festal than an individual origin; and long
before the artist was practising his breath-lengths for a connected
story, the rhythm of verse was fixed by the muscular rhythm of steps
in a communal dance accompanied by words, often by one sound, repeated
indefinitely, but in exact cadence with the steps.

Footnote 219:

Dr. Paul Ehrenrcich, “über die Botocuden,” in the _Zeitschr. f.
Ethnologie_, XIX. 30 ff.

Footnote 220:

The gnomic verses preserved in Anglo-Saxon, especially the shorter
sentences in the Exeter Ms. (see Grein-Wülker, _Biblioth._, I. 345 f.)
are a curious instance of the survival of _quasi_-Botocudan maxims on
a higher plane of culture. As to the æsthetic value of the South
American utterance, how far is it inferior to the sonorous
commonplaces of our own verse,—say _The Psalm of Life_?

Footnote 221:

“The Central Eskimo,” by Dr. F. Boas, _Sixth Annual Report, Bureau of
Ethnology_, 1884-1885, Washington, 1888, pp. 409 ff.

Footnote 222:

_Atlantic Monthly_, XIX. (1867), 685 ff.

Footnote 223:

See below, on Cumulative Songs.

Footnote 224:

See the marching song, p. 690, _Go in the Wilderness_. Thanks to the
repetitions, it “scans” correctly enough, even when it is read.

Footnote 225:

Meumann’s remarks on this subject are good, though they apply no
further than the narrow circle of his experiments. See
_Untersuchungen_, pp. 26, 35, 77. Grant Allen, _Physiological
Æsthetics_, London, 1887, pp. 114 f., 118, is quite wide of the mark;
facts of physiology, in this case, need very careful testing by the
facts of poetry.

Footnote 226:

_Mind_, N. S., IV. (1895), 28 ff., “On the Difference of Time and
Rhythm in Music,” supplementing researches in his _Primitive Music_.

Footnote 227:

_Psychology of the Emotions_, p. 104.

Footnote 228:

See his _Primitive Music_, pp. 239, 236, note; and Grosse, _Anfänge_,
p. 213.

Footnote 229:

The theory of breath-lengths, often noted, comes here into play. Under
high excitement breathing grows abnormally loud, and the recurring
pauses are regular. Play-excitement, festal shouting and leaping,
would of course bring this about; but the individual must be studied.
Strongly accented verses result from such a process, as any one can
see who undertakes to recite poetry during violent but regular
exercise,—say, in swinging Indian clubs. Here, too, one learns how
rhythm preceded pitch and quantity; the jerked-out accents leave
little room for measuring either height or length of tones. But the
throng and its consent brought out this rhythm, not oratory; and one
must keep in mind the remark of Hamann, after his famous phrase about
poetry as the mother-tongue of man, “wie Gesang älter als
Declamation.”

Footnote 230:

The ethnological evidence for this statement is given in Wallaschek’s
_Primitive Music_ on nearly every page. Many good things on the origin
of rhythm could be quoted from older writers. A. W. Schlegel undertook
a physiological and genetic study of rhythm, but, at Schiller’s
prompting, offered more attractive metal to the Kantlings with “das
Beharrliche im Wechsel.” One notes, however, the modern tone of
passages in the Berlin Lectures; _e.g._ I. 242 ff. Now and then he
almost anticipates Bücher’s _Arbeit und Rhythmus_. Sulzer’s article in
the _Allgemeine Theorie_ is very interesting. For early material, see
Blankenburg’s invaluable _Litterarische Zusätze_, 3 vols., 1796-1798.
A good recent discussion is found in the third book of Guyau’s
_Problèmes_.

Footnote 231:

Unless it is a succession of inarticulate sounds. See Groos, _Spiele
der Menschen_, Jena, 1899, p. 42.

Footnote 232:

Compare the “meaningless” words so common in savage poetry. The art of
combining with exact rhythm a series of syntactic sentences which give
a connected story, or express a logical series of thoughts, is no
primitive process. Earliest poetry is repetition of sounds,—not
meaningless, for they were connected with the occasion,—of words, of
sentences, with a diminishing use of the refrain, a diminishing
frequency of repetition.

Footnote 233:

In his “Art of the Future,” _Gesammelte Schriften_, III. 82 ff., he
tells how dance, song, and poem were at first inseparable. Dance has
as artistic material “the whole man from top to toe”; but it becomes
an art only through rhythm, which is also the very skeleton of music:
“without rhythm no dance, no song.” Rhythm is “the soul of dancing and
the brain of music.” With the human voice comes poetry, all three
being woven in one: out of this union of the three “is born the single
art of lyric,” but they get their highest expression in the drama.

Footnote 234:

_Primitive Music_, pp. 174, 187.

Footnote 235:

_Psychology of the Emotions_, pp. 335 f.

Footnote 236:

In an article so entitled, in _Mind_, XVI. (1891), 498 ff., and N. S.,
I. (1892), 325 ff.

Footnote 237:

The tendency to use hands as well as feet in keeping rhythm is
illustrated by the Ba-Ronga of Delagoa Bay (Junod, _Les Chantes et les
Contes des Ba-Ronga_, Lausanne, 1897), where the use of sticks may
help to explain Donovan’s “rhythmic beating.” With these people “tout
s’y chante et ... tous ou presque tous les chants s’y dansent” (p.
21). Refrains are sung “ten, twenty, fifty times in succession”; the
songs have two elements, the solo and the refrain _en tutti_. A circle
is formed, the men holding sticks in their hands; the solo singer
leaps into the middle and sings a few words; then all the dancers sing
a refrain, raising and dropping their sticks in cadence, though the
rhythm is primarily given by their stamping feet. Then the soloist
again, only slightly varying his theme; and again the long refrain
(pp. 32 f.). The war-songs are almost entirely refrain, sung by all
the warriors as they dance, “antique et grandiose choral,” says Junod.

Footnote 238:

_From Lyre to Muse, a History of the Aboriginal Union of Music and
Poetry_, London, 1890; Chap. V., “Fusion of Tones and Words.”

Footnote 239:

“It is said that if it is known that anybody in particular composed a
song, the people in some of these places will not sing it,” _Ibid._,
pp. 138 f. For this vexed question, see below, chapter on Communal
Poetry.

Footnote 240:

Of course Horace (IV. ii. 10 ff.) is thinking of Pindar’s “new”
compounds and fresh expressions; but the quotation agrees as well with
the history of the dithyrambic poem.

Footnote 241:

“Arbeit und Rhythmus,” reprinted from the _Abhandlungen d. kgl.
sächsischen Gesellschaft d. Wissenschaften, philol. histor. Classe_,
XVII. 5, Leipzig, 1896. According to Groos, _Spiele der Menschen_, pp.
57 ff., some of these statements have been modified. In the second
edition of the _Entstehung der Volkswirthschaft_, pp. 32 f., a book
which the present writer could not consult, Bücher concedes the
priority of play, and sees in it the starting-point of labour. This,
however, does not change the validity of Bücher’s main argument for
the connection of labour and rhythm, so far as they concern the
beginnings of poetry.

Footnote 242:

A. W. Schlegel here and there hints at this origin of rhythm in
labour; so does Sulzer. See note above, p. 101. See also the Abbé
Batteux, “Sur les Nombres Poëtiques et Oratoires,” _Mém. Acad.
Inscript._, XXXV. 415: “le marteau du forgeron tombe en cadence, la
faulx du moissonneur va et revient avec nombre ... le rhythme soutient
nos forces dans les travaux pénibles.”

Footnote 243:

Bücher, p. 101.

Footnote 244:

_Ibid._, p. 52.

Footnote 245:

“Grundelement dieser Dreieinheit,” _Ibid._, p. 78. Of course, he
admits elsewhere similar functions of the dance, which was, after all,
a kind of labour, even when not an imitation of labour. Hence Bücher
gives priority to labour in its large sense. For primitive man the
line between work and play was not too sharply drawn.

Footnote 246:

A strong support for this social foundation of song is found in
observations such as Böckel has made among the peasants of Hesse.
“Their song,” he says (work quoted, p. cv.), “is nearly all choral;
the countryman, when sober, seldom sings alone. It is remarkable,”
Böckel goes on to say, “how these people, who singly show little
capacity for music, can make such an artistic effect in chorus.”

Footnote 247:

Several men, as a rule, trod the grapes with naked feet. Songs
directly sprung from this labour survived for long ages. The material
is indicated by Bücher, pp. 88 f. The later festal songs, of course,
were symbolical and reminiscent.

Footnote 248:

The famous Greek song, preserved by Plutarch, is matched by recent
songs of the Africans, as well as by those of European traditions.

Footnote 249:

“La sympathie pour les choses,” says M. de Vogüé, _Histoire et
Poésie_, p. 190, is the “principe et raison de l’art d’écrire.”

Footnote 250:

Bastian, in his book _Der Völkergedanke im Aufbau einer Wissenschaft
vom Menschen_, Berlin, 1881, pp. 8 f., notes that in a modern work of
art one looks for traits of the genius that brought it forth, while in
the beginnings of society, of institutions, one looks “for the
unconscious stirrings, in the organism, of the average man who has
realized himself in them.” And in an address (same book, p. 172) on
the aims of ethnology, he declares that for this science man is not
the individual _anthropos_, but the social being, the _zoon politikon_
of Aristotle, which demands the social state as condition of his
existence. “_Das Primäre ist also der Völkergedanke._”

Footnote 251:

_Œuvres_, Paris, 1790, III. 165 ff., from the _Mercure_ of January,
1678.

Footnote 252:

Nowhere better discussed and settled than in Goethe’s sonnet, “_Natur
und Kunst, sie scheinen sich zu fliehen_,” with its concluding lines:—

In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister,
Und das Gesetz nur kann uns Freiheit geben.

Footnote 253:

_Theatrum Poetarum_, first published 1675, ed. Brydges, Canterbury,
1800 (who limits it to English poets, so changing the title), p.
xxxvi.

Footnote 254:

_Ueber Ursprung und Verbreitung des Reimes_, Dorpat, 1866, p. 18.
“Anschauung” and “Empfindung” are the terms.

Footnote 255:

_Nature and Elements of Poetry_, pp. 76 f.

Footnote 256:

_Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen_, Bd. III., three essays, “Die
Kunst und die Revolution” (1849); “Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft,” a more
important work, dithyrambic, but highly interesting and full of the
“folk,” as against “Ihr Intelligenten”; and thirdly, “Kunst und Klima”
(1850).

Footnote 257:

_Ibid._, pp. 255 f., 261, 268.

Footnote 258:

See especially _ibid._, pp. 133-207.

Footnote 259:

Preface to _Cromwell_, p. 16: “La société, en effet, commence par
chanter ce qu’elle rêve, puis raconte ce qu’elle fait, et enfin se met
à peindre ce qu’elle pense,” Hugo’s well-known sequence of lyric,
epic, drama.

Footnote 260:

_L’Art au Point de Vue Sociologique_, p. 26.

Footnote 261:

This doctrine is in line with modern psychological notions of the part
played by intelligent mental selection upon the instinctive material
of consciousness. See Lloyd Morgan, _Habit and Instinct_, pp. 323 f.

Footnote 262:

See _Shepheard’s Calender_, October, Argument,—a specimen of the
doctrine in that never-published _English Poete_.

Footnote 263:

“Abbregé de l’Art Poetique,” in _Works_, ed. Blanchemain, VII. 318.

Footnote 264:

_Ibid._, VII. 340. “Aussi les divines fureurs de Musique, de Poësie,
et de paincture, ne viennent pas par degrés en perfection _comme les
autres sciences_, mais par boutées et comme esclairs de feu, qui deçu
qui dela apparoissent en divers pays, puis tout en un coup
s’esvanouissent.”

Footnote 265:

For writers in the vulgar tongue, Dante reverses the rule of more
matter and less art. They are too facile. “Pudeat ergo, pudeat idiotas
tantum audere deinceps, ut ad cantiones prorumpant,” _de vulgar.
Eloq._, Cap. vi. The _canzone_ must not be content with the speech of
common life; let it essay an exalted style.

Footnote 266:

Cap. iv., _Pastoralia_, p. 6.

Footnote 267:

G. J. Vossius, _de artis poeticæ natura_, 1647, Cap. iii. Many
subsequent writers followed Scaliger’s account of origins.

Footnote 268:

_Critische Dichtkunst_, 1737, pp. 86, 72.

Footnote 269:

_Unterricht von der teutschen Sprache und Poesie, deren Ursprung,
Fortgang und Lehrsätzen_, Kiel, 1682. This book has been called the
first attempt at a history of German, and, indeed, of collective
European, poetry. Morhof gives a historic account of rime, compares
German verse with verse of other nations, and is the first writer in
Germany to name Shakspere.

Footnote 270:

“De la Poésie Naturelle ou de la Langue Poétique” and “De la Poésie
Artificielle,” in _Mém. Acad. Inscript._, XV. 192 ff., 207 ff. (1739).
The only interest lies in the titles, the text is all verbal
quibbling. In _Mém._, XXIII. 85 ff., is a plan for a general history
of poetry. But Racine Junior is negligible.

Footnote 271:

_Ibid._, IX. 320 f. (1731-1733), in a paper on the songs of ancient
Greece. He repeats the idea that art comes out of nature, but lays
stress on a development of special singers, a sort of guild, as
contrasted with earlier universality of song. This is the contrast
made afterward by Wilhelm Grimm (_Heldensage_, 2d ed., pp. 382 f.)
between “free” and professional song.

Footnote 272:

_Augustini Calmet dissertatio de poesi veterum Hebraeorum_, ...
Helmstadii, 1723. A French version is in the _Dissertationes qui
peuvent servir de Prologomenes de l’Ecriture Sainte_, ... Paris, 1720,
3 vols., I. 128 ff. See particularly 15 ff. of the Latin: “Duo
habentur Poeseos genera: naturale et artificiale,” etc.

Footnote 273:

“Non incommode ergo dicimus, Poesin methodicam artem esse, accurate et
studiose exprimendi passiones, naturalem vero, quae sine arte, sine
meditatione praevia, eas sistit. Omnis populus, omnis terra, omne
temperamentum, omnis affectus sua non destituitur rhetorica aut poesi
naturali.... _Natura semper producit rudius aliquid, quod ars
perficere conatur._”

Footnote 274:

See Barth, _Die Philosophie der Geschichte als Sociologie_, Leipzig,
1897, I. 202.

Footnote 275:

“Sur les progrès successifs de l’esprit humain,” _Œuvres_, II. 597 ff.

Footnote 276:

On this change in poetic criticism, see Von Stein, _Entstehung der
neueren Aesthetik_, p. 97. It must be remembered, however, that while
Turgot clung to the individual in this sense, his search for laws of
progress, movements, tendencies, was really preparing ruin for
individualism, and making Condorcet’s and Herder’s task more easy.

Footnote 277:

_Characteristics_, 5th ed., Birmingham, 1765, I. 22.

Footnote 278:

_Stimmen der Völker_, Dedication: _Euch weih’ ich die Stimme des Volks
der zerstreueten Menschheit._

Footnote 279:

Leslie Stephen, _History of English Thought in the Eighteenth
Century_, II. Chap. XII. § vii., divides the general course of thought
into sentimental, romantic, and rationalistic tendencies.

Footnote 280:

_Essais_, I. liv., near the end: “La poësie populere et purement
naturelle a des naifvetez et graces par où elle se compare à la
principale beauté de la poësie parfaicte selon l’art: comme il se voit
ès villanelles de Gascoigne, et aus Chançons qu’on nous raporte des
nations qui n’ont conoissance d’aucun sciance ny mesmes d’escriture.
La poësie mediocre qui s’arrete entre deus est desdeignée, sans honur
et sans pris.”

Footnote 281:

On Cannibals, I. xxx. “Ce premier couplet, c’est le refrain de la
chanson.... Toute la journée se passe à dancer.”

Footnote 282:

Fresenius, _Deutsche Litteraturzeitung_, 1892, col. 769 ff.

Footnote 283:

Or whoever wrote the book. See Arber’s ed., pp. 26, 53.

Footnote 284:

So says Ferdinand Wolf in his famous essay on Spanish ballads.

Footnote 285:

_Stimmen der Völker_ and _Volkslieder_. _Volkslied_ is original with
Herder. See note, p. xxvi., of the author’s _Old English Ballads_.

Footnote 286:

“Nicht jeder versteht Poesie zu wittern,” is a remark of his still in
some need of emphasis, _Lectures_ (_Neudruck_), III. 141.

Footnote 287:

“We shall treat first the poetry of nature, and then the poetry of
art. We shall follow this development historically.”... _Lectures_
(_Neudruck_, etc.), I. 25 f.

Footnote 288:

_Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues_, a part of the
introduction to his researches on the Kawi language, § 20, _Werke_,
VI. 249.

Footnote 289:

See the introduction to the author’s _Old English Ballads_.

Footnote 290:

A. W. Schlegel, _Werke_, ed. Böcking, VIII. 64 ff., written in 1800.
See particularly pp. 79 f.

Footnote 291:

“Deren Dichter gewissermassen das Volk im ganzen war.”

Footnote 292:

Reprinted, _Werke_, XII. 383 ff., from the _Heidelberger Jahrbücher_
of 1815.

Footnote 293:

Oral and communal literature, it is almost superfluous to point out,
are not one and the same thing. See Max Müller on “Literature before
Letters,” _Nineteenth Century_, November, 1899, pp. 798 f.

Footnote 294:

Such an assumption takes most of the value from Berger’s detailed
account of the controversy over popular song, “Volksdichtung und
Kunstdichtung,” _Nord and Süd_, LXVIII. (1894), 76 ff., an account
which is often inaccurate and quite incomplete. Berger’s conclusion
that there is no essential difference between poetry of the people and
poetry of art confuses, as is usual in this school of Germans, the
poetic impulse with the poetic product.

Footnote 295:

As direct, unqualified fact. One is dealing here with no phrases, no
illustrations, such as the editor of Brantôme employs when he says
(preface to the _Vie des Dames Galantes_, p. x), “dans un siècle, il y
a deux choses, l’histoire et la comédie: l’histoire, c’est le peuple,
la comédie, c’est l’homme.”

Footnote 296:

_La Vie Littéraire_, II. 173.

Footnote 297:

Work quoted, p. 340.

Footnote 298:

For the psychological study of individuality in art and letters,
see Dilthey, “Beiträge zum Studium der Individualität,”
_Sitzungsberichte_, Berlin Academy, 1896, I. 295 ff. For a
historical study, with sociological leanings, see the admirable
work of Burckhardt, _Cultur der Renaissance in Italien_, ed. 1898,
I. 143 ff. (“der Mensch wird geistiges Individuum”), 154 f., 178;
II. 29 f., 48; and Brunetière, _Évolution des Genres_, pp. 39, 167
(Rousseau and individualism), and _Nouveaux Essais_, pp. 66, 150,
194.

Footnote 299:

If one had the materials, a similar emancipation of the poet could be
noted in Latin, beginning, perhaps, with Ennius—_volito vivus per ora
virum_—and Naevius, down to Horace, his fountain made famous _me
dicente_, and the _non omnis moriar_.

Footnote 300:

Vossler, _Poetische Theorien in der italienischen Frührenaissance_,
Berlin, 1900, p. 3: “Im Mittelalter hatte jede Gesellschaftsklasse
ihren eigenen zünftigen Sänger (_rimatore_ oder _dicitore per rima_),
der nur von ihr verstanden und anerkannt wurde.”

Footnote 301:

Lounsbury, _Chaucer_, III. 14.

Footnote 302:

Nyrop, _Den oldfranske Heltedigtning_, p. 288.

Footnote 303:

On the individual poet as mouthpiece of the clan, see Posnett, _Comp.
Lit._, pp. 130 ff., and Letourneau, _Évolution Littéraire_, p. 78.

Footnote 304:

_Purgat._, xxiv. 52 ff.:—

Io mi son un che quando
Amor mi spira, noto, ed a quel modo
Che ditta dentro, vo significando.

But it must be read with what precedes and what follows.

Footnote 305:

It is almost impertinent to remind the reader of Dante’s famous
verses, _Purgat._, viii. 1 ff. Perhaps Hugo remembers his Dante here.
Compare Section iv. of this same _Chant_.

Footnote 306:

The emancipation of woman as an individual begins here in Italy. See
M. de Vogüé’s study of the Sforza (in _Histoire et Poésie_), and the
general statement of Burckhardt, _Cult. Ital. Ren._, I. 144, note 3.

Footnote 307:

“Ego velut in confinio duorum populorum constitutus simul ante
retroque prospicio,” a saying of Petrarch, would apply better to
Dante. The _Vita Nuova_ has psychological analysis enough for ten
moderns; but the mediæval in it all conquers the modern, as one feels
the moment one turns to Petrarch’s correspondence. Perhaps Norden,
_Antike Kunstprosa_, II. 732, lays too much stress on Petrarch’s
backward gaze; he did look backward to the classics, but he was not
mediæval. See the charming extracts given in Robinson and Rolfe’s
_Petrarca_.

Footnote 308:

Hardly borrowed from the classics, as Gautier hints in general, and
asserts for Old French epic. See Benezé, _Das Traummotiv in der mhd.
Dichtung bis 1250, und in alten deutschen Volksliedern_, Halle, 1897,
pp. 53 ff.

Footnote 309:

_Development of English Thought_, pp. 81 f.

Footnote 310:

Déor’s song, first in point of time of English lyrics, is a _vox
clamantis in deserto_. The breezy personality of it, the individual
confidence, the appeal to great names and great things to prop Master
Déor’s own hope that something good will turn up,—all this is
discouragement to the critic who likes to go about pasting labels on
various epochs of literature. But there is Déor’s rival, Wîdsîð, the
typical singer lost in the guild, or rather a dozen singers rolled
into one,—communal triumph.

Footnote 311:

_Causeries du Lundi_, XIV. 296 f. Learned research on the _ubi sunt_
formula is noted by Professor Bright, _Modern Language Notes_, 1893,
Col. 187.

Footnote 312:

Classical parallels go for little here; changes rung upon the _memento
mori_, like Horace’s _quo pater Æneas_, a statement, are not in line
with these mediæval queries.

Footnote 313:

Chaucer, _Troilus_, V. 1174 ff.:—

From hazel-wode, ther Ioly Robin pleyde,
Shal come al that that thou abydest here;
Ye, farewel al the snow of ferne yere!

Boccaccio has instead an allusion to the “wind of Etna.” Chaucer’s
phrase is “a reference to some popular song or saying,” in Skeat’s
opinion.

Footnote 314:

Printed by Morris, _Old English Miscellany_, pp. 90 ff.

Footnote 315:

Not, of course, merely in this ballade. Among other examples of the
quality, see stanzas 28, 29, 38 ff. of the _Grand Testament_. See
other ballades; passages in the _Petit Testament_:—

“Au fort, je meurs amant martir,”

and of course the _Regrets de la Belle Heaulmiere_.

Footnote 316:

About 1300; modernized, of course. Compare the sweep and firm
individual control of Wordsworth’s _Loud is the Vale_,—lines on the
expected death of Fox.

Footnote 317:

M. Gaston Paris, _Poésie du Moyen Age_, II. 232, contrasts Villon with
Charles of Orleans, the “dernier chanteur du moyen age,” while the
other is “premier poète moderne,” and that “par le libre essor de
l’individualisme.” See the rest of this admirable summary.

Footnote 318:

The Lorelei legend would once have been given for its own sake; now it
is merely a reason, which the poet imparts to his reader, “dass ich so
traurig bin.”

Footnote 319:

_Lament for the Makaris_ (dead poets for dead ladies), _quhen he wes
Seik_,—a significant situation, like Tom Nash—again with dead lords
and ladies—and his “I am sick, I must die: Lord have mercy on us!” For
the imitation of Villon by Dunbar, see the notes by Dr. Gregor in
Small’s edition of Dunbar’s _Works_.

Footnote 320:

Mr. Sidney Lee has surely gone too far in divorcing sentiment from
Elizabethan sonnets; as in the case of dance and ballad, literary
bookkeeping can be overdone, and borrowing may too easily obscure
production.

Footnote 321:

See Ribot, _Psychol. Emot._, p. 267, on arrested development of
emotion. He allows, by the way, p. vi., not only a physiological basis
of emotion, but, pp. 7, 12, gives autonomy to the emotional states,
and allows them to exist independently of intellectual conditions.

Footnote 322:

The tyranny of terms mars some of the conclusions in Professor
Francke’s valuable book on _Social Forces in German Literature_, and
the “individualism” to which he often refers has divers meanings.

Footnote 323:

See next chapter.

Footnote 324:

Becker, _Ursprung der romanischen Versmasse_, Strassburg, 1890, pp. 6
f., notes that a mediæval hymn by no means expressed mediæval life; it
was an individual affair, as was proved at length by Wolf, _Lais_, pp.
86 ff., who calls the hymns “kunstmässige Gedichte (_carmina_)” by
known and named churchmen. These often had classical models in mind.
Later the hymns were suited to congregational purposes.

Footnote 325:

See p. 172; and cf. the passage about the solitary way of the poet, p.
175: “Les animaux lâches vont en troupes. Le lion marche seul dans le
désert. Qu’ainsi marche toujours le poëte.”

Footnote 326:

Gervinus thinks that the individual came to his rights in the
crusades, when Christian ideals were substituted for ancient ideals.
But the classical traditions of authorship, if not of wider issues,
were one with the individual spirit of Christianity. The struggle was
against communal conditions of life in general.

Footnote 327:

“To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow....”

Footnote 328:

A pretty study in communal feeling, as compared with artistic and
individual sentiment, could treat the use of a supernatural element in
the ballad _Clerk Saunders_ and in Keats’s _La Belle Dame sans Merci_.

Footnote 329:

See Texte, _Rousseau_, pp. 330 ff.

Footnote 330:

_Cult. Ren. in Ital._, II. 72.

Footnote 331:

Even Icelandic sagas, which show considerable artistic skill, make the
diction of their heroes anything but pathetic, whatever the situation.
See Heinzel, “Beschreibung d. isländ. Saga,” _Sitzungsberichte Wiener
Akad._, XCVII. 119.

Footnote 332:

Work quoted, I. 167.

Footnote 333:

Northall, _English Folk-Rhymes_, prints a number of these; for
example, p. 34, in Lancashire, Gorton lads sing:—

The Abbey Hey bulldogs drest i’ rags,
Dar’ no com’ out to the Gorton lads.

One thinks, too, of the Scottish feuds, and a favourite tune like that
of Liddesdale:—

O wha dare meddle wi’ me?
O wha dare meddle wi’ me?
My name it is little Jock Elliot,
And wha dare meddle wi’ me?

See Chambers’s _Book of Days_, I. 200.

Footnote 334:

Vilmar, in his little _Handbüchlein_, p. 5, is full of righteous
enthusiasm for an old cutthroat ballad, and full of righteous scorn
for Heine’s cynical lines, “Spitzbübin war sie, er war ein Dieb;” the
modern reader, for his sins, prefers Heine and chances the moral
turpitude involved in his choice.

Footnote 335:

Interest even in the great tragedies has come to be duty rather than
inclination. In the Abbé Dubos’s day tragedy was still preferred; but
he says that whereas he read Racine with keenest delight at thirty
(“lorsqu’il etoit occupé des passions que ces pièces nous
dépeignent”), at sixty it was Molière.

Footnote 336:

_Der Scheidende._ Sentiment naturally turns to the cadence of rhythm,
while humour feels at home in prose; hence it is easy to see that
humour in verse, as with Heine, is ancillary to sentiment, while
sentiment in prose, as with Sterne and even Lamb, is ancillary to
humour.

Footnote 337:

See below, Chap. VII.

Footnote 338:

See the author’s _Old English Ballads_, p. xxx, and reference to
Wordsworth’s famous preface. See also Gray’s letter to R. West, April,
1742, “The language of the age is never the language of poetry,” and
what follows.

Footnote 339:

See the author’s _Old English Ballads_, Boston, 1894, Introduction (on
terminology, origins, criticism), and Appendix I. (_The Ballads of
Europe_). For collections, see, of course, the material in the tenth
volume of Child’s great work. On the relations of this communal ballad
to the other kind of ballads, see Holtzhausen, _Ballade und Romanze_,
Halle, 1882, and Chevalier, _Zur Poetik der Ballade_, Programme of the
Prague _Obergymnasium_, in four parts, Prague, 1891-1895.

Footnote 340:

“Volkslied und Kunstlied in Deutschland,” Beilage zur _Allgemeinen
Zeitung_, Munich, Nos. 53, 54, March, 1898,—a paper first read in
October, 1897.

Footnote 341:

Only the narrative song is here considered; for popular lyric see
below.

Footnote 342:

“Volksdichtung und Kunstdichtung,” in _Nord und Süd_, LXVIII. (1894),
76 ff. It may be noted here that the temptation to take this easy
attitude toward poetry of the people, as toward a fictitious and
fanciful affair, is largely due to a misunderstanding of the
evolutionary side of the case. The distinction is not one of
coexistent forms of poetry so much as of successive stages of
evolution. It is no hard matter to take so-called popular poetry of
the day and reduce it to terms of art—the lowest terms, of course; but
with poetry of the people treated as a closed or closing account, and
with historical evidence about it in former times, a very different
problem is presented. An important hint to this effect was given by
Dr. Eugen Wolff in his paper “über den Stil des Nibelungenliedes,”
_Verhandlungen der vierzigsten Versammlung deutscher Philologen_,
etc., Leipzig, 1890, pp. 259 ff.

Footnote 343:

_Norske Folkeviser_, Christiania, 1853, pp. iii f.

Footnote 344:

_Chants et Chansons Populaires des Provinces de l’Ouest_, Niort, 1895,
I. 12. For the authorship, Le Braz, remarks, _Soniou-Breiz-Izel,
Chansons Pop. d. l. Basse-Bretagne_, Introd., p. xxv, “à mesure que
les productions populaires deviennent plus médiocres, leurs auteurs se
font un devoir de conscience de les contresigner.”

Footnote 345:

_Songs of the Russian People_, p. 40.

Footnote 346:

Krohn, “La Chanson Populaire en Finlande,” Proceedings Internat.
Folk-Lore Congress, 1891, pp. 134 ff., a valuable paper. “La poésie
s’est refugiée dans la pensée, mais elle n’a pu se maintenir intacte
de trivialité.” See also Comparetti, _Kalewala_, pp. 16 f.

Footnote 347:

E. H. Meyer, _Volkskunde_, pp. 327, 331.

Footnote 348:

_James Hogg_ (Famous Scots Series), p. 25.

Footnote 349:

In _Mélusine_, IV, (1888-1889), pp. 49 ff., and continued.

Footnote 350:

It is significant that the vogue of singing-clubs in German rural
districts, which would seem to make for communal ballads, really
drives them out. See Dunger, _Rundâs u. Reimsprüche aus dem
Vogtlande_, Plauen, 1876, p. xxx.

Footnote 351:

The introduction to Rosa Warrens’s _Schwedische Volkslieder_, 1857, is
by Wolf, and Grundtvig did a similar favour for her _Dänische
Volkslieder_, 1858; opposed as regards authorship, the two are agreed
on the source of a ballad in the homogeneous community. This even
Comparetti recognizes: _Kalewala_, p. 21. See, too, Liliencron,
_Deutsches Leben im Volkslied um 1530_, p. xi., and Baring-Gould,
_English Minstrelsie_, Vol. VII. Introduction (“On English
Song-Making”). But it is useless to pile up these references.

Footnote 352:

January 27, 1900.

Footnote 353:

Of course, one community may still sing, while another has forgotten.
Beaurepaire, _Étude sur la Poésie Populaire en Normandie_, 1856, pp.
24 f., notes this, as well as the fact that some kinds of songs linger
while others die. He found no _vocero_ left in Normandy, but old
choral wedding songs still were heard. The dance is going—the old
village dance, the _ronde_: pp. 30 f.

Footnote 354:

Böckel, _Deutsche Volkslieder aus Oberhessen_, Marburg, 1885, has an
introduction of great value, which shows how utterly German folksong
is a closed account. Traditional ballads are still sung, but none are
made; what is now made is mainly “Schmutz und Rohheit.” Factories,
singing-schools, are putting an end to communal song. The process of
decay, he thinks, began as early as 1600. For description of modern
communal songs, see p. cxxviii. Folksong, he says (p. clxxxiii), is
dead throughout civilized Europe.

Footnote 355:

See John Ashton, _Modern Street Ballads_, London, 1888. For the
French, see C. Nisard, _Les Chansons Populaires chez les Anciens et
chez les Français, essai historique suivi d’une étude sur la chanson
des rues contemporaine_, ... Paris, 1867, 2 vols. Vol. II. treats
street songs. This is really a continuation of Nisard’s _Histoire des
Livres Populaires_, 2 vols., 1854, on almanacs, prophecies,
divinations, magic, etc. Nisard’s account of origins is ridiculous,—or
perhaps it is meant to be playful. See I. 69.

Footnote 356:

In addition to the material quoted in the introduction to _Old English
Ballads_, see Nash, Harvey, and the other pamphleteers on nearly every
page. Chettle, _Kind-Harts Dreame_ (Percy Soc., 1841), particularly
pp. 9 ff., has a lively account of ballad making, printing, selling,
singing, in this lower stratum. What is so lewd, he asks, that it has
not been printed “and in every streete abusively chanted”? For the
state of things somewhat later, see a curious publication, _Whimzies,
or a New Cast of Characters_, London, 1631; it describes in
alphabetical order, “almanach-maker,” “ballad-monger,” and so on, down
to “zealous brother”; for ballad-monger, see pp. 8-15.

Footnote 357:

_Ancient and Modern Scottish Songs._

Footnote 358:

_National Ballad and Song: Merry Songs and Ballads Prior to the Year
1800_; 5 vols., privately printed for subscribers only, 1897. The
fourth volume of the Percy Folio teaches a like lesson.

Footnote 359:

_Werke_, ed. Suphan, XXV. 323.

Footnote 360:

See above, p. 121.

Footnote 361:

_Poetik_ (well called _Naturlehre der Dichtung_, and an excellent
piece of work), pp. 99 ff.

Footnote 362:

When folk read and write, they cease to improvise poetry, and the
folksong really ceases; that the æsthetic impulse, however, abides
with them, even in low levels, but has other results, is shown by
Gustav Meyer in an interesting passage of his “Neugriechische
Volkslieder,” _Essays_, p. 309.

Footnote 363:

Sir George Douglas, _Hogg_, pp. 38 f.

Footnote 364:

See the context of it in Lachmann u. Haupt, _Minnesangs Frühling_, pp.
221 ff.

Footnote 365:

Jeanroy, _Origines de la Poésie Lyrique en France_, Paris, 1889, Part
III., shows conclusively the origin of these songs in the public
dance.

Footnote 366:

“Balade” of the twelfth century: Bartsch, _Chrestomathie Provençale_,
p. 107. _Alavia_ = “away from us, begone,” the _procul este profani_
of the dancers. See also G. Paris, _Origines de la Poésie Lyrique_,
etc., a review of Jeanroy, Paris, 1892, pp. 12 ff. The rimes in -_ar_
running through this stanza and the rest, and certain touches of art,
show the changes in record; but the refrain and the spirit of the
piece are quite communal.

Footnote 367:

Quellien, _Chansons et Danses des Bretons_, Paris, 1889, p. 11, notes
that one event is not likely to be treated both in the song and in the
tale: “ce qui est tombé dans le domaine de la narrative prosaïque est
par cela même exclu desormais de la chanson.” Communal song must seize
present things; in the tales it was “once upon a time.”

Footnote 368:

Buckle, _Hist. Civ. Engl._, I. Chap. vi., calls ballads “the
groundwork of all historical knowledge,” and says they are “all
strictly true” at the start. The use of writing, he thinks, put an end
to their value.

Footnote 369:

This traditional, narrative song is called ballad throughout the
present book,—unfortunately an equivocal term. The terminology of the
whole subject is notoriously bad, and “ballad” is no exception to the
rule. See _Old English Ballads_, pp. xviii ff.; Blankenburg,
_Litterarische Zusätze u. s. w._, I. 387 ff., under “Dichtkunst”; for
modern “ballad,” Werner in the _Anzeiger für deutsches Alterthum_,
XIV. 165 ff., 190 f., XV. 259; for German names, Erich Schmidt,
_Charakteristiken_, pp. 199 ff.; on _balada_, Jeanroy, _Origines_,
etc., p. 403, who shows the passage of the word from its meaning as a
dance-song to the technical term for a fixed form of verse. In Corsica
a _ballata_ can be a lament (see below under _vocero_), and derives
from the dance round a corpse: J. B. Marcaggi, _Les Chants de la
Mort_, etc., Paris, 1898, p. 121, note on the _caracolu_, “a sort of
pantomime danced about the corpse by the mourning women, with gestures
of grief,” but now fallen out of use. Of course, the only point here
is to separate the ballad from songs like _Greensleeves_, from
journalism (for the so-called “ballad” under Elizabeth shows that her
folk were as anxious to get into print, or to keep out of it, as we
are in days of the newspaper), from occasional poetry, scurrilous
rimes, hymns, and all the rest. “Sonnet” was a word that then not only
meant any short poem, but occasionally made a little competition with
“ballad”; several of the ballads in the Rawlinson Collection, Bodleian
Library, are called “sonnet” either by title or in the text.

Footnote 370:

Work quoted, p. lxviii. Critics look at this narrative and treat it as
the only element in the ballad; but at every turn they should remember
that the original ballad was always property of a throng, was always
sung, was always danced, and was never without a dominant refrain.

Footnote 371:

Even Kleinpaul, sarcastic enough against Grimm, implies this condition
in his nine characteristics of popular poetry: _Von der Volkspoesie_,
published anonymously, 1860, and as supplement to his _Poetik_, 1870.
See p. 29.

Footnote 372:

Introduction to Rosa Warrens’s _Schwedische Volkslieder_, p. xix.

Footnote 373:

_Ancient Danish Ballads_, 1860, I. ix.

Footnote 374:

_Altgermanische Poesie_, p. 118. See also p. 52.

Footnote 375:

Heinzel, “Beschreibung d. isländ. Saga,” _Sitzungsberichte_, Vienna
Acad., phil. hist. class, 1897, p. 117.

Footnote 376:

Said of the Castilian and Aragonese ballads in Wolf’s _Proben portug.
u. catalan. Romanzen_, Vienna, 1856, p. 6. Here, too, he opposes the
idea, presently to be considered, that ballads are degenerate epic or
romance.

Footnote 377:

A broader account of the origin of ballads is given by Comparetti,
_Kalewala_, pp. 282 f. He refers them to the romantic and chivalric
sentiment of the late Middle Ages—beginning, say, with the eleventh
century—which passed from the “Romanic-Germanic centre of Europe” into
various tongues, was delivered to oral tradition as popular verse,
spread and flourished down to the sixteenth century, where it was
collected as _romancero_, _romanze_, _kæmpevise_, ballad. But
Comparetti neglects the communal conditions.

Footnote 378:

Of course it was the revival of learning, the humanistic spirit,
dividing lay society into lettered and unlettered, which really broke
up the communal ballad.

Footnote 379:

_Characters_, “A Franklin.”

Footnote 380:

Brand-Ellis, under Harvest Home. The “mell-supper,” may not derive its
name from _mesler_, as suggested, but the fact is clear enough.

Footnote 381:

Grosse, _Formen der Familie_, pp. 134 f.

Footnote 382:

_Proben_, etc., p. 6, as above, and also p. 31.

Footnote 383:

_Popular Tales of the West Highlands_, new ed., IV. 114 ff.

Footnote 384:

_Proceedings_, Internat. Folk-Lore Congress, 1891, p. 64.

Footnote 385:

Even in the material itself there is a shading from highly artistic
down to communal. _Thomas Rymer_ undoubtedly comes from a romance.
_The Boy and the Mantle_ has the flippancy of its origin in the
_fabliau_; Jeanroy, _Origines_, p. 155, declares such a touch of the
cynical to warrant one in taking the ballad out of that class which he
calls popular. _King Orfeo_ is a distorted tale from the classics.
Plain kin-tragedies, however, like _Babylon_, _Edward_, _The Twa
Brothers_, are simple enough for one to leave them to communal
origins, and not go source-hunting. Even where the motive seems
international, details may be home-made; how much of _Hero and
Leander_ is left in that Westphalian ballad, _Et wasen twei
Kunnigeskinner_? This story of the lovers and the lighted taper is
found in many folksongs. See Reifferscheid, _Westfälische
Volkslieder_, pp. 127 ff. In the classics and modern poetry,—witness
Musæos and Marlowe,—it belongs to art. Comparative mythology laid hold
of it, followed it back to India, and from India to the
skies,—spring-god, sea, stars, autumn storms, and the rest. But this
is needless bewilderment of a plain case; we have only to deal with
the way in which Westphalian peasants sing of prince and princess. In
three stanzas the story is told; all the rest deals with the situation
so given, and here the communal elements (see below, p. 196) come in.
The point is that study of subject-matter in ballads is distinct from
the study of ballad elements. These are constant in good ballads,
whether the subject be borrowed, or be local history, as in _Bessy
Bell and Mary Gray_, and the Border ballads generally. In addition to
the studies of ballad migration (e.g. _Sir Aldingar_) by Grundtvig and
by Child, see a close piece of investigation by Professor Bugge,
“Harpens Kraft,” in the _Arkiv for Nordisk Filologi_, VII. (1891), 97
ff.

Footnote 386:

In his introduction to the _Canti Populari del Piemonte_, p. xviii.

Footnote 387:

On the chasm between ballads of the collections and the recorded
beginnings of national literatures, see _Old English Ballads_, p.
lxxi.

Footnote 388:

See below, under Improvisation.

Footnote 389:

See remarks on “Crow and Pie,” _Ballads_, II. 478.

Footnote 390:

_Essays_, pp. 309 f.

Footnote 391:

See appendix on minstrels in the author’s _Old English Ballads_.

Footnote 392:

_Social Forces in German Literature_, p. 117. Talvj draws similar
conclusions: _Charakter._, etc., pp. 339, 405.

Footnote 393:

_Altdeutsches Liederbuch_, p. xxii. The personal theory is much more
temperately set forth, and with a better idea of throng-conditions, by
Jeanroy, _Origines_, p. 396.

Footnote 394:

This leprous monk has been a godsend to the writers on ballad origins.
But one might as well appeal to the _ego_ in a passage from Thomas
Cantipratensis, written near Cambrai, in 1263, and often quoted: Quod
autem obscoena carmina finguntur a daemonibus et perditorum mentibus
immittuntur, quidam daemon nequissimus qui ... puellam nobilem ...
prosequebatur, manifeste populis audientibus dixit: “Cantum hunc
celebrem de Martino ego cum collega meo composui et per diversas
terras Galliae et Theutoniae promulgavi”.... Here are individual
authorship—or collaboration: “I and a colleague of mine,” says the
demon,—aristocratic origins, and Prior’s lady in the case.

Footnote 395:

Villemarqué, _Barzaz-Breiz_, Paris, 1846, II. 285. _Le Temps Passé_
begins p. 273.

Footnote 396:

Or suppose one should pin the _ego_ folk to a belief in the statement
found in so many ballads that they are written by the person of whom
they sing! This statement is a favourite in Basque songs. See F.
Michel, _Le Pays Basque_, pp. 320 f.

Footnote 397:

Or take the _Schloss in Oesterreich_:—

Wer ist, der uns dies Liedlein sang?
So frei ist es gesungen;
Das haben gethan drei Jungfräulein
Zu Wien in Oesterreiche.

Footnote 398:

Compare the dance and singing of the Botocudos, above, p. 95.

Footnote 399:

No one now pretends that “Expliceth, quod Rychard Sheale,” at the end
of the Ms. of the old Cheviot ballad, makes Sheale the author of it.

Footnote 400:

Work quoted, p. lvii. The implied protest against Grimm, p. lxxxii,
must be read along with the passage just cited.

Footnote 401:

“Una creazione spontanea essenzialmente etnica.”

Footnote 402:

_Histoire Poétique de Charlemagne_, p. 2.

Footnote 403:

_Romania_, XIII. 617.

Footnote 404:

_Ibid._, p. 603.

Footnote 405:

_Hist. Po. Charl._, p. 11.

Footnote 406:

Driver, _Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament_, p. 389,
sums up for a modified acceptance of this theory. It seems clear that
some of the Psalms are distinctly individual in every way, and as
clear that many others are congregational and communal.

Footnote 407:

“Ueber das Ich der Psalmen,” _Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche
Wissenschaft_, VIII. (1888), 49-148. Against him _in toto_ is Dr.
Robertson, _The Poetry and the Religion of the Hebrews_, 1898. See pp.
20 ff., 260 ff.

Footnote 408:

_Religion of Israel to the Exile_, p. 198.

Footnote 409:

Robertson’s objection to this is trivial (work quoted, p. 283), and
shows a total lack of insight into the conditions of old communal
song. “It is becoming more and more plain,” says Donovan, _Lyre to
Muse_, p. 162, “that individuals could have had little to do with
forming the fashions and manner of Hebrew song.” It sprang from the
choral dance of the people, which later times called “idolatrous.”

Footnote 410:

_Vore Folkeviser fra Middelalderen_, Copenhagen, 1891, an admirable
book. See particularly, p. 39; also Talvj, _Charakteristik_, p. 340.

Footnote 411:

Wright and Halliwell, _Reliquiae Antiquae_, I. 248 f.

Footnote 412:

Sc. _fine_,—finish, end?

Footnote 413:

_Zeitschrift f. Völkerpsych._, V. 201. He notes a curious close found
in many ballads.—

Danube! Danube!
Thou shalt sing no more.

Footnote 414:

The opening or close of Germanic epic is often of this “I” character.
So the Hildebrand Lay, the _Béowulf_, the _Nibelungenlied_ at its end.
Later epic shows a poet in the case, who has his own wares to
announce. See R. M. Meyer, _Altgermanische Poesie_, pp. 357 ff., and
his references.

Footnote 415:

Steenstrup, work quoted, pp. 43, 28 f.

Footnote 416:

Often the reciter remarks that it is night; that he is tired, thirsty;
let the hearers come again on the morrow and each one bring a coin
with him,—and so on. See A. Tobler, _Zeitschr. f. Völkerpsych._, IV.
175, quoting from _Huon de Bordeaux_.

Footnote 417:

It was noted that the Botocudos had no legends, no song of the past. A
narrative song in the legendary sense is unknown to primitive folk;
what they sing is the event of the day, an improvised song of
sentences almost contemporary with the facts, cadenced by the communal
dance. The sense of time past is so slender even among North American
Indians (Powell, First Annual Report of Bureau of Ethnology to
Smithsonian Inst., 1881, pp. 29 ff.), that while they admit that grass
grows, they “stoutly deny that the forest pines and the great sequoias
were not created as they are.” Now this primitive trait of poetry is
preserved in communal ballads; and from this strictly communal class,
long historical ballads, like those in German collections, should be
excluded. Kögel, _Geschichte der deutschen Litteratur_, I. 111, notes
that “the epic song ... is one of the later kinds of poetry.... It
cannot even be regarded as belonging to the common Germanic stock.”
But the communal narrative song is another matter.

Footnote 418:

“On American Aboriginal Poetry,” _Proc. Numismat. and Antiquar. Soc.
Philadelphia_, 1887, p. 19.

Footnote 419:

See Böckel, work quoted, cxix.

Footnote 420:

Steenstrup has some good remarks on this point, work quoted, pp. 188
ff., 203 ff.

Footnote 421:

Of far earlier date than ballads, this poetry is in a later stage of
evolution. _Wîdsið_, the oldest recorded English poem, shows more art
and more poetic dialect than many a bit of Scottish verse picked up a
century ago.

Footnote 422:

See R. Heinzel, _Ueber den Stil der altgermanischen Poesie_,
Strassburg, 1875; W. Bode, _Die Kenningar in der angelsächsischen
Dichtung_, Darmstadt u. Leipzig, 1886; R. M. Meyer, _Altgermanische
Poesie_. See too Uhland, _Klein. Schrift._, I. 390.

Footnote 423:

A kenning, with many branches in Anglo-Saxon poetry, calls survivors
of battle “the leavings of weapons.” This may once have been literal;
but in its context it looks as deliberate as Lamb’s phrase for a
resuscitated victim of the gallows,—“refuse of the rope, _the leavings
of the cord_” (_Inconveniences Resulting from Being Hanged_).

Footnote 424:

_Pop. Tales_, IV. 152.

Footnote 425:

The general testimony for all ballads. For example, Fauriel, _Chants
Populaires de la Grèce Moderne_, I. cxxix; these, he says, are full of
commonplaces and recurrent phrases; the diction is “simple, nervous,
and direct, that is, it has few figures, almost no inversions, and
progresses in short periodic and nearly equal passages.” Remains of
oldest Greek folk song show the same traits: Usener, _Altgriech.
Versbau_, p. 45.

Footnote 426:

_Wolfram von Eschenbach_, ed. Lachmann, p. 4.

Sîne klâwen
durh die wolken sint geslagen,
er stîget ûf mit grôzer kraft,
ih sih in grâwen ...
den tac ...

Footnote 427:

This may well go back to the summer songs, May-day songs, chorals, and
so on, of festal crowds; so Bielschowsky, _Geschichte der deutschen
Dorfpoesie_, Berlin, 1891, p. 13, concludes for the songs of Neidhart.
So, too, with songs on the conflict of summer and winter. Latin poets
of the Middle Ages led the way in regular description of nature. See
Wilmanns, _Walther_, p. 409. For the general case, Burckhardt, _Cultur
d. Renaissance_, II. 15; Uhland, _Klein. Schrift._, III. 388, 469.

Footnote 428:

_Færøiske Qvaeder_, p. 74.

Footnote 429:

Child, _Ballads_, I. 170.

Footnote 430:

Refrain or burden, not printed with the other stanzas, but sung
throughout.

Footnote 431:

Maid.

Footnote 432:

Of = by.

Footnote 433:

Deprived, parted.

Footnote 434:

The incremental repetition of this ballad could be matched by many
other cases. Typical is the combination of simple and incremental
repetition, also in triads, at the end of a French ballad, “Sur le
Bord de l’Ile,” Crane, _Chansons Populaires_, p. 28. Typical, too, is
the interesting Westphalian ballad, already noted, of the Hero and
Leander story: Reifferscheid, _Westf. Volksl._, pp. 2 f.; see _ibid._,
Nos. 2, 5. “Mother, my _eyes_ hurt me,—may I _walk_ by the sea?”—“Not
alone; take thy youngest brother.” Reasons follow against and for
this. Then repetition: my _eyes_ hurt me, may I not _walk_, etc. “Take
thy youngest sister,”—and incremental repetition of the reasons.
Then:—

“O mother,” said she, “mother,
My _heart_ is sore in me;
Let others go to the churches,—
I will _pray_ by the murmuring sea.”

Usually each increment has a stanza, but now and then compression
takes place, as in Motherwell’s version of _Sir Hugh_:—

She wiled him into ae chamber,
She wiled him into twa,
She wiled him into the third chamber,
And that was warst o’t a’ ...

And first came out the thick, thick blood,
And syne came out the thin,
And syne came out the bonnie heart’s blood ...

So with three horses, and what not. This triad is not necessarily
sprung from the “Dreitheiligkeit in der Lyrik,” of which Veit Valentin
discourses in the _Zeitschr. f. vgl. Lit._ (New Series) II. 9 ff.
“Dreitheiligkeit in der Lyrik,” comes rather from communal iteration
in primitive song and dance.

Footnote 435:

See his letter to Mason, _Works_, ed. Gosse, II. 36.

Footnote 436:

Professor Earle confuses, in a very uncritical way, the garrulity of
romances with the garrulity of epics and of ballads: see his _Deeds of
Béowulf_, p. xlix. A “voluble and rambling loquacity,” he says, is the
“natural character of the lay, and still more of the epic, which is a
compilation of lays.” And presently he says that the romances are “the
nearest extant representative of that unwritten literature which from
the very nature of things was undisciplined and loquacious.” Confusion
could hardly go beyond this.

Footnote 437:

_Ferienschriften_, I. 87.

Footnote 438:

“Das russische Volksepos,” _Zeitschr. f. Völkerpsych._, V. 187.

Footnote 439:

See above, p. 69.

Footnote 440:

See Porthan, _Opera Selecta_, III. 305-381. I quote from the original
dissertations _de Poesi Fennica_ 1778, pp. 57 ff. He begins by
lamenting the decay of old national song near the coast and under
clerical influence; intimates that song was a universal gift and was
improvised, although sundry bards are now eminent. Memorable events
slip into song, now convivial, now satiric; and there is great store
of proverbs. The description of dual singing begins with § XI.

Footnote 441:

“Præcentor, _Laulaja_ ... adjungit sibi alium socium sive adjutorem,
_Puoltaja_ sive _Saistaja_ dictum.”

Footnote 442:

“Quod facile jam ex sensu ipso, atque metri lege, reliquum pedem
conjectando definire licet.”

Footnote 443:

“Rarissimi stantes canunt; et si contingit aliquando, ut musarum
quodam afflatu moti stantes carmen ordiantur, mox tamen, conjunctis
dextris sessum eunt, et ritu solito cantandi continuant operam.” They
observe the rules of the game. Porthan, to be sure, notes the absence
of dancing as a national and pervasive affair; but the statement must
not go unchallenged. Long before this, Olaus Magnus (_Hist. de
gentibus Septentrion._, Romæ, 1555, Cap. VIII. lib. IV. 141) said of
the Lappland and other northern folk that they were often moved to
dance,—“excitentur ad saltum, quem vehementius citharoedo sonante
ducentes, veterumque heroum ac gigantum præclara gesta patrio rhytmate
et carmine canentes, in gemitus et alta suspiria, hinc luctus et
ululatum resoluti, dimisso ordine in terram ruunt,” a parlous state.
Scheffer, to be sure, discredits this statement of the archbishop
(_Lapponia_, 1673, p. 292); but Donner, _Lieder der Lappen_, p. 38,
believes it, and says it is confirmed by the report of a recent
Russian traveller.

Footnote 444:

Castrén, quoted by Comparetti, _Kalewala_, p. 66, note.

Footnote 445:

Talvj, _Charakteristik_, p. 87; Steenstrup, pp. 85 f.

Footnote 446:

_Ibid._, pp. 23 f.

Footnote 447:

Child, _Ballads_, I. 21.

Footnote 448:

See “Hans Michel,” and the notes to it in Reifferscheid, _Westjälische
Volkslieder_, pp. 47, 175. The song “Drüben auf grüner Haid,” pp. 51,
176, is used in the spinning-room, old home of communal minstrelsy, to
stir the women to their work. Further, see Coussemaker, _Chants Pop.
des Flamands de France_, p. 129, for a pious chanson: One is one, One
is God alone, One is God alone, And that we believe. Two is two, Two
Testaments, One God Alone ..., etc. Three is three, Three Patriarchs,
Two Testaments ... and so on, up to the Twelve Apostles. _Ibid._, pp.
333, 336 ff., 353, are comic songs of the kind; and these are highly
important, for they are songs of the dance, and still in vogue for
communal processions. Their main features are repetition—and the
refrain.

Footnote 449:

See Halliwell, _Nursery Rhymes_, p. 197:—

John Ball shot them all.
John Scott made the shot,—
But John Ball shot them all.
John Wyming made the priming,
And John Brammer made the rammer,
And John Scott ..., etc.

This is cumulative. But an old song of the fifteenth century is
incremental, a jolly bit of verse withal: Wright-Halliwell, _Reliquiae
Antiquae_, I. 4 f.—

The fals fox camme into owre croft,
And so owre geese ful fast he sought;
_Refrain_: With how, fox, how, with hey, fox, hey,
Comme no more into oure house to bere owre gese awaye.

The fals fox camme into _oure stye_ ..., etc.

Footnote 450:

E. H. Meyer, _Deutsche Volkskunde_, p. 124.

Footnote 451:

_Proben_, p. 34: “La Mina de Puigcerdá.”

Footnote 452:

K. L. Schröer, “Ein Ausflug nach Gottschee,” in _Sitzungsber._, Vienna
Acad., phil.-hist., LX. (1868), 165-288. See pp. 231 ff. One is
distantly reminded of the cumulative song (Chambers, _Popular Rhymes
of Scotland_, p. 35) of “Katie Beardie,”—for the dance:—

Katie Beardie had a coo,
Black and white about the mou’;
Wasna that a dentie coo?
Dance, Katie Beardie!

Katie Beardie had a hen,—

and cock, “grice,” so on,—probably as many animals as were won by her
distant cousin in Gottschee. See also the “Croodin Doo,” p. 51; “My
Cock, Lily Cock,” p. 31; “The Yule Days,” p. 42; and others.

Footnote 453:

Schröer, p. 274.

Footnote 454:

_Ibid._, p. 277.

Footnote 455:

To the young men invited thus to the wedding.

Footnote 456:

The Armenian bride does the singing herself, combining incremental
repetition with a refrain in which the crowd may join (Alishan,
_Armenian Popular Songs_, Venice, 1852: the third edition, 1888, omits
the name of the translator):

Little threshold, be thou not shaken;
It is for me to be shaken,
To bring lilies.

Little plank, be thou not stirred;
It is for me to be stirred,
To bring lilies.

Footnote 457:

Bladé, _Poésies Populaires de la Gascogne_, II. 220 ff. In the _Chants
Heroiques des Basques_, p. 48, Bladé tells how the Basques use these
songs of number.

Footnote 458:

_Ibid._, same page. Herd, _Ancient and Modern Scottish Songs_, I. 117
(reprint of 1869), among a number of marches more or less artificial,
prints a chorus:

Little wat ye wha’s coming,
Little wat ye wha’s coming,
Little wat ye wha’s coming,
Jock and Tam and a’s coming,

to which an indefinite series of incremental stanzas can be
added,—as:—

Duncan’s coming, Donald’s coming,
Colin’s coming, Ronald’s coming ...

and so the chorus, and again another stanza, and so on. A different
kind of song for the march is “Un wenn nu de Pott en Lock hett,”
printed by Firmenich, _Germaniens Völkerstimmen_, p. 187.

Footnote 459:

See his references, _Arbeit u. Rhythmus_, p. 71.

Footnote 460:

_Primitive Culture_, I. 86.

Footnote 461:

Tacitus, _Germania_, c. 10. Liliencron u. Müllenhoff, _Zur
Runenlehre_, Halle, 1852. Simple iteration, of course, is everywhere
in charms: _ter dices_ is the stage direction.

Footnote 462:

Grein-Wülker, _Bibliothek_, I. 317 ff.

Footnote 463:

D’Annunzio, following Baudelaire, revives repetition with considerable
effect to make up for lack of rimes in his _Elegie Romane_. See p. 69,
“Villa Chigi.”

Footnote 464:

By R. B. Gent. (Barnfield?), London, 1594, a rare book. See
Barnfield’s own _Hellens Rape_, ed. by Grosart for the Roxburgh Club,
1876.

Footnote 465:

A gentle shepherd born in Arcady,
Of gentlest race that ever shepherd bore.

No small influence in introducing this kind of repetition is due to
the imitations of classic verse, and the struggles of the Areopagus to
expel the tyrant Rime. Compare Spenser’s own experiment: _Now doe I
nightly waste_, quoted by Guest, _English Rhythms_, II. 270.

Footnote 466:

A suspicion that R. B. is japing (see his _Amyntas: A-mint-Asse_, in
the 4th of the fourteen “sonnets”), vanishes with careful reading of
these highly interesting “experiments.”

Footnote 467:

_Carm._ lxii. 39 ff.

Footnote 468:

Recorded as a fifteenth-century carol in the Sloane Ms.

Footnote 469:

See, however, the caution uttered by M. Jeanroy against the idea that
songs of the _Carmina Burana_ represent popular poetry (_Origines de
la Poésie Lyrique en France_, pp. 304 f.). Ingenious repetition,
whether in refrains of the _triolet_ type, or in the Portuguese type
represented by these verses, and in certain other poems of artificial
construction (Jeanroy, p. 309):—

Per ribeira do rio
vy remar o navio;
_et sabor ey da ribeyra_!

Per ribeyra do alto
vy remar o barco;
_et sabor_, etc.

Vy remar o navio
hy vay o meu amigo;
_et sabor_, etc.

Vy remar o barco,
hy vay o meu amado;
_et sabor_, etc.

are probably no popular making. See, however, above, p. 139, the
folksong of this type.

Footnote 470:

“Chume, chume, geselle min.” _Carmina Burana_, ed. Schmeller, pp. 208
f.

Footnote 471:

See also R. H. Cromek, _Select Scottish Songs_, London, 1810, I. 14,—

_Saw ye my Maggie?_

Footnote 472:

_Altgermanische Poesie_, pp. 228 f. See also Kluge, in Paul-Braune,
_Beiträge_, IX. 462 f.

Footnote 473:

Uhland, _Volkslieder_, I. 78.

Footnote 474:

Variations may advance the sentence, or simply hold it; thus
(_Bareaz-Breiz_):

Little Azénor the Pale is betrothed, but not to her lover,
Little Azénor the Pale is betrothed, not to her sweet “clerk”;

no advance; otherwise in a refrain:—

Come hearken, hearken, O folk,
Come hearken, hearken to the song!

which suggests the syntactic structure of old English poetry due to
alliterative variation.

Footnote 475:

A single sentence to the single verse is indicated in all primitive
poetry, and is still the rule in Russian folksong: Bistrom, _Zeitschr.
für Völkerpsy._, V. 185. Progress lay both in intension and in
extension,—regulation of the verse-parts, and combination of verses in
a strophe. For example, an element like rime or assonance was used to
bind verses now in couplets, now in a series like the old French
_tirade_.

Footnote 476:

_Proben der Volkslitteratur der türkischen Stämme Süd-Siberiens_, St.
Petersburg, 1866 ff.

Footnote 477:

_Ibid._, III. xix. See above on the closed account. Exotic literature,
and the _mullas_, learned poets, Radloff declares, are slowly driving
out folksong of every sort.

Footnote 478:

For a study of the artistic side of this improvised song, see Chap.
VIII. Here the communal conditions are to be emphasized, and the basis
of unvaried repetition is to be inferred.

Footnote 479:

Radloff, III. 34, note; 41.

Footnote 480:

Compare Hildebrand in the older lay, bidding his son Hathubrand put
him to the test of genealogies:—

“ibu dû mî ênan sagês, ik mî dê ôdre uuêt,
chind, in chuninerîche: chûd ist mî al irmindeot.”

Footnote 481:

Radloff, III. 48 f.

Footnote 482:

The so-called _Oelong_, with rime or assonance. _Ibid._, III. xxii.
The quatrain, as Usener points out in his _Altgriechischer Versbau_,
seems to have been the favourite measure for popular verse.

Footnote 483:

_Ibid._, I. 218 ff.

Footnote 484:

White and blue are the favourite variation. In a series, climax is
often displaced by anticlimax, as in the quotation below:
wife—betrothed; gold—silver; back—neck. For anticlimax with decreasing
numbers, see Radloff, II. 670.

Footnote 485:

Radloff, II. 669.

Footnote 486:

See Vilmar, _Deutsche Altertümer im Hêliand_, Marburg, 1862, pp. 3 f.

Footnote 487:

_Essai sur l’Histoire de la Critique chez les Grecs_, Paris, 3d ed.,
1887, pp. 6 f.

Footnote 488:

_Odyssey_, I. 352.

Footnote 489:

A study of marriage-songs must begin with choral sex-dances and songs
of the great periodic excitement, the mating-time, still observed by
Australian tribes, and work up through survivals of every sort to the
festal “epithalamies” and their deputies in the poetry of art.

Footnote 490:

E. H. Meyer, _Volkskunde_, p. 168.

Footnote 491:

Perhaps a survival, but surely an exceptional case, valuable only for
the communal feeling. See Pearson, who gives the facts, _Chances of
Death_, II. 141.

Footnote 492:

_Old English Ballads_, pp. xxxii ff.

Footnote 493:

Fauriel, _Chants Populaires de la Grèce Moderne_, Paris, I. 1824, II.
1825. See I. xxxvi. Roman literature gives hints of the same sort. The
first epithalamium of Catullus (lxi) is “an imitation of the national
custom”: Teuffel, _Hist. Roman Lit._, trans. Warr, p. 5.

Footnote 494:

The older wedding in Greece was of the same kind. See _Iliad_, XVIII.
491 ff.; K. O. Müller, _Griech. Lit._, p. 34. See too the burlesque at
the end of Aristophanes’s _Birds_, and H. W. Smythe, _Greek Melic
Poets_, p. cxx.

Footnote 495:

Hahn, _Albanesische Studien_, I. 144 ff.

Footnote 496:

See the whole section in Brand’s _Antiquities_ under “Marriage Customs
and Ceremonies.” The quotation is from _The Christian State of
Matrimony_, 1543.

Footnote 497:

_De antiquissima Germanorum poesi chorica_, Kiel, 1847, pp. 23
f.—“carmina nuptialia, quorum varia erant nomina,” etc. See also
Kögel, _Geschichte der deutschen Lit._, I. 44 f.

Footnote 498:

Kögel, pp. 44 f.

Footnote 499:

_Chronik_, ed. Dahlmann, I. 116 ff., 176. It is here that the good man
breaks out in a lament for the “leffliche schone Gesenge” that have
been lost. Bladé, _Poesies Pop. d. l. Gascogne_, I. xix ff., says the
wedding songs are both traditional and improvised, taking the form of
choral dialogues, where repetition is of course abundant.

Footnote 500:

“Das Volkslied Israels im Munde der Propheten,” in _Preussische
Jahrbücher_ LXXIII. (1893), 462.

Footnote 501:

Wetzstein, “Die syrische Dreschtafel,” in _Zeitschrift für
Ethnologie_, V. (1873), 288 ff. See p. 297.

Footnote 502:

The various German bridal songs printed by Firmenich, _Germaniens
Völkerstimmen_, are mostly artificial things; and one which goes to a
lively rhythm and is meant for a dance (I. 165) has fallen into mere
barnyard filth.

Footnote 503:

Lucian, _On Mourning_, 12 f. “A speech senseless and ridiculous,” he
says of the oration.

Footnote 504:

_Kl. Schrift._, III. 445.

Footnote 505:

See his _Gesch. d. d. Lit._, I. 47, 51.

Footnote 506:

Professor Smythe points out, _Greek Melic Poets_, p. cxiv, that Homer
describes a hymeneal but “nowhere alludes to the religious element in
the celebration of the rite.”

Footnote 507:

_Iliad_, XXIV, 719 ff., trans. Lang, Leaf, and Myers.

Footnote 508:

See H. Koester, _de Cantilenis Popularibus Veterum Graecorum_, Berol.,
1831, p. 15. Roman _neniae_, of course, are in point (see Sittl,
_Gebärden der Griechen und Römer_; Cap. IV.); but the artificial
element is very strong, and primitive survivals are few. Wordsworth,
_Fragments and Specimens of Early Latin_, p. 562, says of the epitaphs
on the Scipios, “Whether they were or were not fragments of _neniae_
is quite uncertain.”

Footnote 509:

Crude enough, to be sure, compared with Chaucer’s humour in dealing
with the funeral of Arcite:—

“Why woldestow be deed,” thise wommen crye,
“And haddest gold ynough, and Emelye?”

For this is the conventional question, in whatever form, in the
_vocero_ of all places and ages: “Why did you die? You had enough to
eat, you had clothes,” etc. Old Egeus has the modern consolation, and
philosophizes in no communal vein.

Footnote 510:

_Odyssey_, XXIV. 59 ff.

Footnote 511:

1117 f. It has been noted that Kögel, _Gesch. d. d. Lit._, I. 54,
says, without good reason, that this was a magic song, a _spruch_. It
was surely what it is called, a song of lament, a _vocero_, and
doubtless asked the same old question.

Footnote 512:

St. Augustine tells how such songs were sung at the tomb of St.
Cyprian: “per totam noctem cantabantur hic nefaria, et _cantantibus
saltabatur_.” See also the well-known passage from Burchard of Worms:
“cantasti ibi diabolica carmina et fecisti ibi saltationes”—_i.e._ at
the “vigiliis cadaverum mortuorum.” Müllenhoff, work quoted, pp. 26
ff., gives some of these protests of the church. On p. 30 he notes
that the songs themselves were improvised: _extempore et subito
facta_. The older the rite, the more choral and communal it grows. The
names (_ibid._, p. 25) are significant: _dâdsisas_, _leidsang_,
_chlagasang_, etc., for older German; _lîcsang_, _lîcleóð_
(_epicedium_), _byrgensang_ (_epitaphium_), etc., for older English.

Footnote 513:

_Béow._, 1322, 2124 f.

Footnote 514:

_Ibid._, 2446 f., 2460. There is a sort of _vocero_ echo here.
Remarkable, too, in the story of the self-buried chief, is a _vocero_
of that old man over himself, the last of the race burying his
treasure as a kind of substitute: _ibid._, 2233 ff. It is superfluous
to point out how English lyric poetry, from the _Ruin_ to the _Elegy_,
and on to our own day, loves to linger by a grave. Traces of the
_vocero_ that led to the vendetta might be found in the countless
stories of old Germanic feud.

Footnote 515:

_De Orig. Act. Getarum_, ed. Holder, c. 49. A similar story is told
(c. 41) of the funeral of King Theoderid of the Visigoths, killed in
451, and of the wild songs that were sung even on the field of battle
as the warriors bore away the body of their king.

Footnote 516:

Child, I. 182.

Footnote 517:

_Folk-Lore Soc. Pub._, IV. (1881), pp. 21, 31.

Footnote 518:

Scott, _Minstrelsy_, 1812, II. 361 ff.

Footnote 519:

Still found in remote places,—among Germans in North Hungary, and in
Gottschee in Krain, speech-islands both. Meyer, _Volkskunde_, p. 272.

Footnote 520:

“Dans der Maegdekens,” heard at Bailleul by Coussemaker. See his
_Chants Populaires des Flamands de France_, Gand, 1856, pp. 100 f.
Soon after 1840 it was forbidden, and the song is no more, save in the
record. It goes back, says C., to the oldest times.

Footnote 521:

_Ibid._, p. 101.

Footnote 522:

Budde, “Das hebräische Klagelied,” _Zeitschr. f. alttestamentl.
Wissensch._, II. 26 f.; and Wetzstein, “Syrische Dreschtafel,” as
quoted above. See also same _Zeitsch._, III. 299 ff. For the
professional singing-women, the _praeficae_ of Israel, see Jer. ix.
19.

Footnote 523:

Budde, “Die hebräische Leichenklage,” _Zeitschr. d. deutsch.
Palästina-Vereins_, VI. 181 f., 184 ff.

Footnote 524:

Work quoted, p. cxxxiii.

Footnote 525:

J. G. Hahn, _Albanesische Studien_, I. 150 f.

Footnote 526:

Precisely as among the Irish. See Miss Edgeworth’s account, quoted by
Brand, _Antiquities_, “Watching with the Dead.”

Footnote 527:

In a note, I. 198, Hahn notes that Plato forbade this wild cry
(_Legg._ xxi), but allowed the song of lament. For calling on the
dead, cf. Latin _inclamare_.

Footnote 528:

One of the canons which condemned heathen customs at Christian
funerals forbids not only song and dance, but also _illum ululatum
excelsum_.

Footnote 529:

The _vocero_ sung by natives of Algiers has been noted as strongly
resembling the Corsican. A specimen, quoted from Certeux and Carnoy,
_L’Algérie Traditionelle_, is full of repetition and refrain.

Footnote 530:

Springer, _Das altprovenzalische Klagelied_, Berlin, 1895, pp. 8 ff.
It is this formal poem of grief which is in the mind of Crescimbeni,
_Comentarj Intorno all’ Istoria della Volgar Poesia_, 1731, I. 256,
when he traces the Italian funeral song back to Latin and Greek.

Footnote 531:

This English Boileau, who “flourished,” in two senses, about 1200, is
good reading. His _Poetria_ begins at p. 862 of Polycarpi Leyseri ...
_Historia Poetarum et Poematum Medii Ævi_, Hal. Magd., MDCCXXI.

Footnote 532:

_C. T._, 4537 ff. The Latin:

_Temporibus luctus, his verbis exprime luctum._

Footnote 533:

Marcaggi, _Les Chants de la Mort et de la Vendetta de la Corse_,
Paris, 1898, p. 193, gives a _vocero_ said to have been made by a
monk, who calls on the celestial powers to join the chorus and wail
the death of his two friends: “Jesus, Joseph, Mary, Sacred Sacrament,
and all of you here in chorus, sing this _lamento_.” Bandits make a
_vocero_, pp. 307 f.

Footnote 534:

Jer. xxii. 18. See below, on the Linos song.

Footnote 535:

_Trionfo della Morte_, pp. 419 f. “Era l’antica monodia che da tempo
immemorabile in terra d’Abruzzi le donne cantavano su le spoglie dei
consanguinei.” See another account of the Italian _vocero_ in
Guastella, _Canti Popolari del Circondario di Modica_, Modica, 1876,
p. lxxix. He notes, moreover, that in Sicily the _prèfiche_ are called
_ripetitrici_.

Footnote 536:

Mérimée’s _Columba_ has made the _vocero_ familiar to readers. See
also Marcaggi, work quoted; Ortoli, _Les Voceri de l’Ile de Corse_,
Paris, 1887; Paul de St. Victor, _Hommes et Dieux_, Paris, 1872, pp.
349-369, a reprinted article cannily decocted and pleasantly served in
the English periodical _Once a Week_, 1867, pp. 437-442. St. Victor
refers to the older collections of Tommaseo and of Fée.

Footnote 537:

Marcaggi, p. 161. See above on the ride round the body of Beowulf and
of Attila, and the older dance. The _caracolu_ is “a sort of
pantomime, a funeral dance done by the mourners round the corpse as
they make gestures of grief.” The _caracolu_ is danced no more. And
again, Marcaggi, p. 231, note: “_vocerare_ ou _ballatrare_ veut donc
dire improviser un vocero,”—highly suggestive fact.

Footnote 538:

_Ibid._, p. 4; Ortoli, p. xxxiv. Of these two, Marcaggi prints mainly
the older material, with a few new pieces of miscellaneous character,
such as cradle-songs and serenades.

Footnote 539:

His philology is unnecessary, p. 85. Ortoli, too, should stick to his
“espèce de sanglot,” rather than follow his colleague’s “racine de
_titiare_” or contraction of _Oh Dio!_

Footnote 540:

Ortoli, p. 248.

Footnote 541:

_Manquait de tenue_, M., pp. 24 f.

Footnote 542:

See Marcaggi, pp. 157, 231, for a _vocératrice célèbre_. “La
vocératrice marche toujours à la tête des pleureuses,”—in going to the
funeral.

Footnote 543:

Such is No. X. in Marcaggi, a “_vocero_ sung by a woman in the square
of Canonica in the midst of a great crowd of women, priests, doctors,
and magistrates come from neighbour villages.”

Footnote 544:

A child who does this, and makes a _vocero_, declares that he will
bind the kerchief about his neck whenever he feels moved to laugh,—a
grim bit which throws into the shade that “child on the nourice’s
knee” of English ballads, who vows revenge if he shall live to be man.

Footnote 545:

On the vendetta in Italy during the renaissance, see Burckhardt,
_Cult. d. Ren._,⁶ II. 179 ff.

Footnote 546:

J. K. Bladé, _Dissertation sur les Chants Historiques des Basques_,
Paris, 1866, pp. 6 ff.; Borrow, _The Bible in Spain_, 1843, II. 394;
F. Michel, _Le Pays Basque_, 1857, pp. 277 f.

Footnote 547:

“They have not utterly disappeared from my country,” says Bladé,
_Poésies Populaires de la Gascogne_, introduction to Vol. I. p. xi;
and he prints a collection of them, pp. 212-231.

Footnote 548:

This is Bladé’s French rendering, pp. 212 ff. Beaurepaire, work
quoted, pp. 24 f., says these cries are no longer heard in Normandy.

Footnote 549:

“The men, old and young, take no part,” Bladé, I. xiii.

Footnote 550:

“Die syrische Dreschtafel,” _Zeitschr. f. Ethnologie_, V. (1873), 295
f.

Footnote 551:

_Die Adonisklage und das Linoslied_, Berlin, 1852, pp. 16 ff.

Footnote 552:

K. O. Müller, _Gesch. d. Griech. Lit._, I. 28, makes Linos the
personification of the soft spring slain by heats of summer.

Footnote 553:

Quoted by Tylor, _Primitive Culture_, II. 32.

Footnote 554:

Taken from the German rendering of Brugsch.

Footnote 555:

_Mythologische Forschungen_, pp. 16, 55. Herodotus, II. 79, distinctly
says that the Maneros song was of the people.

Footnote 556:

For the general custom, see Tylor, _Primitive Culture_, II. 36 ff.;
for Germanic relations, Pfannenschmidt, _Germanische Erntefeste_, pp.
165 ff.

Footnote 557:

Grosse, _Anfänge der Kunst_, p. 234.

Footnote 558:

_A Tour in Scotland_, 3d. ed., Warrington, 1774, p. 99.

Footnote 559:

Chaucer, who puts several home touches not known to Boccaccio or
Statius into his account of the funeral of Arcite in the “Knight’s
Tale,” speaks of the _lyche-wake_ as well as of the _wake-pleyes_,—the
latter, of course, funeral games. Pennant, by the way, in his _Second
Tour in Scotland_ (Pinkerton, III. 288), speaking of Islay and its
antiquities, says “the late-wakes or funerals ... were attended _with
sports and dramatic entertainments_.... The subject of the drama was
historical _and preserved by memory_.” (No italics in the original.)

Footnote 560:

See above, p. 222.

Footnote 561:

_Æn._, X. 473 ff.

Footnote 562:

Perhaps best in Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall’s _Ireland: its Scenery,
Character_, etc., 3 vols., London, 1841-1843. See I. 222 ff. The
authors mention the women who wept over Hector, with the odd
explanation that the Greeks were once in Ireland. Other accounts of
Irish funerals are quoted in Brand-Ellis, _Popular Antiquities_, as of
“the men, women, and children” who go before the corpse and “set up a
most hideous _Holoo_, _loo_, _loo_, which may be heard two or three
miles round the country.”

Footnote 563:

Quoted by J. C. Walker, _Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards_,
London, 1786, pp. 20 f. The keening of women who follow the hearse,
dressed sometimes in white and sometimes in black, “singing as they
slowly proceed ... extempore odes,” is sufficiently like the march of
the _praeficae_ at a Roman funeral; and in neither case has one the
primitive form of the rite.

Footnote 564:

_Transact. Royal Irish Academy_, IV., “Antiquities,” pp. 41 ff., read
December, 1791.

Footnote 565:

“Present State of Ireland,” _Works_, ed. Morris, pp. 625 f. Camden,
about the same time, _Britannia_, trans., ed. 1722, p. xix, speaks of
the bards as men who “besides ... their poetic functions do apply
themselves particularly to the study of genealogies.” See also Evan
Evans, _Specimens of the Poetry of the Antient Welsh Bards_, ...
London, 1764, p. 91. This is not primitive song.

Footnote 566:

Spenser, p. 633.

Footnote 567:

“Totenklagen in der litauischen Volksdichtung,” _Zst. f. vgl.
Litteraturgesch._, N. F., II. 81 ff.

Footnote 568:

A similar series of questions, with interesting details of the
ceremony, is given in the _Itinera Constantinopolitanum et Amasianum_
ab Angerio Gislenio Busbequij ... Antverpiæ, 1681, p. 28: “deuertimus
in pagum Semianorum Iagodnam: ubi ejus gentis ritus funebres vidimus
multum à nostris abhorrentes. Erat cadauer in templo positum detecta
facie: iuxtà erant apposita edulia, panis et caro et vini cantharus:
adstabant coniunx et filia melioribus ornata vestibus, filiae galerius
erat ex plumis pavonis. Supremum munus, quo maritum jam conclamatum
uxor donauit, pileolum fuit purpureum, cuius modi virgines nubiles
illic gestare solent. Inde lessum audiuimus et naeniam lamentabilesque
voces; quibus mortuum percunctabantur _quid de eo tantum meruissent,
quae res, quod obsequium, quod solatium ei defuisset; cur se solas et
miseras relinqueret: et hujus generis alia_.”

Footnote 569:

Compare the pathetic word of David about his dead child: 2 Sam., xii.
23.

Footnote 570:

Spencer, _Sociology_, I. § 142, quotes Bancroft, of the Indians of the
West, that for a long time after a death, relatives repair daily at
sunrise and sunset to the vicinity of the grave, to sing songs of
mourning and praise. Hahn tells the same thing of his Albanians, _Alb.
Stud._, I. 151 f.

Footnote 571:

Radloff, III. 22.

Footnote 572:

Often quoted from Kranz, _Grönländische Reise_. See also Boas, “The
Central Eskimo,” in _Report Bur. Ethn._, 1884-1885, Washington, 1888,
p. 614.

Footnote 573:

Quoted Spencer, _Soc._, III. § 126.

Footnote 574:

There was also a lament sung hard upon the death of a warrior in
battle. As the Goths bore away their dead king, singing a song of woe
in the midst of flying weapons, so with many savages. In a skirmish
which followed the murder of Captain Cook, a young islander was
killed, and the Englishmen next morning saw “some men carrying him off
on their shoulders, and could hear them singing, as they marched, a
mournful song.” Cook’s Last Voyage, in Pinkerton, _Voyages and
Travels_, XI. 723.

Footnote 575:

On _neniae_ as incantations, see Grimm, _Mythologie_,⁴ p. 1027.

Footnote 576:

The phrase for a capable person in incantation is found for Germanic
usage in the Merseburg Charm, here said of Wodan himself,—_sô hê unola
conda_; in Anglo-Saxon the same phrase is used for a skilled poet: _se
þe cuðe_, _Béow._, 90; and in Old Saxon for a wise man: _én gifrôdðt
man the sô filo konsta wisaro wordo_, _Hêliand_, 208.

Footnote 577:

For example, in mere invocation, the _Erce, Erce, Erce, eorðan modor_
of an Anglo-Saxon charm (Grein-Wülker, I. 314), and the actual spell
against stitch in the side (_ibid._, p. 318):—

Wert thou shot in the fell, or wert shot in the flesh,
Or wert shot in the blood [or wert shot in the bone],
Or wert shot in the limb ...

with more of the sort, and the solemn,—

This to heal shot of gods, this to heal shot of elves,

and so on, with a refrain in the epic part,—

Out, little spear, if it in here be’

Footnote 578:

Schoolcraft, _Indian Tribes_, I. 367 ff.

Footnote 579:

Translated from the French in Pinkerton’s _Voyages and Travels_, XVI.
598 ff. See pp. 623 f.

Footnote 580:

_Ibid._, XVI. 877, 685, 596.

Footnote 581:

_Ibid._, VII. 534.

Footnote 582:

_Histoire d’un Voyage fait en la Terre de Bresil autrement dite
Amerique_ ... à la Rochelle, MDLXXVII. pp. 336 f.

Footnote 583:

“Au surplus au refrein de chacune pose.”

Footnote 584:

_Histoire de la nouvelle France_, Paris, MDCIX. See pp. 691 ff. On the
title-page he declares himself “témoin oculaire d’une partie des
choses ici recitées.”

Footnote 585:

_Mœurs des Sauvages Ameriquians, Comparées aux Mœurs des Premières
Temps_, ... 2 vols., 4to, Paris, 1724. See II. 321. Lafitau spent five
years in a mission in Canada, and also got information from a brother
Jesuit of sixty years’ experience in the new world (I. 2). It was this
book which moved Dr. John Brown, a century and a half ago, to write
his essay on the history of poetry and music, and to use so
effectively the comparative method in literature.

Footnote 586:

_Ibid._, II. 395.

Footnote 587:

_Anf. d. K._, p. 229.

Footnote 588:

_Indian Tribes_, IV. 71, question 254 (see I. 556): “Is it the custom
to call on certain persons for these laments? Are the laments
themselves of a poetic character?” Answered by Mr. Fletcher for the
Winnebago Indians.

Footnote 589:

_Ibid._, answer to question 253.

Footnote 590:

_Three Years’ Travel through the Interior Parts of North America_
(1766-1768), Philadelphia, 1796. See p. 179.

Footnote 591:

_Rep. Bureau Ethnol._, I. 194 f.

Footnote 592:

Wallaschek, _Prim. Mus._, p. 54.

Footnote 593:

_Ibid._, p. 198.

Footnote 594:

Wallaschek, _Prim. Mus._, p. 199. It is needless to insist on the
custom of dancing at funerals, and, in memorial rites, over the graves
of the dead; mediæval councils were full of warning against this
habit. The “dance of death,” of course, became symbolic and artistic.

Footnote 595:

Denied as a literal fact, as an affair of government and authority,
the matriarchate, so called, is sufficiently proved as the early form
of family life.

Footnote 596:

As the clan or horde had its song of triumph, and this is echoed and
prolonged in “national” songs like the _Marseillaise_, or, better, the
_Ça ira_, so the clan grief can expand into a national lament.
Something of this sort is found in that wail over the downfall of
their power sung by the Moors in Spain and so potent to stir the heart
that it was forbidden by government; its refrain, _Woe is me, Alhama_,
has all the iterated passion of grief that one finds in the primitive
_vocero_. Then there is the song or psalm of the captives in
Babylon,—and the list could be extended indefinitely.

Footnote 597:

The story is at first hand.

Footnote 598:

Work quoted, II. 324.

Footnote 599:

Account of Shelley’s last days, quoted in _Harper’s Magazine_, April,
1892, p. 786.

Footnote 600:

Schoolcraft, III. 326, “Poetic Development of the Indian Mind.”—For a
good collection of facts about iterated words as song, see the sixth
chapter of Wallaschek’s _Primitive Music_. For example, p. 173, “The
Macusi Indians in Guiana amuse themselves for hours with singing a
monotonous song, whose words, _hai-a_, _hai-a_, have no further
significance.” See also pp. 54, 56 f.

Footnote 601:

_Report Proceed. Numism. and Antiquar. Soc., Philadelphia_, 1887, pp.
18 f. (Printed 1891.)

Footnote 602:

Lectures, as quoted, II. 117, speaking of poetry before Homer. On the
origin of poetry in unintelligible sounds, see Ragusa-Moleti, _Poesie
dei Popoli Selvaggi_, Torino-Palermo, 1891, pp. vi ff., and
Jacobowski, _Anfänge der Poesie_, p. 66, who assumes that early man
held fast to those tones and gestures which expressed an original
sensation or emotion. On the repetition of mere sounds to express
emotion, see Alice C. Fletcher, _Journal American Folklore_,
April-June, 1898, p. 87.

Footnote 603:

_Travels in West Africa_, pp. 66 f.

Footnote 604:

V. 559 ff. “Original Words of Indian Songs literally translated.”

Footnote 605:

“Choral chant, four times repeated.” All Schoolcraft’s examples here
are full of repetition.

Footnote 606:

_Ibid._, III. 328.

Footnote 607:

_Ibid._, V. 563 f. See below, p. 310.

Footnote 608:

See above on Rhythm. In addition to the references given there, see
some sensible remarks in Emerson’s “Poetry and Imagination”; for
scientific discussion of repetition as basis of rhythm, see Gurney,
_Power of Sound_, pp. 455 f., and Masing, _über Ursprung u.
Verbreitung des Reims_, pp. 9 f. J. Grimm pointed out that
alliteration is really a form of repetition, _Kl. Schr._, VI. 161 f.
Adam Smith, _Essays_, pp. 154 f., has some curious remarks on
repetition as possible in music, but impossible in poetry.

Footnote 609:

W. von Biedermann, in two articles,—“Zur vergleichenden Geschichte der
poetischen Formen,” _Zeitschr. f. Vergl. Litteraturgesch._, N. F., II.
415 ff.; IV. 224 ff., and “Die Wiederholung als Urform der Dichtung
bei Goethe,” _ibid._, IV. 267 ff.,—traces the development of poetical
style from this fundamental fact of repetition. First, simple words
were repeated, then only part of the words in a sentence: such is the
case in old Chinese, in Zend, in Accadian. Then came parallelism; then
the repetition of similar sounds; _and finally metre or rhythm_
(_Versmass_). Where were the dancing throngs in this interesting
stretch of development, with rhythm as an afterclap of rime? As later
in his review of Bücher’s _Arbeit und Rhythmus_, so here, Biedermann
denies that rhythm came into poetry through music and the dance. He
fails, however, to make good this assertion by any show of proof (see
above, p. 75); but his references are useful for the student of
repetition. For another scheme of repetition in poetry, see R. M.
Meyer, _Altgermanische Poesie_, pp. 12 f.

Footnote 610:

Hence the inadequate character of its treatment, say for Old Norse, by
Vigfusson and Powell, _Corp. Poet. Bor._, I. 451 ff. R. M. Meyer,
_Altgerm. Poesie_, p. 341, takes a more excellent way, but he lays too
much stress on the ancient refrain, and not enough on the ancient
choral and the primitive communal conditions of song. Much more to the
point is the admirable though incomplete chapter on “Early Choral
Song” in Posnett’s _Comparative Literature_: see especially pp. 127
ff.

Footnote 611:

Wolf, _Lais_, pp. 23 f. The refrain was insistent in all poetry of the
troubadours and trouvères, and so leads back to refrains as the
prevalent characteristic of all songs in the vernacular. See Wolf’s
references, pp. 22 ff., and notes, pp. 184 ff. For a modern study of
this development of artistic forms of the refrain, see the third
chapter of the third part of Jeanroy’s excellent _Origines de la
Poésie Lyrique en France au Moyen Age_, Paris, 1889.

Footnote 612:

Ebert, _Lit. d. Mittelalters_, II. 63 f., 64 note.

Footnote 613:

See lxi, lxii. The Hymen cry, taken from the Greek, was there a
lending of communal wedding songs: see Smythe, _Greek Melic Poets_, p.
496. More artistic refrains are the

Currite ducentes subtegmina, currite, fusi,

of Catullus, lxiv. 323 ff., and the recurrent lines in Spenser’s
_Prothalamion_ and _Epithalamium_, which, of course, are on the same
artistic plane with that marriage-song of Peleus and Thetis.

Footnote 614:

Walter Pater’s pleasant account of the making of this song (_Marius
the Epicurean_, p. 73) is not improbable, in spirit at least; and it
must be borne in mind that this was the metre of marching songs of
Roman soldiers and other popular verse. See Du Meril, _Poésies
Populaires Latines_, Paris, 1843, pp. 106-117, including the
_Pervigilium Veneris_.

Footnote 615:

Bujeaud, “Refrains des Chansons Populaires,” in _Le Courier
Littéraire_, 25 Mai, 1877, pp. 256 ff. For reference to this article,
the present writer is indebted to Boynton’s dissertation, named and
quoted below.

Footnote 616:

“Le Refrain dans la Littérature du Moyen Age,” in _Revue des
Traditions Populaires_, III. 1 ff.; 82 ff.

Footnote 617:

J. Darmesteter, _Chants Pop. des Afghans_, Paris, 1888-1890, p. cxcvi,
calls the strophe “abstraction faite du refrain,”—a more excellent way
than these theorists take with their “little poem stuck in the cracks
of a big poem,” and such clever nonsense.

Footnote 618:

“Der Kehrreim in der mhd. Dichtung,” _Jahresber. d. Königl. Gymnas. zu
Paderborn_, 1890.

Footnote 619:

_Neuhochdeutsche Metrik_, p. 392. See R. M. Meyer, below.

Footnote 620:

_Zeitschr. f. vergleich. Lit._, I. 34 ff.; _Euphorion, Zeitschr. f.
Litteraturgesch._, V. (1898), 1 ff. He points out that nobody heeded
his view of the case, but that the works of Grosse, Groos, and Bücher
all brought confirmation to it.

Footnote 621:

All early accounts of dances among savages, South Sea islanders, and
the like, assert this priority of chorus over refrain. There are no
spectators, no audience, or “public”; all sing and all dance. See
Wallaschek in his first chapter, and Yrjö Hirn, _Förstudier till en
Konstfilosofi_, Helsingfors, 1896, p. 148.

Footnote 622:

Zell, _Ferienschriften_, II. 111 f., notes that this sort of
repetition is found in old Etruscan prayers as well as in the liturgy
of the Roman church.

Footnote 623:

By Wordsworth, work quoted; see, too, F. D. Allen, _Remnants of Early
Latin_, p. 74, with interesting remarks on the fragments of the
_Carmina Saliaria_, the _axamenta_.

Footnote 624:

Kögel, _Gesch. d. d. Lit._, I. 31, 34 f., points out the close
resemblance of the conditions and circumstances of this hymn with
those of the old German hymns, of which we have no example; he
therefore infers for the latter the same repeated cries to the god,
and finds confirmation for this inference in the dancing, the
repetitions and the cries of a Gothic Christmas play, written in
Latin, in Greek characters, but with a Gothic original peeping
through. Müller’s attempt to restore this Latin-Gothic hymn is highly
interesting.

Footnote 625:

Westphal, _Allgem. Metrik_, p. 37.

Footnote 626:

Also dramatic poetry, as in Job; for example, the refrain in the
speeches of the messengers who tell Job of his calamity, “And I only
am escaped alone to tell thee.” See Moulton’s arrangement in his
edition of Job, pp. 10 f.

Footnote 627:

For these refrains see Driver, _Introd. to the Lit. of the Old Test._,
p. 366 (original ed., p. 344). They are sometimes exactly repeated,
sometimes varied. For the poetry due to the Hebrews in general, see
Renan, _Mélanges_, p. 12.

Footnote 628:

2 Sam. vi, 14 f.

Footnote 629:

Lowth, _de sacra Poesi Hebr._, ed. Rosenmüller, p. 205, citing “Nehem.
xii, 24, 31, 38, 40, et titulum Ps. lxxxviii.” D. H. Müller, _Die
Propheten in ihrer ursprünglichen Form_, Vienna, 1896, I. 246 f.,—a
somewhat discredited work with regard to the theory of Hellenic and
Hebrew relations, but seemingly sound in these facts. Budde, _Religion
of Israel to the Exile_, pp. 97, 100. The “prophets” who came to
England from the Cevennes make another modern instance; and there are
many more in the great development of religious enthusiasm in the
seventeenth century.

Footnote 630:

Exod. xv. 1. 20 f. Clearly the whole tribe: see above, p. 186.

Footnote 631:

1 Sam., xviii. 1 ff. Lowth says of the _one to another_: “hoc est,
alternis choris carmen amoebaeum canebant; alteris enim praecinentibus
‘Percussit Saulus millia sua,’ alterae subjiciebant ‘et David suas
myriadas.’” Perhaps. _Amant alterna Camenæ._ But it was rude amœbean,
then, a tumultuous chorus, just as in the Fescennine songs of old
Italy, and in the songs of Roman soldiers, a roughly divided pair of
choruses sang alternately: see Zell, _Ferienschriften_, II. 149. On
the choral nature of old Hebrew poetry see this whole passage in
Lowth, pp. 205 f.

Footnote 632:

In the year 446. The story is often quoted from Priscus, 188, 189.

Footnote 633:

Böckel, work quoted, p. cviii.

Footnote 634:

“Ex qua victoria carmen publicum juxta rusticitatem per omnium ora ita
canentium, feminaeque choros inde plaudendo componebant.” Mabillon,
_Acta Sanctorum ordinis S. Benedicti_, Venetis, 1733, II. 590. This
clapping of hands as one dances and sings is often found in communal
records, and is common among savages, negroes, and the like. Among
tribes on the White Nile, where no musical instruments were to be had,
girls clapped their hands to the song and dance: Wallaschek, p. 87,
and also cf. p. 102, the account of women seen by Captain Cook to snap
their fingers in marking time for their song. The practice is common
elsewhere; for Polynesia generally, see Waitz-Gerland, _Anthropol._,
VI. 78 f. Sidonius Apollinaris speaks of it, I. 9:—

Castalidumque choros vario modulamine plausit
Carminibus, cannis, pollice, voce, pede;

while a dance to this hand-clapping is represented on an Assyrian
monument: see Herrig’s _Archiv_, XXIV. 168, quoted by Böckel in the
introduction to his Hessian ballads.—That actual songs were made by
these women is clear; see the passage from Guillaume de Dôle, quoted
by Jeanroy, _Origines_, p. 309:—

que firent puceles de France
a l’ormel devant Tremilli
on l’en a maint bon plet basti.

Footnote 635:

London, 1811, p. 420. See also Ritson, _Scottish Song_, I. xxvi, f.

Maydens of Englande, sore may you mourne
For your lemmans ye have lost at Bannockisburne!
_With heve a lowe._
What, weeneth the King of England
So soone to have won Scotland!
_With rumbylowe._

This refrain, as will be seen, is a kind of water-chorus.

Footnote 636:

_Bruce_, ed. Skeat, E. E. T. S., p. 399.

Footnote 637:

_Brut_, ed. Madden, 9538 f.

Footnote 638:

A notable exception is K. O. Müller, who studied early Greek song in
connection with early Greek life, an example—as Posnett notes in some
excellent remarks, _Compar. Lit._, p. 104—which subsequent historians
have neglected to their own harm.

Footnote 639:

Smythe, _Melic Poets_, p. 490.

Footnote 640:

For reference to the older literature of this subject, see
Blankenburg, _Litterar. Zusätze_, I. 235 ff.

Footnote 641:

Déor’s song, of course, is divided into strophes or stanzas by means
of this refrain.

Footnote 642:

See above, p. 86, on the dispute between Sievers and Möller, and their
agreement regarding this change from song to recitation.

Footnote 643:

_Altgerm. Poesie_, pp. 341, 345.

Footnote 644:

_De Antiquissima Germanorum Poesi Chorica_ ... Kiel, 1847.
“Antiquissimum enim omnium poesis genus haud dubie illud est, quod
choricum dicitur.” See p. 5: “Carmina vero haec sacra ... ex communi
populorum usu, _non a rhapsodis recitata neque a singulis, sed semper
a choro sive pluribus simul et cantata et acta sunt_.”

Footnote 645:

The best recent summary is that of Kögel in the first volume of his
_Geschichte der deutschen Litteratur_.

Footnote 646:

See p. 6 of Müllenhoff: “Actionum autem choricarum triplex est genus:
pompa, saltatio, ludus; quorum et simplicissimum est pompa et quasi
primitivum.” He treats only the first of these three; but a valuable
paper on the sword-dance (“Ueber den Schwerttanz,” in the _Festgabe
für G. Homeyer_, 1871), the essay _De Carmine Wessofontano_, and many
hints in his introduction to the _Sagen, Märchen u. Lieder d.
Herzogth. Schleswig-Holstein u. Lauenburg_, 1845, make up the
omission.

Footnote 647:

Kögel, work quoted, p. 18. See his references, p. 17, for these
refrains and songs of war.

Footnote 648:

Well meant but ludicrous compilations, designed to offer songs of
solace and cheer to all sorts of labourers, and to drive out the idle
rimes which they are wont to sing, are cleverly noted in Hoffmann von
Fallersleben’s _Unsere Volksthümlichen Lieder_, Leipzig, 3d ed., 1869;
the specimens he gives in his introduction are highly amusing, and are
taken from Becker’s _Mildheimisches Lieder-Buch_, 1799, which provides
special songs for the butcher, the chimney-sweep, the
scissors-grinder, and all the rest. See Hoffmann, pp. vii ff.

Footnote 649:

A Lithuanian mill-song: see Bücher, p. 39. See also Porthan, work
quoted above, p. 198. He gives a pretty little song of a Finnish woman
who calls for her absent husband in no recondite terms, ending:—

Liki, liki, linduiseni,
Kuki, kuki, kuldaiseni!—

that is, “prope, prope, deliciae meae; juxta, juxta, corculum meum.”

Footnote 650:

“Agrestum quendam concentum edere solent ... hocque verbum ad
cantilenae similitudinem repetunt.” Pistorius, _Polon. Hist. Corp._,
I. 46, quoted by Bezzenberger, _Zeitsch. f. vgl. Lit._, N. F., I. 269.

Footnote 651:

Smythe, _Greek Melic Poets_, pp. 160, 510 f.—Bücher, p. 38, notes that
this song, like many a lost refrain of the same kind, disregards the
rules of classical metre, and follows the movement of the
millstone.—Pennant (_Second Tour in Scotland_), Pinkerton, III. 314,
compares the singing at the mill of the island women with
Aristophanes’ _Clouds_, Act V. scene 11.

Footnote 652:

_Pros. Edda_, ed. Wilken, “Skáldskaparmál,” xliii. pp. 123-134; cf.
4:—

sungu ok slungu
snúðga steini ...

Footnote 653:

Böckel, work quoted, lxiii f., where there are other references of the
sort. So in pounding wheat, women in North Africa sang a national song
in chorus, always pounding in time with the music, Wallaschek, p. 220.

Footnote 654:

Bücher, p. 60, is emphatic on this point, that the refrain is to be
regarded as the oldest part of all songs of labour.

Footnote 655:

Act V.

Footnote 656:

Zell, _Ferienschriften_, II. 99 ff., “Ueber die Volkslieder der alten
Römer,” is still the best piece of information on the subject,
although it was published in 1829.

Footnote 657:

In carrying loads, in cutting, and the like tasks, the Lhoosai in
southeast India “clear the lungs with a continuous _hau! hau!_
_uttered in measured time by all_; without making this sound they say
they would be unable to work.” Lewin quoted by Böckel, p. lx.

Footnote 658:

_Arbeit u. Rhythmus_, pp. 30 ff. This chapter, quoted above, pp. 107
ff., gives ample references for the subject.

Footnote 659:

_Ehstnische Volkslieder_, 1850, p. 1.

Footnote 660:

_Deutsche Volkskunde_, 1898, pp. 331 f.

Footnote 661:

Work quoted, p. cxxiii. The spinning-room for winter, and in summer
the _rundgänge_, when youths and maidens arm in arm go by long rows
singing songs to their march, are still a refuge for actual poetry of
the people. But, as he says, it is dying fast.

Footnote 662:

Böckel, work quoted, p. clii, notes that the three classes who spread
and sing songs of the folk are women, soldiers, shepherds. Blind
minstrels, of course, are to be added for the chanting and reciting
guild, and in Russia the tailors. But women, soldiers, and shepherds
best keep the old clan instincts.

Footnote 663:

Laura Alexandrine Smith, _Music of the Waters_, London, 1888; John
Ashton, _Real Sailor Songs_, London, 1891. Boatmen’s songs changing or
dying out: Bücher, pp. 128 f. Bücher’s little group of boatmen’s
songs, pp. 118 ff., 66 ff., is far more valuable than these long and
random collections. See his comments, pp. 68 ff. For example, the
boat-song of North American Indians, taken from Baker, is foolishness
to the Greeks who make collections for popular use, but is full of
instruction for the student of poetry; it runs, without the musical
notes:—

Ah yah, ah yah, ah ya ya ya,
Ah ya ya ya, ah ya ya ya,
Ya ya ya ya ya ya.

Footnote 664:

Böckel, p. lx. Roman oarsmen had not only the _celeusma_ to time their
strokes, but often a song of their own: Zell, II. 208.

Footnote 665:

Ed. Murray, E. E. T. S., pp. 40 ff.

Footnote 666:

Bücher, p. 68.

Footnote 667:

Wallaschek, pp. 41, 47. See, too, p. 166: “Mr. Reade observed that his
people”—Africans—“always began to sing when he compelled them to
overcome their natural laziness and to continue rowing.”

Footnote 668:

Chappell, _Pop. Music Olden Time_, pp. 482, 783; Skelton, _Bowge of
Court_.

Footnote 669:

“Cantilenam his verbis Anglice composuit;” see _Historia Eliensis_,
II. 27, in Gale, _Hist. Script._, I. 505; it gives the account here
quoted, then the verses, adding “et caetera, quae sequuntur, _quae
usque hodie in choris publice cantantur_.” ...

Footnote 670:

_Danmarks Gamle Folkeviser_, III. x f.; _Nordboernes Aandsliv_, II.
408.

Footnote 671:

Refrains of rowing are found in many Danish ballads, mostly
irrelevant, as these refrains so often are, but unmistakable. See
Steenstrup, _Vore Folkeviser_, p. 77, for several examples.

Footnote 672:

In Wright-Halliwell, _Reliquiae Antiquae_, I. 240: it belongs to the
fourteenth century. Some rimes for St. Clement’s day are printed by G.
F. Northall, _English Folk-Rhymes_, 1892, mostly begging verses (pp.
222 ff.): although there is a ceremony at Woolwich connected with
blacksmiths, song, however, yielding to formal speech.

Footnote 673:

23 November. See Hampson, _Medii Aevi Kalendarium_, I. 61; and
Brand-Ellis, _Antiquities_, same date. The Germanic year has been
recently studied by Dr. A. Tille, _Yule and Christmas_, London, 1899;
he corrects in some particulars the current ideas set forth by
Weinhold, according to which the seasons were regulated by natural
signs,—solstice and the like. Dr. Tille contends that this was rather
done by economic conditions. Before the German had a settled
agricultural life, Michaelmas superseded Martinmas, the oldest
Germanic festival. Actual harvest festivals are comparatively late.
While Dr. Tille’s idea of borrowing and of Christian influence goes
entirely too far, his emphasis on economic conditions must be noted
and approved.

Footnote 674:

_Great Expectations_, Chap. XII.

Footnote 675:

Or rather Mr. J. Cocke; see note to _Works_, ed. Rimbault, p. 288, and
p. 89. See also the tinker as “master of music” and chief singer of
catches, in Chappell, pp. 187. 353.

Footnote 676:

Among the Romans, too; see Tibullus, Eleg. II. 1:—

Atque aliqua assiduae textis operata Minervae
Cantat, et applauso tela sonat latere.

Footnote 677:

See letter in _Evening Post_, quoted above, p. 168; Böckel, work
quoted; and the preface written by “Carmen Sylva” for the Countess
Martinengo’s _Bard of the Dimbovitzka_, London, 1892.

Footnote 678:

It is almost superfluous to mention Gretchen and the recurrent echo of
her wheel in the stanza _Meine Ruh’ ist hin_. But this, of course, is
art.

Footnote 679:

A version of “The Cruel Brother” (Child, I. 147), from Forfarshire,
has along with the common refrain two lines at the end of the stanza
which partly echo the refrain of labour:—

Sing Annet, and Marret, and fair Maisrie,
An’ the dew hangs i’ the wood, gay ladie.

Footnote 680:

Northall, _English Folk-Rhymes_, p. 322. See the interesting notes
from Southey’s _Doctor_, xxiv, about Betty Yewdale and the song she
and her sister had to sing while learning to knit socks. The song kept
time with the work, _and had to bring in the names of all the folk in
the dale_. See on cumulative song above, p. 200.

Footnote 681:

Dyer, _British Popular Customs_, p. 42.

Footnote 682:

_Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs_, London, 1857, pp. 187 f. Greenside
is near Manchester.

Footnote 683:

_Voceri_, pp. 244 f., with a specimen song taken from Viale.

Footnote 684:

E. H. Meyer, _Volkskunde_, p. 236.

Footnote 685:

_Poes. Pop. Gasc._, II. 224 ff. See his references for this
interesting subject.

Footnote 686:

Coussemaker in his section of songs for the dance, work quoted, pp.
338 f., gives a “ronde” sung during the fête at Bailleul:—

Now the salad must be sowed,
Now the salad must be sowed,
Salad, salad, salad, salad, salad,
Now the salad must be sowed.

Now the salad must be cut,—

then plucked, washed, dried, and so on. The list of these songs could
be extended indefinitely; the fact that this of the salad is sung at a
quite alien festivity simply proves the vogue of the thing. One must
refer, however, to the dances of Catalonian peasants and children, the
songs for which are little more than repetition and refrain
descriptive of country toil, as quoted by Wolf, pp. 34 f., of his
_Proben Portugiesischer und Catalanischer Volksromanzen_, Wien, 1856.

Footnote 687:

Ed. 1825, IX. 41. The phrase “to town” at which our editor boggles,
ignorant of its real meaning, is a further proof of the traditional
character of this song.

Footnote 688:

“Is your throat clear for _hooky hooky_?” asks Harvest; and the
reapers sing the refrain again. Later he speaks of weeping out “a
lamentable _hooky hooky_.” Drake connected _hooky_ with _hockey_, the
hock or harvest cart sung by Herrick. But perhaps “hooky” is to be
kept without any such change. Leyden, see _Complaynte of Scotland_, p.
xciii, speaking of ring dances at the _kirn_ or feast of cutting down
the grain, says that reapers who first finished the work danced on an
eminence, in view of other reapers, and began the dance “with three
loud shouts of triumph, and _thrice tossing up their hooks in the
air_.” Cf. the Oxford Dict., s.v. _hook_, the common word for reaping
scythe or sickle from Anglo-Saxon down.

Footnote 689:

In his _Neydhardt mit dem Feyhel_, 1562. See Uhland, _Volkslieder_, I.
58, and notes, _Schriften_, III. 24. Böhme follows the song back to
the fourteenth century. In the play it is sung by the duchess and
repeated by the chorus, as in popular dances of the day.

Footnote 690:

In his edition of the play for Macmillan’s _English Comedies_.

Footnote 691:

The reapers now appear “with women in their hands.”

Footnote 692:

Described to the writer by a Japanese gentleman.

Footnote 693:

Bücher, p. 49.

Footnote 694:

Twelve centuries before Christ, Chinese women gathered plantain with a
song that is particularly rich in repetition and refrain; Bücher
quotes the translation of Strauss, of which a stanza runs thus:—

Pflücket, pflücket Wegerich,
_Eija zu und pflücket ihn_!
Pflücket, pflücket Wegerich,
_Eija zu, ihr rücket ihn_.

The whole song minutely follows the process of picking.

Footnote 695:

Grimm, _Mythologies_,⁴ pp. 1036 f. He notes the frequency of this
shouting, leaping, and singing at the planting of crops. It all goes
back, of course, to communal rites.

Footnote 696:

E. H. Meyer, _Volkskunde_, p. 225.

Footnote 697:

Grein-Wülker, _Bibliothek_, I. 312 ff. To describe the whole ceremony
in this case as original, is highly absurd.

Footnote 698:

Zell, _Ferienschriften_, II. 118, 212; see Plin. _Nat. Hist._, XXVIII.
2: “qui fruges excantasset.” Standard works for the investigation of
these relics of ancient cult are Mannhardt, _Wald-und Feldkulte_, 2
vols., 1875-1877; the same author’s _Mythologische Forschungen_,
already quoted; Pfannenschmid, _Germanische Erntefeste_, Hannover,
1878; and, pioneer of them all, Tylor’s admirable work on _Primitive
Culture_. For children’s games, as last refuge of many of these rites,
see F. M. Böhme, _Deutsches Kinderlied u. Kinderspiel_, Leipzig, 1897,
which could be enlarged by a judicious use of Firmenich, _Germaniens
Völkerstimmen_, in four volumes. Böhme says the _Ringelreihen_ of
these games are “uralte Reste chorischer Aufführungen bei den
Jahres-und Gottesfesten unserer heidnischen Vorfahren,” and gives
cases which support his statement. Processional songs of the old cult
survive in the _Ansingelieder_, _Umzugslieder_, and so forth, of the
children, now mainly begging-rimes like the wren-song in Ireland and
England, parallel to the swallow-song in Rhodes. Again, children have
games which imitate sounds and movements of labour; Böhme gives a few.
See also G. F. Northall, _English Folk-Rhymes_, pp. 360 ff. Halliwell,
of course, includes some of these in his nursery-rimes. See also W. W.
Newell, _Games and Songs of American Children_, N. Y., 1883. These
songs of the children would lead us too far a-field, and we shall
cling to the scanty survivals of the songs and refrains of labour
itself.

Footnote 699:

Grein-Wülker, I. 323 f., especially version C.

Footnote 700:

Cattle.

Footnote 701:

Halliwell, _Nursery-Rhymes_, p. 129.

Footnote 702:

Mannhardt, _Mythol. Forsch._, pp. 228 ff., J. Grimm, _Kl. Schr._, VII.
229, in a paper on the “Nothhalm,” with account of harvest rites.

Footnote 703:

This child of destiny, asleep on a sheaf of grain, is wafted to the
kingless land in a boat,—the Lohengrin parallel. For all the enticing
material see Grimm, _Mythologie_,⁴ III. 399 ff.; Müllenhoff, in
_Zeitschr. f. deutsch. Alth._, VII. 410 ff., and in his _Beowulf_, pp.
5 ff., with strongly established probability that the myth celebrates
the beginnings of agriculture among Germans by the North and Baltic
seas.]

Footnote 704:

Mannhardt, _Myth. Forsch._, pp. 15 ff. That the Greeks sang at
reaping, as at planting (Smythe, _Melic Poets_, p. 498, girls sing a
sowers’ song), is beyond question. See Mannhardt’s note and
references, as above, p. 2. He remarks that the Lityerses song in
Theocritus (Id. X.) is an imitation of a real Greek folksong of
labour, not, however, of the original Lityerses. Mr. Lang notes the
resemblance of this situation to the famous scene in Molière’s
_Misanthrope_.

Footnote 705:

Work quoted, p. 17. See his _Wald-u. Feldkulte_, p. 262.

Footnote 706:

That the Romans had these refrains of harvest and vintage, as well as
their Fescennine flytings and improvised satire, is beyond dispute
(Zell, II. 122 ff.), but nothing of it all has come down to us.
Fortune has been kinder with regard to the songs and refrains sung in
processions about the Roman field.

Footnote 707:

Chappell, II. 580. See his quotation from Tusser. Even here, in the
Eastern states of America, middle-aged men have watched the passing of
the “wealthy farmer,” who now exists only in newspapers, and even
there is kept at long range,—“of Indiana,” “of Texas.” Yet we knew him
in our boyhood. The communal farmer occurs in old English novels, and
in some new ones; but he is passing rapidly into tradition. See a
paper on “England’s Peasantry,” by the Rev. Dr. Jessopp, in the
_Nineteenth Century and After_, January, 1901; he tells of the
communal conditions which once prevailed, of the change to the
present, and is “inclined to doubt seriously whether before another
century has ended there will be any such thing as an agricultural
labourer to know.”

Footnote 708:

On the modern corruption of old refrains, see Pfannenschmid, pp. 207
ff., 468 ff.

Footnote 709:

Compare the song sung on this occasion in Bavaria as the peasants
dance about the fire and leap over it for good luck (Firmenich, II.
703):—

Haliga Sankt Veit,
Schick uns a Scheit;
Haliga Sankt Wendl,
Schick uns an Bengl;
Haliga Sankt Florio,
Kent uns des Fuiar O!
_Kent_ = kindle.

Footnote 710:

Mannhardt, _M. F._, pp. 32 fl., 51.

Footnote 711:

Quoted by Reifferscheid, _Westf. Volksl._, Nos. 49, 50, 51. See the
note, p. 188, and variants. The habit is widespread through Westphalia
and the Rhinelands. A refrain printed by Firmenich, _German.
Völkerstimmen_, III. 175, keeps time with the work (near Iserlohn):—

Dai Klinge dai klank,
Dai Hüppe dai sprank,
Wuol üöwer de Bank,
Wuol niäwen den Pal.

Footnote 712:

Aubrey, _Remains of Gentilisme_. Folk-Lore Soc., IV. (1881), pp. 81
f., under “Rymers.” On p. 169 he says, “when I was a boy, every
gentleman almost kept a harper; and some of them could versifie.”

Footnote 713:

Wallaschek, p. 179.

Footnote 714:

He too heard a girl “singing an Erse song,” as she span; and he had
his jest, “I warrant you, one of the songs of Ossian.” Hill’s Boswell,
V. 133 f.

Footnote 715:

Before this he had been in a boat and heard one Malcolm sing “an Erse
song, the chorus of which was ‘Hatyin foam foam eri,’ _with words of
his own_.... The boatmen and Mr. M’Queen chorused, and all went well.”
_Ibid._, V. 185.

Footnote 716:

_A Journey to the Western Islands_, Dublin, 1775, p. 97.

Footnote 717:

The doctor complaining that he never could get an Erse song explained,
was told “the chorus was generally unmeaning,” which, of course, would
point to a predominance of the refrain; Johnson himself slyly quoted
an unintelligible refrain from an old English ballad. Hill’s Boswell,
V. 274.

Footnote 718:

V. 203; Lockhart’s _Life of Scott_, IV. 307. Pennant tells the same
story in his _Tour in Scotland_.

Footnote 719:

See above, p. 281, quotation from Leyden. See also for Scottish
custom, Chambers, _Book of Days_, II. 376 ff.

Footnote 720:

Note to Passus, IX. 104, ed. of _Piers Plowman_, version C.

Footnote 721:

Above, p. 286.

Footnote 722:

E. H. Meyer, p. 133.

Footnote 723:

Kurschat, _Litth. Gram._, p. 445, quoted by Böckel, p. cxx.

Footnote 724:

Pfannenschmid, p. 392. The song, “Die Ernt’ ist da, es winkt der
Halm,” is clearly an outgrowth of the older refrain. See also p. 92.
An actual refrain at the work is printed by Firmenich, III. 631:—

Ei Hober, Hober, zeitige Hober!
Ei Mädl, kom und schneid den Hober!
Ei dirre Hober, dirre Hober!
Ei Knechtl, kom und benn den Hober!

Footnote 725:

_Étude_, pp. 24 f.

Footnote 726:

In this dying of communal song, its heart, the refrain, beats strong
to the end, despite the other failing powers. See Beaurepaire’s
valuable testimony to this fact, _Étude_, pp. 39 ff., 48 f. “Deux
lignes au plus composent le couplet. Le refrain est vraiment la partie
importante, il supplie à la pauvreté ou à l’absence de la rime.... Au
reste, il ne faudrait pas s’y tromper, la longueur du refrain, et son
retour continuel, que nous serions tenté de considerer comme un
défaut, forme précisement un des plus sûrs moyens du succès de la
Chanson de Filasse. Elle exige, en effet, peu d’efforts de mémoire,
elle permet à tous les laboureurs de prendre part fréquemment au
chant; et avec son allure monotone, elle s’adapte merveilleusement à
la marche lente et reguliere de travaux de la campagne. Aussi
croyons-nous que c’est en partie à la predominance du refrain, que la
chanson cuellissoire doit sa vogue et sa popularité.” He gives another
song with a refrain of planting.

Footnote 727:

Pfannenschmid (on the cries and songs) pp. 404 ff.; Mannhardt, _M.
F._, pp. 167 ff., for the religious significance; J. Grimm, _Kl.
Schr._, VII. 225 f.; _Book of Days_, II. 377 f. Other instances are
presently to be recounted.

Footnote 728:

Firmenich, IV. (_Anhang_), 687. A longer version on p. 693. Keriole =
_Kyrie eleison_,—substituted for an older heathen cry.

Footnote 729:

See Mannhardt’s chapter on “Demeter,” work quoted; also pp. 20 ff.

Footnote 730:

For all this English material, see Brand-Ellis, “Harvest Home,” in the
_Antiquities_.

Footnote 731:

Chappell, I. 120.

Footnote 732:

_Ibid._, II. 745, one version. See for variants, and similar songs, J.
H. Dixon, _Ancient Poems, Ballads, and Songs of the Peasantry of
England_, _e.g._ pp. 175 ff., London, Percy Soc., 1846; Broadwood and
Maitland, _English Country Songs_, pp. 150 ff., London, 1893.

Footnote 733:

In the fifth act of Dryden’s opera, _King Arthur_, is a harvest-song
with this chorus:—

Come, boys, come! Come, boys, come!
And merrily roar out Harvest Home!

and the directions are that the actors shall sing this as they dance,
a good communal trait. The words of this song grew popular, were
varied, and became a ballad; it is in order for some one to show that
harvest-home songs, like other popular verse, come from operas, plays,
concerts, and the like.

Footnote 734:

Perhaps “we end,” as Brand suggests; but perhaps and probably not. At
another place in Devonshire they cry “the knack,” and a rime is
repeated:—

Well cut, well bound,
Well shocked, well saved from the ground.

Footnote 735:

_Five Hundred Points of Husbandry_, Eng. Dial. Soc., 1878, p. 126,
under August. Hentzner noted the shouting of the people _in the cart_.
See Furnivall’s Harrison, _Descrip. Eng._, p. lxxxiv. A curious custom
of the largess-shilling in Suffolk is described by Major Moor, note to
Tusser, p. 294. The reapers answer their leader’s “Holla Lar! Holla
Lar! Holla Lar!—jees,” with “o-o-o-o-,” head inclined, and then,
throwing the head up, vociferate “a-a-a-ah.” This is thrice done by
harvesters for a shilling.

Footnote 736:

Brand-Ellis, “Twelfth Day.”

Footnote 737:

See Uhland, _Kl. Schr._, III. 389 f., and note, with references, 467
f., for the “bornfart,” “bronnefart,” with “dantzen, rennen, springen,
jagen,” closely connected with the May feasts. On the whole subject of
processions, see Pfannenschmid’s second chapter along with his notes,
pp. 342 ff.

Footnote 738:

_Georg._, I. 343 ff.

Footnote 739:

Translation of J. Rhoades. The last line—‘det motus incompositos et
carmina dicat’—is suggestive: “spontaneous gestures and steps, with
song,” emphasize a purely communal dance as compared with the ritual
of the Brothers. Tibullus, by the way, has the Lares, not Ceres, in
mind for the dance and song of his rustics: _Eleg._, I. 1, 23 f.

Agna cadet vobis, quam circum rustica pubes
Clamet: _Io! Messes et bona vina date!_

Footnote 740:

A “queen,” accompanied by a guard of brothers and young folk
generally, goes on Whitsuntide in Servia from farm to farm; at each
she stops and her companions form a circle (_kolo_) and sing their
songs. Each line is thrice repeated, and then follows the refrain
_Leljo!_ Then the dancers hold one another by the belt and dance in a
half-circle, led by an exarch. Between the songs any ready young man
cries out a lusty phrase or two, or makes a verse, after the fashion
of the German _schnaderhüpfl_. See A. W. Grube, _Deutsche
Volkslieder_, Iserlohn, 1866, pp. 132 f.

Footnote 741:

_Germania_, xl.

Footnote 742:

The procession of the Phrygian goddess, the _magna deum mater materque
ferarum et nostri genetrix_, described by Lucretius in often-quoted
lines, _Rer. Nat._, II. 598 ff., with its Dionysian features, cannot
be discussed here; Germanic and modern examples must suffice.

Footnote 743:

It is a commonplace in sociology that agricultural communities worship
female deities as representatives of fertility, while the god like Tiw
or Woden springs from warlike and nomadic conditions.

Footnote 744:

For example, the rain-song in Servia, an interesting ceremony, full of
cries and with a refrain sung by dancing maidens. The _dodola_, a girl
otherwise naked, but entirely covered with grass, weeds, and flowers,
goes with a retinue of maidens from house to house; before each house
the girls form a dancing ring with the _dodola_ in the middle. The
woman of the house pours water over the _dodola_, while she dances and
turns about; the other maidens now sing the song for rain, each line
ending with the refrain, _oj dodo oj dodo le!_ See Grimm,
_Mythologie_⁴, p. 494. Similar customs prevail in Greece; the song is
here full of repetitions. See Grimm, _Kl. Schr._, II. 447. In the
_Athenæum_, No. 2857 (1882), G. L. Gomme has some interesting notes on
a survival of these processional rites.

Footnote 745:

E. H. Meyer, p. 223.

Footnote 746:

Grimm, _Mythol._,⁴ I. 52.

Footnote 747:

References _ibid._, I. 214 ff., with similar cases. See also III. 86
f.

Footnote 748:

William of Malmesbury tells a story to show that the church could do
better than condemn. In 1012 fifteen young men and women were dancing
and singing in a churchyard and disturbed Robert the priest. He prayed
at them, and for a whole year they had to dance and sing without
ceasing until they sank to the middle in the earth.

Footnote 749:

Gregor. M. _Dial._, III. 28, quoted by W. Müller, _Geschichte und
System der altdeutschen Religion_, Göttingen, 1844, pp. 74 f. The
first book of this excellent treatise is even now the best summary of
old Germanic rites,—clear, compact, and with all necessary references.
For the boar’s head and the famous Latin song, at Oxford, see Grimm,
_Mythol._⁴, p. 178; for the vows, Grimm, _Rechtsalterthümer_, pp. 900
f.

Footnote 750:

From Du Cange, s.v. _Kalendae_. See too Hampson, _Med. Æv. Kal._, I.
140 ff.

Footnote 751:

Broadwood and Maitland, p. 30. Survivals of procession song
(_Ansingelieder_) are printed by Böhme, _Kinderlied_, 331 ff. The
refrain has some body in a song “’t Godsdeel of den Rommelpot,”
printed by Coussemaker, _Chants Pop. des Flamands_, p. 95, and also
found in different parts of Germany. The begging songs for Martinmas
Eve, found in Flanders, are widespread in Germany; Firmenich, work
quoted, prints a good dozen and more from different places. The steps
of dance and march are best heard in his version from Oldenburg, I.
231.

Footnote 752:

Firmenich, I. 281.

Footnote 753:

_Reuzelied_, pp. 139 ff.:—

Als de groote Klokke luyd
De Reuze komt uyt.
_Keere u e’s om, de Reuze, de Reuze,
Keere u e’s om,
Reuzekom_.

That is, “When the big bell sounds, Reuze (giant?) comes out. _Turn
back, Reuze, Reuze, turn back, good Reuze._” The text is corrupt, and
Reuze is not easy to explain; but one need not appeal with Coussemaker
to the Scandinavians to establish the antiquity of this procession and
this refrain.

Footnote 754:

Hampson, I. 61.

Footnote 755:

For a good description of wakes, see Brand-Ellis, and Song 27 of
Drayton’s _Polyolbion_, where such cheering is recorded of the
villages—

That one high hill was heard to tell it to his brother,
That instantly again to tell it to some other.

Footnote 756:

Besides T. Wright’s _Songs and Carols_, Percy Soc., 1847, see W.
Sandy’s _Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern_, London, 1833, with a
long introduction, and the same editor’s Festive Songs, Percy Soc.,
1848. Sandys (_Carols_) gives the cries or refrains of many Christmas
songs:—

Nowell, nowell, nowell, nowell,—
No—el, el, el, el, el, el, el, el, el, el,—
Noel, Noel—

_à moult granz cris_, the familiar refrain in France.

Footnote 757:

_Remaines Gentil._, pp. 9, 21, 23, 26, 31, 36, 40, 161, 180. “Little
children,” he says here, “have a custome when it raines to sing or
charme away the Raine; thus they all joine in a Chorus, and sing thus,
viz.:—

Raine, raine, goe away,
Come againe a Saterday.

I have a conceit that this childish custome is of great antiquity.”

Footnote 758:

See the Helstone Furry-Day Song, Bell, _Ancient Poems_, pp. 167 f.,
with a refrain of some value.

Footnote 759:

Also cross-week and grass-week. See Dyer, _British Popular Customs_,
pp. 204 ff., for a sympathetic account of the customs still lingering
in England.

Footnote 760:

The standard description of English May-games, of course hostile, is
that of Stubbes in his _Anatomie of Abuses_, ed. New Shaks. Soc., p.
149. See also the diatribe in John Northbrooke’s _Treatise wherein
Dicing, Dancing ... are Reprooved_. London, 1579. He leans to
Chrysostom’s view (that is, Age takes this side against Youth, in the
dialogue) that dancing “came firste from the Diuell”, and p. 68ᵇ (only
one page of the leaf is numbered) he describes the May.

Footnote 761:

Compare the chorus of the Maypole song in _Actæon and Diana_, in
Chappell, I. 126:—

Then to the Maypole come away,
For it is now a holiday.

“Trip and go” was “one of the favourite Morris-dances,” and the words
seem to have become a proverbial expression. See Chappell, I. 126,
302. It was on the basis of some refrain of this sort that the first
part-song in English, the famous Cuckoo Song, was built up. Ten Brink
is surely right in giving it a communal origin, though not communal
making.

Footnote 762:

“We have brought the summer home,” is the spirit of all the May
refrains, as the young folk come back with flowers and boughs. See
Brand, “Maypoles.”

Footnote 763:

Still in vogue in some parts of Germany. See E. H. Meyer, p. 256.

Footnote 764:

_Volkslieder_, I. 23. For the whole subject, see Uhland’s _Abhandlung
über die deutschen Volkslieder_, pp. 17 ff. Suspicion has been
expressed that these flytings are a late echo of the Vergilian eclogue
through such a transmitting element as the mediæval _Conflictus Veris
et Hiemis_ and the song to the cuckoo:—

Salve, dulce decus cuculus per saecula, salve!

Comparison of the fragments, however, shows this suspicion to be
groundless, and it is thoroughly discredited by Uhland, _Kl. Schr._,
III. 24. See also Ebert, _Christ. Lat. Lit._, II. 69.

Footnote 765:

_Love’s Labour’s Lost_, V. 2.

Footnote 766:

Ritson, _Ancient Songs_, 3d ed., pp. 113 ff. The text is a sort of
dramatic description. See also T. Wright, _Songs and Carols_; and
Brand, under “Morris Dancers.” The refrains are unfortunately seldom
recorded, but they are the foundation of the little drama.

Footnote 767:

Used as refrain in ballads; see Child, I. 19 f., _e.g._:—

Sing ivy, sing ivy ...
Sing holly, go whistle, and ivy ...
Sing green bush, holly, and ivy.

Footnote 768:

_Deutsche Volkslieder aus Oberhessen_, p. xi. His list of references
is valuable.

Footnote 769:

At a harvest-home at Selborne, 1836, Bell (pp. 46 ff.) heard two
countrymen recite a “Dialogue between the Husbandman and the
Servingman”; “it was delivered in a sort of chant or recitative,”
though the rhythm is good for such doggerel; what suggests the older
refrain is that the rime (second and fourth lines of each stanza) has
to be either with “husbandman” or with “servingman” throughout. The
odd lines have interior rime.

Footnote 770:

See Jeanroy’s chapter, “Le Debat,” in _Origines de la Poésie Lyrique
en France_, pp. 45 ff.

Footnote 771:

Böhme, _Kinderlied_, pp. 332 ff. See p. 347.

Footnote 772:

See Firmenich, II. 15, where children in the Palatinate on
“Rose-Sunday” go about and sing:—

Ri, ra, ro
Der Summertaagk iss do!

See _ibid._, II. 34.

Footnote 773:

Letourneau, _L’Évolution Littéraire_, p. 21.

Footnote 774:

“Choruses are about all the Indians sing. They have probably four or
five words, then the chorus. ‘They have brought us a fat dog’; then
the chorus goes on for half a minute; then a repetition again of the
above words ‘they have brought us a fat dog.’... Tukensha, a rock, or
grandfather, is often appealed to in the choruses for aid.” Answer to
question about Indian poetry by Rev. Mr. Fletcher, who lived several
years with the Winnebago Indians. He says, too, “there are no Indian
poets in this country.” Schoolcraft, IV. 71.

Footnote 775:

“Account of the History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations
who once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighbouring States,”
_Transact. Amer. Philos. Soc._, 1819, pp. 200 ff.

Footnote 776:

Quoted above, p. 255, from _Indian Tribes_, V. 563 f.

Footnote 777:

_Die Korndaemonen_, Berlin, 1868. See also his _Roggenwulf und
Roggenhund_, Danzig, 1866.

Footnote 778:

Work quoted, I. 25.

Footnote 779:

_Ibid._, I. 248.

Footnote 780:

_Ibid._, I. 517 ff.; II. 189 f.

Footnote 781:

_Ibid._, I. 525.

Footnote 782:

Jean de Lery, _Histoire_, etc., pp. 268 ff.

Footnote 783:

Opposite p. 274.

Footnote 784:

See above, p. 253.

Footnote 785:

On pp. 25 ff.

Footnote 786:

The name of the brave.

Footnote 787:

One can readily understand that Stevenson heard his islanders sing, in
chorus of perhaps a hundred persons, legendary songs about which not
two of these singers could agree in their translation. _Letters of R.
L. Stevenson_, II. 152.

Footnote 788:

_Lais_, p. 18. Professor Schipper, in his valuable treatise on
_Englische Metrik_, I. 326 ff., follows Wolf in this definition; but
in both cases the analytic purpose excuses this neglect of the
communal origin, and the material presented allows the student to make
his own comparisons and supply the neglected considerations.

Footnote 789:

A. W. Grube, _Deutsche Volkslieder_, Iserlohn, 1866, in his sections
“Der Kehrreim des Volksliedes,” pp. 1-103, and “Der Kehrreim bei
Goethe, Uhland und Rückert,” pp. 187-306, follows Wolf in part,
deriving refrains from the church hymns (p. 112), but adds a plea for
the antiquity of folksong, which is “von Haus aus Chorgesang” (p.
183). So, too, on p. 125, he seems to view the origin of poetry of the
people as a statement of contemporaneous events in one sentence—hence
not “invented”—which is sung by the throng. He notes the increased
power of the refrain with the preponderance of lyric over epic
elements: though he neglects the dance and communal conditions
generally. The close connection of Goethe (as in the _Ach neige, Du
Schmerzensreiche_) and of Rückert (as in the beautiful repetitions of
_Aus der Jugendzeit_) with popular poetry, is admirably treated. See
pp. 189 ff., 284 ff.

Footnote 790:

See a note in the author’s _Old English Ballads_, p. lxxxiv.

Footnote 791:

See Chappell, _Popular Music_, I. 222 ff., 34, 264; II. 426, 457.

Footnote 792:

III. 4. See also the Oxford _Dictionary_, s.v. “burden,” with the
reference to Shakspere’s _Lucrece_, v. 1133.

Footnote 793:

III. 1.

Footnote 794:

_English Rhythms_, II. 290.

Footnote 795:

Child, I. 113.

Footnote 796:

_Nordboernes Aandsliv_, II. 434 ff.; but this evolution is stoutly
denied by Steenstrup, _Vore Folkeviser_, pp. 120 ff., in a study of
the refrain to be considered below.

Footnote 797:

Child, I. 403: printed after the sixth stanza, and so till the
eleventh, when the chorus is slightly changed to suit the story, and
kept so to the end. For the strophic refrain or chorus and its
popularity in Old French, see Schipper, I. 328.

Footnote 798:

Child, I. 209, 214.

Footnote 799:

_Ibid._, I. 126 ff., in F., O. See H.

Footnote 800:

_Studies in the English Ballad Refrain, with a Collection of Ballad
and Early Song Refrains._ Thesis presented by John Henry Boynton in
candidacy for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English, May 1,
1897. In 3 vols., Ms., Harvard University Library. The material is
excellently put together; but the genetic and historical elements are
not sufficiently brought out. The comparative work is good, and as a
study of actual refrains this dissertation is of distinct value. The
burden-stem is discussed in section V., pp. 184 ff.

Footnote 801:

_Chronik_, ed. Dahlmann, I. 176 f. See also II. 559 ff.

Footnote 802:

Chappell quoted by Child, _Ballads_, I. 7. “I must avow myself,” says
Professor Child, “to be very much in the dark as to the exact relation
of stem and burden.” See also _Ballads_, II. 204, first note.

Footnote 803:

This technical side of the case is discussed by Valentin, _Studien
über die schwedischen Volksmelodien_, pp. 9 f.

Footnote 804:

_Les Origines de la Poésie Lyrique en France au Moyen Age_, Paris,
1889, pp. 102 ff. (see note 2, p. 111), and 387 ff. On the etymology
of _refrain_, see pp. 103 f.

Footnote 805:

_Ibid._, p. 113. Jeanroy will not accept the view of Wackernagel and
Bartsch that the refrains preserved in old French lyric poetry are
actual “popular” songs, or fragments of them; but he willingly accepts
the theory that all refrains were once of a communal kind. These, he
thinks, are hopelessly lost. See pp. 115 ff. A few older refrains can
be found in foreign lyric which imitated the French; pp. 177 ff.

Footnote 806:

_Ibid._, p. 396, note 1. Or, as in old Portuguese song, copied from
the popular manner, one part of the dancers sang one verse, and
another part, like strophe and antistrophe, repeated the verse with a
slight change, usually in the final word which rimes with the other
final word. The connection of this with the _contrasto_ of lover and
sweetheart, imitated in the dance, of debate, flyting, _tenso_, and
the like, would lead too far afield. See p. 207, and below, p. 325.

Footnote 807:

_Ibid._, p. 405. This chapter, where Jeanroy traces the growth of
artificial forms, like the rondel and so on, out of purely popular
refrain and verse, is of distinct value to the student of communal
poetry. It completely refutes the claim of superficial criticism,
common enough of late, that ballad and folksong are merely dregs of an
older art, and that some pretty comparison, say a tramp in an old
dress-coat, solves the communal problem. As jaunty and insufferable a
piece of comment as can be found anywhere in print is Mr. Gregory
Smith’s chapter on “The Problem of the Ballads and Popular Songs” in
his _Transition Period_, pp. 180 ff.

Footnote 808:

See above, p. 174. The refrain is very clearly an actual cry at the
dance.

Footnote 809:

Quoted by Ritson, _Anc. Songs_³, p. xxxv.

Footnote 810:

Difference.

Footnote 811:

It is useless to pile up references; any collection has such refrains
in plenty. This “springewir den reigen” (_Carmina Burana_, ed.
Schmeller, p. 178), however, like Neidhart’s dance-songs, although it
goes with the welcome to May, is conventional already and artistic.

Footnote 812:

Chambers, _Popular Rhymes of Scotland_, pp. 132 ff. “Another form of
this game is _only a kind of dance_,” says the editor, without
italics, “in which the girls first join hands in a circle and sing
while moving round to the tune of Nancy Dawson:—

Here we go round the mulberry-bush,

and so on. Then:—

This is the way the ladies walk ...
This is the way they wash the clothes ...

with refrain, or chorus, as before, and imitative actions.”

Footnote 813:

Lucian, in his treatise on the dance, is no authority for primitive
dancing and refrain; but it is noteworthy that he gives such an
exhortation as a kind of refrain. “The song that they sing as they
dance,” he says of the Lacedæmonians, § 11, “is an invitation to Venus
and the loves.... One of these songs is a lesson in dancing (!): ‘On,’
they sing, ‘young people, stretch your legs and dance your best.’”

Footnote 814:

Coussemaker, I. 328; Firmenich, I. 380, IV. 679.

Footnote 815:

In the other version “nonnetje,” “nönneke,” little nun.

Footnote 816:

Bujeaud, _Chants et Chansons ... de l’ouest_, I. 88, from Poitou;
reprinted by Crane, _Chansons Populaires_, pp. 87 ff. See a similar
song, Crane, pp. 162 ff.; many more could be instanced, and some have
been already named.

Footnote 817:

Waitz, _Anthropologie_, VI. 606.

Footnote 818:

_Vore Folkeviser_, pp. 75-112, “Omkvaedet.” Geijer denied that the
refrain is necessary to a ballad, but Steenstrup’s argument is
convincing; out of 502 Scandinavian ballads which he examined, not
more than 20 lacked a refrain. The ballads in Child’s collection point
the same way, at least for the older and shorter ballads; the _Gest_,
of course, and others of that sort, as well as broadside copies, have
passed from the lyrical stage. But even these must go back to an
earlier song with a refrain. Of the two-line ballads, the older form,
there are 31, and of these only 7 lack the refrain in their present
form. Of the 305 ballads in the collection, 106 in at least one
version show evidence of refrain or chorus,—more than a third; while
of some 1250 versions in all, about 300 have the refrain. This count
was made very carefully by Mr. C. H. Carter, of Haverford College. Of
course, Wolf had long since proved that the refrain is characteristic
of all early poetry in the vernacular, and played a leading part in
popular verse everywhere, from its first collection in the fifteenth
century down to the present time. See his _Lais_, pp. 27, 191.

Footnote 819:

“Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft,” _Schriften_, III., pp. 87, 89. See also
Ribot, _Psychology of the Emotions_, p. 334, who calls dancing the
“primordial art,” and shows that here is the transition from mere
movement to æsthetic activity.

Footnote 820:

_Geschichte des Tanzes_, p. 4. This is the best treatise on the
subject, though mainly confined to Germany. _A History of Dancing from
the Earliest Ages ... from the French of Gaston Vuillier, with a
Sketch of Dancing in England_, by Joseph Grego, London, 1898, is of
scant use for the student of origins and development. Dancing “was
probably unknown to the earliest ages of humanity,” a bold assertion,
is followed by another, that “it is certain that dancing was born with
man.” Information of value can be found, however, on special topics;
_e.g._ on the _branle_, p. 100, and its connection with children’s
games.

Footnote 821:

_Sociology_, II. 123.

Footnote 822:

See also Yrjö Hirn, _Förstudier_, pp. 89 f. Dismissing exceptions, he
declares that “dancing in its widest sense is as universal as laughing
and weeping.”

Footnote 823:

No dancing in Iceland, says Kerguelen, who visited there in 1767. See
Pinkerton, _Voyages and Travels_, I. 751. Volumes of proof could be
furnished for refuting this light-hearted assertion.

Footnote 824:

See Bastian, “Masken und Maskereien,” _Zeitschr. f. Völkerpsych._,
XIV. 347.

Footnote 825:

_Anthropologie der Naturvölker_, VI. 78 ff.

Footnote 826:

Wallaschek, p. 189.

Footnote 827:

Letourneau, p. 28.

Footnote 828:

Work quoted, pp. 95 ff. He refers to Hartshorne, “The Weddas,” _Indian
Antiquary_, VIII. 316 f.; E. Tennent, _Ceylon_, II. 437 ff.; and E.
Schmidt, _Globus_, LXV. 15 f.

Footnote 829:

See above, p. 95. It is interesting, however, particularly in
connection with the idea of rhythm as the chief factor in the social
process, that these Veddahs live mainly in pairs; “except on some
extraordinary occasion they never assemble together,” and this dance
is evidently their chief means to express a social union. See Bastian,
_Der Völkergedanke_ ..., p. 72.

Footnote 830:

See also the Brazilian dances noted by Lery, above, p. 312.

Footnote 831:

_Béowulf_, 631 ff., 2631 ff. The _béot_ is the same thing; _Battle of
Maldon_, 213.

Footnote 832:

Pinkerton, _Voyages and Travels_, London, 1808 ff., XI. 535, 543, 648.

Footnote 833:

Pinkerton, _Voyages and Travels_, pp. 652, 723.

Footnote 834:

_Ibid._, p. 667; no italics in the original. So, p. 654, twenty young
women dance to their own singing, and in many other cases; the fact is
beyond dispute. For a dance of more complicated character, but with
chorus and refrain, see pp. 678 f.

Footnote 835:

_Three Years’ Travel_, etc., Phila., 1796; the travels were in
1766-1768. See pp. 171 ff., 220.

Footnote 836:

See Lescarbot, _Histoire de la Nouvelle France_, Paris, 1609, pp. 317
ff., an account of the tribal dances of the Algonquins in honour of a
victory, with interesting particulars. So, too, pp. 691 ff., another
account, with a dance where they “do nothing but sing _Hé_ or _Het_!
like a man cutting wood, with a movement of the arm; and they dance a
‘round’ without holding one another or stirring from one place,
beating their feet upon the earth.” So, says Lescarbot, they make
fires and jump through them, like our French peasants on the eve of
St. John, who shout and dance the whole night. His fifteenth chapter,
pp. 765 ff., is on _Danses el Chansons_, and accents the dance after a
feast. Here, too, he says, “après la panse vient la danse.” Savages,
he says, always sing to their dancing.

Footnote 837:

It is unfortunately not superfluous to suggest that the dances
described by Homer are anything but primitive, though they retain some
primitive traits. The dance pictured on the shield of Achilles (_Il._
XVIII.), youths dancing and fair maids, hand in hand, is a _ronde_, to
be sure, in form, but a society affair as well, with full dress,
complicated figures, and a “divine minstrel” for the music. However,
the vintage dance to the Linos song, described in the preceding
verses, holds, like our harvest refrains, an older fashion.

Footnote 838:

Ten Broeck, in Schoolcraft, IV. 84.

Footnote 839:

Clavigero, _History of Mexico_, trans. Cullen, London, 1787, I. 399
f., a description of the great public dances.

Footnote 840:

_Schoole of Abuse_, p. 34.

Footnote 841:

When M. Gaston Paris, _Les Origines de la Poésie Lyrique en France au
Moyen Age_, p. 42, says he has found no dance among the old Romans
except the professional dance, he overlooks the fact that this rustic
dance in procession about the fields is proof of similar dances for
pleasure. It is no professional affair which Vergil has in mind: _det
motus incompositos et carmina dicat_. Surely the dances were not
danced by slaves.

Footnote 842:

Described by Mr. Arthur Symons in _Harper’s Monthly Magazine_, March,
1901, p. 503.

Footnote 843:

Pfannenschmid, _Germ. Erntef._, p. 400.

Footnote 844:

See above, p. 301.

Footnote 845:

See the suggestive treatment of this subject by Posnett, _Comparative
Literature_, pp. 117 ff., with his references to Réville and Burnouf.

Footnote 846:

Silius Italicus, naming the troops which Hannibal led out of winter
quarters, comes to the Gallician contingent, and describes their
youth—

barbara nunc patriis ululantem carmina linguis,
nunc, pedis alterno percussa verbere terra,
ad numerum resonas gaudentem plaudere caetras.

Lemaire (_Bib. Class. Lat._, Sil. Ital. _Punic._, III. 345 ff.),
explains this as a heroic ballad which the soldiers sing, as they
dance and strike their shields, when going into battle. He refers to
the classical passages for this as well as for the Pyrrhic dance; but
see note at the end of this chapter. The perhaps similar custom of the
Germans, noted by Tacitus, is treated in a masterly way by Müllenhoff.
See the next note but one.

Footnote 847:

Pantomime, as early form of dance leading to poetry and drama, was
noted by Adam Smith, _Essays_, p. 151. For older literature, see
Blankenburg, _Zusätze_, I. 153 ff. Erotic dances were exaggerated by
Scherer into the protoplasm of all poetry, _Poetik_, pp. 83, 114; and
are more moderately treated by Hirn, _Förstudier_, pp. 88 ff., and
Grosse, _Anf. d. Kunst_, pp. 21 ff. It is a developed art, of course,
that Lucian has in mind in his treatise on the dance. See, however,
Lucian, §§ 36, 63, 65.

Footnote 848:

Manley, _Specimens of the Pre-Shaksperian Drama_, I. 296 ff., from the
Folk-Lore Journal, VII. 338 ff. The date of the play is 1779. For the
Germanic sword-dance, see Müllenhoff, _Festgabe für G. Homeyer_,
“Ueber den Schwerttanz,” p. 117. A bibliography of this subject is
printed in the _Zeitschr. f. Völkerpsychol._, etc., XIX. 204, 416;
especially see p. 223; and other references may be added from Paul’s
_Grundriss_, II. i. 835, for the German. For the sword-dance in
Shetland noted by Scott, see Lockhart’s _Life_, ed. 1837, III. 162.
For other gymnastic plays, see the two books of Groos, _Spiele der
Thiere_ and _Spiele der Menschen_.

Footnote 849:

See Bruchmann, _Poetik_, p. 212.

Footnote 850:

Skill, of course, and rivalry are early provocatives of art in the
dance. As to ball-playing as a part of it, references could be given
for all times and climes.

Footnote 851:

See _Old English Ballads_, p. lxxvi.

Footnote 852:

Such as the author of the _Complaynt of Scotland_ watched at their
dancing, and noted the songs.

Footnote 853:

See below, Chap. VII.

Footnote 854:

See Uhland, _Kl. Schr._, III. 399 ff., and 484 ff., who gives other
well-known instances of this panic dance, as well as the _tarantella_
of Italy. The shaman, of course, even among a tribe as low as the
Veddahs, dances himself into a fit.

Footnote 855:

See book of this title by Sir J. G. Wilkinson, London, 1848, I. 399.

Footnote 856:

It translates “dance” in Luke xv. 25.

Footnote 857:

See Kögel, _Gesch. d. deutsch. Lit._, pp. 7 ff.

Footnote 858:

_Sigeléoð_ in Anglo-Saxon, sung after a victory, was doubtless the
same thing. Kögel notes that _leikr_, _leik_, in Norwegian dialects
down to this day, means both “war” and “dance”; and he conjectures
that _winelâc_, in Anglo-Saxon, goes back to an originally erotic
dance, as it may go forward to a children’s “kissing-game.”

Footnote 859:

Wolf, _Lais_, pp. 18, 183 f., puts too much stress on the singing of
church music, though he concedes popular origins; p. 22.

Footnote 860:

Work quoted, p. cxvii.

Footnote 861:

Bladé, _Poésies Populaires de la Gascogne_ (Vol. III. is devoted
entirely to songs for the dance), III. i. ff. “En général on ne danse
aux chansons que faute de mieux,” although even now, at times, “they
bid the music cease, and dance to the sound of their own voices.” The
dancing is literally a round, a circle.

Footnote 862:

See Wolf’s note, _Lais_, pp. 185 f. On this _carole_ or _ronde_,
danced mainly by women, but now and then by men and women, see
Jeanroy’s chapter, already quoted, and the additional suggestions of
M. Gaston Paris, _Origines d. l. Poés. Lyr._, pp. 44 ff., really a
review of Jeanroy’s book. “Ce qui caractérisait surtout les caroles,
c’était le chant qui les accompagnait,” says M. Paris. The only use of
instruments, and these very simple, was to mark the rhythm. Dancers
turned to the left.

Footnote 863:

An early reference, from “Ruodlieb,” may be added to show the
connection of dance and song; the passage occurs in a description of
the dancing bears (III. 84 ff., ed. Grimm-Schmeller, _Lat. Ged. des X.
u. XI. Jhrh._, p. 144):—

cum plebs altisonam fecit gyrando choream,
accurrunt et se mulieribus applicuere,
quae gracili voce cecinerunt deliciose,
insertisque suis harum manibus speciosis
erecti calcant....

The bears dance, then, along with the singing and dancing women; Grimm
calls them _spielweiber_, and quotes an ecclesiastical prohibition
(_ibid._, p. xv); but part of the description, witness the _plebs_,
will pass for a communal dance.

Footnote 864:

In the translation ascribed to Chaucer, w. 759 ff., “Tha myghtist thou
karoles sene,” etc.

Footnote 865:

_De vulg. Eloq._, II. iii. See note in Howell’s translation, London,
1890. Crescimbeni, _L’Istoria della volgar Poesia_, Venez., 1731
(written in 1697), quotes, though in disapproval, Minturno for the
primacy of _ballate_ (p. 148): “ballads,” says M., because “si
cantavano ballando,” which is the root of the matter.

Footnote 866:

It has been repeatedly noticed that older English dances are known by
the ballads sung to them. Even some of the tragic ballads were used
for the dance; but one must think of gay little songs and refrains as
staple for the merry rounds; nothing else will fit the seasons when
“maydes daunce in a ring.”

Footnote 867:

3ᵇ, Bodley copy of 1568. See also the refrain for a dance in the _Four
Elements_, above, p. 322.

Footnote 868:

See _Kind-Harts Dreame_, ed. Rimbault, Percy Soc., 1841, p. 38, and
note, p. 79.

Footnote 869:

_English Minstrelsie_, I., p. ix.

Footnote 870:

In 1767 a “young lady from Scotland” sang as she danced, at the royal
theatre in Copenhagen; but there, too, in 1726, a Stockholm
dancing-girl had done the same thing. “Novelty” is not the word. See
Steenstrup, _Vore Folkev._, pp. 8 f.

Footnote 871:

Brand, “New Year’s Day.”

Footnote 872:

Mannhardt, _Baumkultus_, in many places; Pfannenschmid, _Germ.
Erntej._, pp. 271 ff., 580 ff. For love-songs and the dance, Uhland,
III. 391 ff., and notes, 471, with valuable account of the manner of
dancing, and of the leader, the _voresingen_ and the _voretanzen_.

Footnote 873:

See Böhme, _Altd. Liederb._, p. xxxv.

Footnote 874:

_’T Boertje_, Coussemaker, pp. 329 f., and _’t Patertje_, already
quoted.

Footnote 875:

_Pétition pour des Villageois que l’on empêche de danser._ Par
Paul-Louis Courier, Vigneron, ... Paris, 1822, addressed to the
Chamber of Deputies, asking that the folk of Azai may dance on Sundays
“sur le place de leur commune.” Despite the mystification, there is
some serious intent behind this fooling.

Footnote 876:

In Germany itself: cf. Meyer, _Volkskunde_, pp. 158, 160, 163.

Footnote 877:

_Arbeit u. Rhythmus_, pp. 103 f.

Footnote 878:

See note, end of chapter.

Footnote 879:

Grosse, _Anf d. Kunst_, p. 218; Donovan, _Lyre to Muse_, pp. 91, 127
ff.; Jacobowski, _Anfänge d. Poesie_, p. 127. This author’s discussion
of circle and straight line, as of women and of men in the dance, and
of other formations, is a bit fanciful although interesting and
suggestive. See, too, Donovan on the ring of folk (choral) about a
centre of interest,—altar or the like. Work quoted, p. 204.

Footnote 880:

The development of the dance into different kinds of poetry is
foreshadowed by many of the older writers, although the first really
comparative treatment of the subject must be assigned to A. W.
Schlegel in the lectures at Berlin a century ago. Herder has some
valuable remarks on the subject in his early essay _Vom Geist der
ebräischen Poesie_, following, of course, many hints of Lowth. Two
hundred years ago, Burette, a really learned writer, drew up his
“Mémoire pour servir à l’Histoire de la Danse des Anciens,” published
in the _Mém._, Acad. of Inscript., etc., I. 93 ff., Paris, 1717.
Movement and imitation caused the dance, which is “nearly as old as
man,” and sprang from joy. Cadence is the mainspring; avoid, he says,
Lucian’s prattle about the stars. Wedding, festival, vintage,
harvest,—look to these, says Burette, in quite modern spirit, for the
origins of the dance. He traces metres to the rhythm of songs sung by
the dancers. Another article of this writer investigates ball-playing,
often combined with dance and song. Another writer on the dance was
John Spencer, D.D., master of Corpus Christi College (1630-1693), the
founder of the science of comparative religions; his “Dissertatio de
Saltandi Ritu,” is printed in the _Thesaurus Antiquitat. Sacrar.
complectens selectissima clarissimorum Virorum Opuscula in quibus
Veterum Hebraeorum Mores, Leges, etc., illustrantur_, Vol. XXXII.,
Venet., 1767. Spencer studies the dance of the Hebrews, and his
references are valuable; he is comparative, and uses dances of modern
Turks to illustrate his subject. Hebrews got some of their festal
dances from heathen,—the _saltationes promiscuas_; for erotic dances
he thinks to have been early and everywhere. For a man of his date, he
concludes very boldly “probabilius est, sacras choreas agendi morem,
ex antiquissimo gentium usu primitus oriundum,” and so came to the
Hebrews. The festal dances, where Jews bore about branches and sang a
choral full of repetitions and with a constant refrain, he compares
with pagan affairs of the sort; the pæan is compared with refrains
like _Hallel_ and _Hosannah_. In fine, this is sharp, clear,
comparative work, and good reading still. From Joannis Meursi
_Orchestra sive de Saltationibus Veterum_ ... Lugd. Batav., 1618, not
much is to be learned except a list (alphabetical) of the old dances,
with references to the classic passages. Most of the articles are
short, but the Pyrrhic Dance has twelve pages. An early essay on
dancing, with considerable scope for its time, is inserted in Elyot’s
_Governour_, edited by Croft, London, 1880, from the edition of 1531,
I. 202 ff. Elyot seems to be the first Englishman who wrote about the
art.

Footnote 881:

See above, p. 128.

Footnote 882:

_Essai Comparatif sur l’Origine et l’Histoire des Rythmes_, Paris,
1889.

Footnote 883:

Even this may be questioned in a literal sense. “Formen,” says Usener,
_Altgriechischer Versbau_, p. 111, “werden nicht geschaffen, sondern
sie entstehen und wachsen. Der schöpferische Künstler erzeugt sie
nicht, sondern bildet das Ueberkommene veredelnd um.” He is speaking
of the popular four-accent verse found in so many languages.

Footnote 884:

_L’Esthétique du Mouvement_, Paris, 1889, Cap. iv. See pp. 54, 65.

Footnote 885:

In the _First Principles_.

Footnote 886:

_Essai_, pp. 102, 104.

Footnote 887:

_Mélusine_, I. 1 ff. See, too, _Poésie du Moyen Age_, pp. 77, 89.

Footnote 888:

_Zeitschr. f. Völkerpsychol._, XVII. 113 ff.

Footnote 889:

_Kalewala_, p. 38.

Footnote 890:

_Nordboernes Aandsliv_, II. 437 ff.

Footnote 891:

The refrain of two lines, he thinks, was added to the two-line stanza
of narrative ballads; and so resulted the common ballad stanza. This
is denied by Steenstrup.

Footnote 892:

“Proved” by that old primitive-Aryan process now something
discredited: _danz_ is an imported word (meaning both song and dance).
See Vigfusson’s _Icelandic Dictionary_, _s.v._ More formidable, but
far from final, is the silence of the sagas.

Footnote 893:

A similar denial, not only of the original character of recorded
ballads, but of the ballad habit itself, is made for Denmark by
Professor G. Storm in his otherwise valuable book, _Sagnkredsene om
Karl den Store og Didrik af Bern hos de nordiske Folk_, Kristiania,
1874, pp. 174 f.

Footnote 894:

See below on the _schnaderhüpfl_ and _stev._

Footnote 895:

Comparetti, _Kalewala_, 1892. pp. 3, 264 ff. The very name of the
Finnish song is probably borrowed; but its original and native
character is successfully defended by Comparetti, pp. 37, 272, against
the attempt of Ahlqvist to prove alliteration in Finnish verse a loan
from the Scandinavians.

Footnote 896:

Set forth in Tarde’s _Les Lois de l’Imitation_, Paris, 1890; but the
best recent summary of his views is _Les Lois Sociales_, Paris, 1898.
Special problems of the crowd as imitative, dangerous, weak, are
treated in his _Essais et Mélanges Sociologiques_, Lyon-Paris, 1895.
See also “Les deux Éléments de la Sociologie,” in _Études de
Psychologie Sociale_, Paris, 1898, an address delivered in 1894 before
the first international Congress of Sociology.

Footnote 897:

_Les Lois de l’Imitation_, p. 279. So p. 48,—“A l’origine un
anthropoïde a imaginé ... les rudiments d’un langage.”

Footnote 898:

_Of the Origin and Progress of Language_, I. 318 ff.

Footnote 899:

He concedes that a different relation exists when two are working
together at the same thing (_Lois Soc._, p. 129); although here are
“model and copy,” suggestion at least.

Footnote 900:

_Ibid._, p. 159.

Footnote 901:

He sees light ahead for a world now hung in Schopenhauer-black; the
infinitesimal shall cheer us. _Ibid._, pp. 87, 105, 110.

Footnote 902:

_Lois Sociales_, pp. 40 f. This passage will repay close attention.

Footnote 903:

_Critique Scientifique_, pp. 191 ff. Carstanjen made a fierce attack
on the milieu in art, and, by implication, in literature:
_Vierteljahrsschrift f. wissenschaftl. Philosophie_, XX. (1896), 1
ff., 143 ff. He explains the art of the renaissance by the artists of
that time, and not by their environment. For a fine defence of the
_milieu_, however, see the late M. Texte’s book on _Jean-Jacques
Rousseau et les Origines du Cosmopolitisme Littéraire_, pp. xvii. ff.

Footnote 904:

_Outlines of Sociology_, trans. F. W. Moore for the Amer. Acad. Pol.
and Soc. Sci., June, 1899, pp. 45, 88. See the translator’s abstract,
p. 7.

Footnote 905:

_Die Philosophie der Geschichte als Sociologie_, Leipzig, 1897, I.
183, 213 f.

Footnote 906:

_Principles of Sociology_, New York, 1896.

Footnote 907:

“Ueber Ziele und Wege der Völkerpsychologie,” in _Philosophische
Studien_, 1888, IV. 1 ff., particularly pp. 11 ff. and 17.

Footnote 908:

In his _Völkerpsychologie_ (Vol. I., Leipzig, 1900, has appeared), he
undertakes to study the making of these three products, which he calls
a _gemeinsames Erzeugniss_. See pp. 4, 6, 24 f. A sensible plea for
the _volksseele_, “which need not have any mystical connotation,” was
made by Gustav Freytag in the introduction to his _Bilder aus der
deutschen Vergangenheit_, I. 13 ff.

Footnote 909:

_Psychologie des Foules_; and in English translation, _The Crowd_.

Footnote 910:

“Das Wesen des Gesammtgeistes,” _Studien und Aufsätze_, pp. 504 ff.

Footnote 911:

Significant is the change from _Völkerpsychologie_ to _Volkskunde_.
The new journal is edited by Professor Weinhold, and began in 1891.

Footnote 912:

In Paul’s _Grundriss der Philologie_, II. i., 512 ff. See also Ten
Brink’s _Beowulf_, pp. 105 f.

Footnote 913:

_Débute._ See _Lois de l’Imit._, p. 233. He is arguing against
Spencer’s doctrine of the development of the arts, and implies the
same “high initial source” for music, architecture, and the rest.

Footnote 914:

“Enfin ce triple poésie découle de trois grandes sources, la Bible,
Homère, Shakspeare.”

Footnote 915:

_Lois Sociales_, p. 49.

Footnote 916:

The abstract question is foreign to the present purpose; but it may be
urged that one is wise to take neither the extreme position of Buckle,
Gumplowicz, and Bourdeau,—who said that if Napoleon had been shot at
Toulon, Hoche, or Kleber, or some one, would have done what Napoleon
did,—nor yet the equally extreme stand of Tarde and his school. Some
sensible remarks on the whole matter may be found in Bernheim’s
_Lehrbuch d. historischen Methode_, pp. 513 ff. of the second edition,
Leipzig, 1894.

Footnote 917:

See Lloyd Morgan, _Habit and Instinct_, Chap. II. Solitary chicks
hatched in an incubator can be heard chirping, all in the same way,
before they break the shell, and with no chance of imitation in the
case. Weismann, “Gedanken über Musik,” _Rundschau_, LXI. (1889), 63,
remarks that a young finch brought up alone will sing the song of its
kind, “but never so beautifully as when a good singer is put with him
as teacher.” The concession is enough.

Footnote 918:

Morgan, work quoted, p. 90. Even Mr. Witchell, for whom the song of
birds is traditional, grants that call-notes, alarm-notes, and all
such utterances are instinctive. See Morgan, p. 178, and Romanes,
_Mental Evolution in Animals_, pp. 222 f.

Footnote 919:

_Psychology of the Emotions_, p. 265. The part assigned to imitation
in seemingly spontaneous expression of emotion in a child, Baldwin,
_Mental Development in Child and Race_, pp. 260 ff., does not affect
this study of emotion in throngs.

Footnote 920:

_Die Spiele der Thiere_, Jena, 1896, p. 8. See, however, _Spiele der
Menschen_, pp. 4, 365 ff., 431, 446 ff., 511 f.

Footnote 921:

So Noiré explained the case in the section on the development of
language in his book, _Die Welt als Entwicklung des Geistes_, Leipzig,
1874. Like Donovan, too, he assumed that the first words were uttered
under pressure of communal excitement, elation, joy, social sense. He
assumes that social conditions quite overwhelmed the individual, who
hardly existed as such. See pp. 266 f.

Footnote 922:

Quoted, p. 328, by Morgan, from _Lectures on Human and Animal
Psychology_, p. 397.

Footnote 923:

See Wallaschek against this idea, above, p. 100.

Footnote 924:

Work quoted, p. 21.

Footnote 925:

Work quoted, p. 340. Play is thus tabulated:—

════════════════════╤════════════════════╤════════════════════
Selbstdarstellung. │Nachahmung. │Ausschmückung.
────────────────────┼────────────────────┼────────────────────
Persönliches. │Wahres. │Schönes.
────────────────────┼────────────────────┼────────────────────
Beim Thier: │ │
Bewerbungskünste. │Nachahmungskünste. │Baukünste.
────────────────────┼────────────────────┼────────────────────
Beim Menschen: │ │
Erregungstanz. │Nachahmungstanz. │Kunstgewerbe.
Musik. │Mimik. │(Gartenbaukunst.)
Lyrik. │Plastik. │Architectur.
│Malerei. │
│Epik. │
│Drama. │
════════════════════╧════════════════════╧════════════════════

Compare with this the table given in Mr. Baldwin Brown’s useful book
on _The Fine Arts_, p. 36.

Footnote 926:

_Lyre to Muse_, pp. 127 f. Mr. Baldwin Brown, _The Fine Arts_, p. 23,
also regards art in general as an outgrowth of festal celebrations.

Footnote 927:

At the end of his _Lyre to Muse_, p. 209.

Footnote 928:

_Arbeit und Rhythmus_, pp. 17, 25, 82.

Footnote 929:

In Ribot’s _Psychology of the Emotions_, e.g., p. 332, ample justice
is done to spontaneous emotion and expression.

Footnote 930:

See Butcher’s translation, pp. 15 ff.

Footnote 931:

So Butcher explains, p. 252: “a wild religious excitement, a bacchic
ecstasy.”

Footnote 932:

_Kunstlehre des Aristoteles_, Jena, 1876, pp. 83 ff. Gerber, _Die
Sprache als Kunst_, I. 32, follows Aristotle in denying that
improvisations are ever poetry, which is enthusiasm plus deliberation
and selection.

Footnote 933:

_Vorlesungen_, I. 356 ff. Compare I. 340.

Footnote 934:

Waitz-Gerland, _Anthropologie_, I. (2d. ed.), 345.

Footnote 935:

_Vorlesungen_, II. 117, 119. He calls the Homeric epos an artistic
improvisation as compared with earlier spontaneous, instinctive
improvisation. See also II. 20.

Footnote 936:

_Ibid._, III. 141,—a mere note for his lecture.

Footnote 937:

_Die Geburt der Tragödie_, oder _Griechenthum und Pessimismus_, 3d.
ed. 1894; the immediate title, however, is _Die Geburt der Tragödie
aus dem Geiste der Musik_.

Footnote 938:

_Welt als Wille_, etc., I. 416. Nietzsche, pp. 22, 35 f.

Footnote 939:

Lyric and folksong, according to Nietzsche, p. 48, are outcome of
music. “Diesen Prozess einer Entladung der Musik in Bildern haben wir
uns auf eine jugendfrische, sprachlich schöpferische Volksmenge zu
übertragen, um zur Ahnung zu kommen, wie das strophische Volkslied
entsteht.”

Footnote 940:

The usual references for Bacchic or Dionysian orgies are Livy, IX. 4
ff., where minute particulars are given; Strabo, bk. X.; Athenæus, X.

Footnote 941:

In Nietzsche’s mystic phrase, the chorus “auf seiner primitiven Stufe
in der Urtragödie,” is “eine Selbstspiegelung des dionysischen
Menschen ... eine Vision der dionysischen Masse.”

Footnote 942:

See pp. 60 f. This artistic power is his definition of the poetic
process. Professor Giddings, on hints of Mr. Spencer, has drawn a
picture of solitary, primitive man arguing a spirit from the
phenomenon of his shadow and of the echo of his voice. It may be
pointed out that communal shouts and cries, echoed from the rocks,
would be more likely to rouse a belief in that horde of spirits with
which the primitive human horde thought itself surrounded. Early
religion was social, communal; individual meditation, a process of
individual thought, was utterly subordinate to communal thought. Even
now superstition is a lingering “they say.”

Footnote 943:

“Eine Gemeinde von unbewussten Schauspielern,” p. 61.

Footnote 944:

_Journal d’un Poète_, p. 38.

Footnote 945:

“Das charakteristische Merkmal der Volkspoesie,” _Zeitschr. f.
Völkerpsychol._, XIX. (1889), 115 ff.

Footnote 946:

_Zeitschr. f. Völkerpsychol._, XIX., p. 120.

Footnote 947:

See Schultze, _Der Fetischismus_, pp. 30 ff., with his authorities.

Footnote 948:

Two famous utterances voice this feeling. Swift loved his Peter, Paul,
John, and the rest; he hated the human race at large. This for the
outer circle. As for crowds, Schiller put the antithesis in a
distich:—

Jeder, sieht man ihn einzeln, ist leidlich klug und beständig;
Sind sie _in corpore_, gleich wird euch ein Dummkopf daraus.

Footnote 949:

“Foules et Sectes,” in _Essais et Mélanges Sociol._, p. 4.

Footnote 950:

_Principles of Sociology_, I. 459, 704 f. Tribe to nation, I. 584.
Rise of professions due to “specialization of a relatively homogeneous
mass,” III. 181. See II. 307 ff. In the _First Principles_, §§ 125,
127, he had defined the process as “change from an incoherent
homogeneity to a coherent heterogeneity,” and had applied the idea not
only to the primitive union of poetry, music, and dancing, but within
poetic limits to that undifferentiated song which held in germ the
epic, the lyric, the drama.

Footnote 951:

_Revue des deux Mondes_, 15 Feb., 1898, p. 880; “le passage de
l’homogène à l’heterogène,” that “idée mère, l’idée substantielle de
l’évolution or in Haeckel’s words, “gradual differentiation of matter
originally simple.”

Footnote 952:

_L’Évolution des Peuples_, pp. 37 f. See also pp. 43, 167.

Footnote 953:

_Primitive Folk_, p. 57.

Footnote 954:

So the reviews summarize the doctrine of A. H. Keane, _Man Past and
Present_, 1899.

Footnote 955:

_Critique Scientifique_, pp. 112, 115.

Footnote 956:

In the _Rassenkampf_ and especially in _Outlines of Sociology_, trans.
Moore, pp. 39, 124, 139 note; on p. 142 he names the factors which
made a horde homogeneous.

Footnote 957:

Dr. Richard Mucke, _Horde und Familie in ihrer urgeschichtlichen
Entwicklung_, Stuttgart, 1895.

Footnote 958:

Grosse, _Format der Familie_, pp. 30 ff. See p. 39. He takes as
“representatives of the oldest form of social life” those scattered
tribes which subsist entirely by hunting; we know nothing so
primitive, and while checked in culture, these tribes are probably not
degraded (32 f.). The statements in the text are based on careful
arrangement of the statistics, a very important point. See Mucke,
_Horde und Familie_, pp. 181 ff. Spencer describes the “small, simple
aggregates,” coöperating “with or without a regulating centre, for
certain public ends,” of which the “headless” kind must be regarded as
the primitive type; and gives a list of these not very different from
the list of Grosse. _Prin. Soc._, I. § 257.

Footnote 959:

Grosse refuses to extend this lack of individual power to promiscuity
in sexual relations. That precious theory was doubtless carried to an
absurd point; but the reaction may likewise go too far, and the case
of those Andamanese (p. 43) with their “absolute conjugal fidelity
even unto death,” uncannily suggests Sir Charles Grandison and even
Isaac Walton’s mullet.

Footnote 960:

_Anthropology_, p. 79.

Footnote 961:

_Anthropologie_, I. 74 ff., 349 ff.

Footnote 962:

Waitz, I. 446, answers objections to this view, and disposes of the
idea that civilization levels mankind.

Footnote 963:

See above, p. 372, note 942.

Footnote 964:

_Anfänge der Kunst_, p. 224.

Footnote 965:

_Ibid._, pp. 300 f.

Footnote 966:

_Ibid._, p, 236.

Footnote 967:

_Comparative Literature_, p. 72. See pp. 89 ff., 155 ff., 347 f., and
the whole chapter on “The Principle of Literary Growth.” He glorifies
sympathy as the poetic mainspring; but he fails to study the dualism
in terms of actual throng and actual artist. The spirit and plan of
the book, however, are worthy of the highest praise, whatever its
shortcomings in detail.

Footnote 968:

Catullus, lxiv.

Footnote 969:

_Werke_, VI. 26.

Footnote 970:

_Esthétique de la Tradition_, pp. 69 ff.

Footnote 971:

Spencer, _Sociology_, I. 56 ff., 70 f., II. 271, note; Grosse, _Formen
der Familie_, p. 57, with quotation from Petroff’s book on Alaska;
Schultze, _Fetischismus_, pp. 51 f.

Footnote 972:

_The Theory of Law and Civil Society_, London, 1888, pp. 106 f. See
above, p. 26.

Footnote 973:

Professor Baldwin, _Social and Ethical Interpretations_, p. 214, puts
the beginning of the social period just after man’s release from the
animal. See too his appendix. Ribot, work quoted, p. 281, says the
gregarious life—of animals in hordes, that is—“is founded on the
attraction of like for like, irrespective of sex.” See this whole
chapter on “The Social and Moral Feelings.”

Footnote 974:

See, however, the case of New Zealanders who work in large numbers and
in perfect accord by singing their song _totowaka_. Wallaschek, _Prim.
Mus._, p. 43.

Footnote 975:

Even Mr. Spencer points out that this is no bar to communal consent,
_Sociology_, I. 59; for the variability implies “smaller departure
from primitive reflex action ... lack of the re-representative
emotions which hold the simpler ones in check.” Bastian, too, has
shown that in the formation of society out of individuals, the social
element as such, the social whole, must precede the element of social
individuality or of the individuality within the mass. This is what
one gathers from Bastian’s books in general; in one case, _Die Welt in
ihren Spiegelungen unter dem Wandel des Völkergedankens_, p. 413, he
applies this idea to the priority of social property as compared with
individual property.

Footnote 976:

Perhaps there is some connection between the fervour and merit of
French war-songs like the Marseillaise, the _Ça ira_, and the fact
that French literature as a whole is averse from undue stress upon the
individual and does not suffer, whatever its other defects, from “too
much ego in its cosmos.” Texte points out that Jean-Jacques, Germanic
by nature, noticed this trait in the French. “Le _je_ ... est presque
aussi scrupuleusement banni de la scène française que des écrits de
Port-Royal, _et les passions humaines_ ... _n’y parlent jamais que par
on_.” How contemptuously M. Brunetière, who has no superior in the
appreciation of French literature as a whole, speaks of that new
personal note, set in fashion by Rousseau, “most eloquent of lackeys!”
See “La Littérature Personnelle,” in B.’s _Questions de Critique_, pp.
211 ff., and his review of Hennequin’s book in the same collection,
pp. 305 ff.

Footnote 977:

Boas, _Report Bur. Ethnol._, 1884-1885, pp. 564, 600 ff.

Footnote 978:

_Anf. d. Kunst_, p. 132.

Footnote 979:

On this baffling theme there is good reasoning in a neglected book by
Noiré, _Die Welt als Entwicklung des Geistes_, pp. 240 f. He notes the
mnemonic force of earliest words, which were few and used under strong
emotional excitement; language was a kind of “thinking aloud.”

Footnote 980:

Stated in different terms by W. von Humboldt, _Werke_, VI. 198.

Footnote 981:

Wallaschek, _Prim. Mus._, pp. 70 f.

Footnote 982:

I. von Döllinger, _Beiträge zur Sektengeschichte des Mittelalters_,
Munich, 1890, II. 623 f., from an old Ms., “de hystrionibus et
officiis inutilibus.” Priests are instructed what professions bar the
granting of absolution,—an interesting passage. “Cum igitur meretrices
ad confessionem venerint, vel hystriones, non est eis danda
poenitentia, nisi ex toto talia relinquant officia,” etc.

Footnote 983:

See Dana’s account of an improvising islander working in California,
_Two Years before the Mast_, Chap. XIX.

Footnote 984:

Wallaschek, quoting Portman, p. 278.

Footnote 985:

J. Darmesteter, _Chants Populaires des Afghans_, Paris, 1888-1890, p.
clxxxvi. The Afghans have got to a Browning level in poetry, if we may
believe Captain Rafferty, _Selections from the Poetry of the Afghans_,
London, 1862. “Shaida’s poetry ...” he says, “is deep and difficult.”

Footnote 986:

Ahlwardt, _über Poesie und Poetik der Araber_, Gotha, 1856, p. 7.

Footnote 987:

F. Michel, _Le Pays Basque_, Paris, 1857, pp. 214 f. The same is true
of the Poles. See Talvj (here spelled Talvi) _Historical View of the
Languages and Literatures of the Slavic Nations_, New York, 1850, Part
IV., pp. 315 ff. Speaking of the Polish ballads, Mrs. Robinson says,
“Their dances were formerly always accompanied by singing. _But these
songs are always extemporized._ Among the country gentry ... the
custom of extemporizing songs ... continued even down to the beginning
of our own century.”

Footnote 988:

“Etwas über William Shakspeare,” _Werke_, VII. 57 f.

Footnote 989:

He refers to the Homeric hymn to Hermes, vv. 54-56: “The god sang to
the playing what came into his mind, quickly, readily, just as at
festal banquets youths tease one another with verses sung in turn.”

Footnote 990:

Quoted by Chappell, II. 623.

Footnote 991:

See the _Greville Memoirs_, III. 122, 202.

Footnote 992:

Spence, _Anecdotes_ (for Italy), pp. 116 ff., 120 note.

Footnote 993:

_Travels in Africa_, reprinted in Pinkerton, XVI. 844.

Footnote 994:

Improvisation of labour songs by women, solitary or in bands, is very
common. See Bücher, _Arbeit u. Rhythmus_, passim, especially, p. 78,
and above, p. 269.

Footnote 995:

Improvisations at dance, funeral, wedding, and the like, among these
Africans, are summed up by Spencer in his unfinished _Descriptive
Sociology_, pp. 24 f.

Footnote 996:

See above, p. 20.

Footnote 997:

_Compendium_, 4th ed., p. 641. Cf. Spencer, _Princ. Social._, II. 151,
American ed.

Footnote 998:

_Mental Evolution in Man_, p. 358, American ed.

Footnote 999:

_Færøiske Quæder om Sigurd_, etc., Randers, 1822. P. E. Müller wrote
the preface and made the extracts from Lyngbye’s journal; so that the
evidence is at first hand and by an exact observer. The remoteness of
the place is equivalent to centuries in point of time. See, too, V. U.
Hammershaimb, _Færøsk Anthologi_, Copenhagen, I. xli ff.

Footnote 1000:

See the author’s _Old English Ballads_, p. xxxiv.

Footnote 1001:

_Popular Tales of the West Highlands_, 2d ed., IV. 164 f.

Footnote 1002:

Described at length by Möbius in the “Ergänzungsband” for Zacher’s
_Zeitschrift f. d. deutsche Philologie_, 1874, p. 54. For the _débat_,
_tenso_, _sirventes_, _jeu-parti_, _conflictos_, and all the rest on
romance ground, see Jeanroy, pp. 48 f., and Greif, _Zst. f. vgl.
Lit._, N. F., I. 289.

Footnote 1003:

For Portugal, see Dr. C. F. Bellermann, _Portug. Volkslieder u.
Romanzen_, Leipzig, 1874, p. viii.

Footnote 1004:

On ease of improvisation among the Finns proper, see Comparetti,
_Kalewala_, p. 17.

Footnote 1005:

Chambers, _Popular Rhymes of Scotland_, pp. 166 f.

Footnote 1006:

Coussemaker, p. 271.

Footnote 1007:

Wallace is thinking of music and song in the nobler sense when he
denies them to primitive races; and Wallaschek’s answer is conclusive,
for it is based on evidence that all goes one way, _Primitive Music_,
pp. 277 f. Another absurd reaction against romantic ideas is to deny
lyric propensity to primitive folk and substitute an acute sense of
“business.” So Norden, work quoted, I. 156, says the prayer of early
man was anything but a “lyrical outpouring”; it was “a contract with
deity, give and take.” But emotional fear and emotional thanks precede
any such shrewd rationalism as this, if psychology is to be regarded,
let alone ethnological evidence.

Footnote 1008:

Schmid, 2d ed., p. 366.

Footnote 1009:

_Romanisches und Keltisches_, pp. 363 f. The four-line stanza, he
says, is easy to compose, and one _pennill_ suggests another; so that
each is half tradition, half improvisation, belonging “to everybody
and nobody.” This description approaches very closely the hypothetical
description given by Ten Brink in his sketch of Old English poetry for
Paul’s _Grundriss_, of the making of ballads in a more primitive day.

Footnote 1010:

Mr. Gregory Smith’s facile explanation, _The Transition Period_, pp.
182 f.

Footnote 1011:

Ep. II. i. 145 f. See Zell, _Ferienschriften_, II. 122 ff. Soldiers
sang in pairs, or in two sections, these alternate mocking verses.

Footnote 1012:

Douglas Hyde, _Love Songs of Connacht_, 1895, pp. 88 ff. The prose
translation has less artificial suggestion than the translation in
verses.

Footnote 1013:

Athenæus and Diodorus are quoted as authorities for the Sicilian
origin of such combats in verse; but Jeanroy disposes of this theory
by an effective use of the argument from comparative literature. See
his _Origines_, pp. 260 ff.

Footnote 1014:

On the meaning and relations of _strambotto_, _stornello_, _rispetto_,
_ritornello_, and the other terms, see Count Nigra’s _Canti Popolari
del Piemonte_, Torino, 1888, pp. xi ff. He corrects Schuchardt’s use
of _ritornell_ for _stornello_. This latter is really an amœbean form
of verse, has but one stanza, and this of three lines; the
_strambotto_ is one stanza, too, but has four, six, ten, or even more
lines. Still, the four-line stanza, as comparison shows, is clearly
the primitive form. Southern Italy is, of course, far richer in these
songs than Piedmont, the home of lyrical narrative or ballad.

Footnote 1015:

Found, too, in India; but here not in the really communal stage. See
Gustav Meyer, _Essays und Studien_, pp. 293 f.

Footnote 1016:

_Bayerisches Wörterbuch_, III. 499, explaining them as
_Schnitterhüpflein_, songs of the reapers.

Footnote 1017:

With references to the literature of these songs, work quoted, pp. 332
ff.

Footnote 1018:

On the form cf. O. Brenner, “Zum Versbau der Schnaderhüpfl,” in
_Festschrift zur 50 jähr. Doktorjubelfeier Karl Weinholds_,
Strassburg, 1896, who gives fresh references for the various subjects
of discussion. He emphasizes the fact that these _schnaderhüpfl_ are
always sung.

Footnote 1019:

Dr. H. Dunger, _Rundâs und Reimsprüche aus dem Vogtlande_, Plauen,
1876. A _rundâ_ is originally “a little song sung while drinking,” but
is made to include the _schnaderhüpfl_; and in the author’s opinion
all these forms go back to songs of reapers during harvest. That,
however, is of no great moment here.

Footnote 1020:

“Ueber Poesie der Alpenländer,” in a reprint from a magazine whose
title does not appear.

Footnote 1021:

Firmenich, _Germaniens Völkerstimmen_, II. 716. I have made these
translations solely to reproduce, if possible, the spirit of the
original, and have tried to keep the false “literary” note at arm’s
length.

Footnote 1022:

_Ibid._, II. 715, 777.

Footnote 1023:

G. Meyer, p. 357, prints a number of such variations on the standing
first verse:—

It is dark in the woods
Because of the crows,—
That my girl will be false,
That every one knows.

It is dark in the woods
Because of the firs,—

and so on.

Footnote 1024:

Firmenich, II. 779.

Footnote 1025:

Firmenich, II. 661.

Footnote 1026:

Of the dance,—the _vorsinger_.

Footnote 1027:

Variants of this are found in many places.

Footnote 1028:

Firmenich, III. 39.

Footnote 1029:

_Ibid._, II. 716.

Footnote 1030:

_Ibid._, II. 737.

Footnote 1031:

“Go from my window,” pp. 140 ff., with variations (as “Come up to my
window”) and parodies.

Footnote 1032:

Firmenich, II. 715.

Footnote 1033:

_Od._, III. X.

Footnote 1034:

It is well to note here that development is one thing and imitation is
another. The authorities agree that a _schnaderhüpfl_ cannot be
imitated. See Gustav Meyer, p. 351.

Footnote 1035:

Firmenich, II. 717.

Footnote 1036:

Firmenich, III. 396.

Footnote 1037:

_Ibid._, II. 280. This is widespread. See Meyer, p. 356.

Footnote 1038:

Meyer, p. 341. The rimes are identical in the original. Meyer gives
seven versions.

Footnote 1039:

Child, III. 236.

Footnote 1040:

On this opening touch from nature in the ballads, exemplified in
English by the beautiful beginning of _Robin Hood and the Monk_, much
has been written; but this use of the same device in a _schnaderhüpfl_
is very significant, and has aroused little comment. See Meyer, pp.
377 ff.

Footnote 1041:

Child, I. 399 ff.

Footnote 1042:

_Essays_, pp. 365 ff.

Footnote 1043:

On p. 358.

Footnote 1044:

When the Greek youth leaves his home, Fauriel says, his family sing
songs of farewell, traditional and improvised, to which he often
improvises a reply. Improvisation, too, and presumably once in the
village throng, lies at the foundation of the German prentice songs of
leave-taking, the eternal note of _scheiden, das thut grämen_, with
culmination in that exquisite poem, probably not improvised,
_Innsprück, ich muss dich lassen_. The ennobling process is
interesting, and is of a piece with the process assumed by A. W.
Schlegel for the ennobling of Greek epic out of rude improvisation.

Footnote 1045:

Uhland, _Volkslieder_, I. 78. In spite of the two melodies, I have put
the refrain at the beginning, and slightly changed, as in Uhland’s B.,
at the end. The actual song is for the dance. See Böhme, _Altd.
Liederb._, p. 268. Only two stanzas are given,—one for the happy girl
and one for the lovelorn, one the _vortanz_, the other the _nachtanz_.

Footnote 1046:

See above, p. 208.

Footnote 1047:

Firmenich, II. 742.

Footnote 1048:

The translation fails to bring out the simplicity of these two
stanzas; they run thus:—

Der Weg ös mer z’wait,
Und der Wold ös mer z’dick,
Bhüat di Gott, main liabs Schotzel,
I wünsch dir viel Glück.

I wünsch dir viel Glück
Und es sull dir guat gian,
Für die Zeit, ols d’mi g’liabt host,
Bedonk i mi schian.

Footnote 1049:

_Essays_, p. 370; and see also Kögel, _Gesch. d. d. Lit._, I. 7, who
thinks that Scandinavian _ljóð_ (plural) meant once a series of these
strophes composed by dancers and so coming to be a _lied_. E. H.
Meyer, _Volkskunde_, p. 317, notes the independent quatrains combined
into an _almlied_.

Footnote 1050:

Also G. Meyer, _Essays_, pp. 370, 375.

Footnote 1051:

_Ibid._, pp. 377 ff.

Footnote 1052:

_Norske Folkeviser_, Christiania, 1853. See especially pp. 365 ff.,
423 ff.

Footnote 1053:

_Ibid._, p. 366.

Footnote 1054:

Lundell, Paul’s _Grundriss_, II. i. 730, says that even now any adult
in Iceland can make verses.

Footnote 1055:

Landstad, pp. 370 ff.

Footnote 1056:

_Ibid._, p. 376.

Footnote 1057:

The _vocero_ is far less individual than this quatrain or stave just
considered, because the former is an outburst rather of public grief
than of private emotion.

Footnote 1058:

See above, p. 269.

Footnote 1059:

Definitions are notoriously unsatisfactory in poetics. Contrast
Schleiermacher’s formula for lyric as poetry plus music, _Aesthetik_,
p. 628, with the laborious definition in R. M. Werner’s _Lyrik und
Lyriker_, Hamburg and Leipzig, 1890, p. 10, based mainly on the
subjective element. Confusion of form and conditions, which makes
lyric poetry one with music (see Döring, _Kunstlehre d. Aristoteles_,
p. 88), with inner meaning and purpose, has caused most of the
trouble. In one sense the old choral was the very foundation of lyric.
The congregational psalm of the Hebrews is lyric, and so is the
solitary cry of the modern poet.

Footnote 1060:

_Uralt_, says Usener, _Altgr. Versbau_, p. 45. See above, p. 95.

Footnote 1061:

As Matthew Arnold reminds us:—

Sophocles, long ago,
Heard it on the Ægean.

For the prevailing tone of lyric is sad, and Euterpe treats her poet
as Genevieve treated Coleridge:—

She loves me best whene’er I sing
The songs that make her grieve.

Footnote 1062:

The claim of Usener may be noted (“Der Stoff des griechischen Epos,”
_Sitzungsber. d. Kais. Acad. d. Wiss. zu Wien_, Bd. 137, pp. 18 ff.),
where he puts the ceremonies at the hearthstone, primitive
ancestor-worship, as the real beginning of epic song. The offering to
an ancestor must have been made “with music, prayer, and song.” Hence
the epos. It is true that a lyric of this sort is older than any
epic,—the epic which Hegel pushed forward as earliest form of poetry,
just as the renaissance had put it above the drama in dignity,—and may
well have helped the later epic process. But the evidence of ethnology
shows that rude songs at the tribal dance, which refer to tribal
doings, must be far older than any ceremonies of the primitive
_hausvater_ at his family altar.

Footnote 1063:

A. W. Schlegel said that the Homeric poems were improvised; but he
distinguished between rude communal improvisation and that of
incipient art. _Vorlesungen_, II. 119 f., 243.

Footnote 1064:

Livy, VII. 2, gives an account of this change.

Footnote 1065:

See Maurice Drack, _Le Théâtre de la Foire, la Comédie Italienne, et
l’Opéra-comique_, Paris, 1889. Vol. I. has a sketch of the
movement—from 1678 on—indicated in the title. It began with the _pièce
à couplets_, and passed gradually into modern comic opera. The great
popular fair of St. Lawrence, at Paris, was the scene of part of this
development.

Footnote 1066:

Garnett, _Italian Literature_, p. 306, traces this comedy back through
Tuscan and Neapolitan peasants to the “Greek rustics who smeared their
faces with wine-lees at the Dionysiac festivals, and from whose
improvised songs and gestures Greek comedy was developed.”

Footnote 1067:

Burckhardt, _Cultur der Ren._, II. 40, thinks that such well-known
characters as Pantalone, the Doctor, Arlecchino, may be in some
fashion connected with masked figures in the old Roman plays.

Footnote 1068:

Ticknor, _Spanish Literature_, I. 232 f.

Footnote 1069:

Second Part, Chap. XX.

Footnote 1070:

Malone’s _Shakspere_, 1821, III. 131.

Footnote 1071:

_Tarlton’s Jests_ ... ed. J. O. Halliwell, London, 1844, pp. xviii f.
(Shakspere Society). “As Antipater Sidonius,” says the comparative
Meres, “was famous for extemporall verse in Greeke ... so was our
Tarleton.”

Footnote 1072:

See Bolte, _Die Singspiele der englischen Komödianten und ihrer
Nachfolger_, Hamburg u. Leipzig, 1893, pp. 50 ff. He prints parallel
copies of “Singing Simpkin” and the German “Pickelhering in der
Kiste.”

Footnote 1073:

“Passages were often left for the extempore declamation of the actors.
Sometimes the whole conduct of the piece depended on their powers of
improvisation.” Symonds, _Shakspere’s Predecessors_, p. 66.

Footnote 1074:

_Vorlesungen über Aesthetik_, pp. 84 f.

Footnote 1075:

Ed. Grosart, V. 200.

Footnote 1076:

Hazlitt-Dodsley, V. 149, 151.

Footnote 1077:

As, for example, Schwab takes it: _Das Schauspiel im Schauspiel_, Wien
u. Leipzig, 1896, p. 32.

Footnote 1078:

Bruchmann, _Poetik_, p. 17.

Footnote 1079:

The material has been set forth above in the section on the communal
dance; for early dramatic dances of fight, hunting, and the like, see
especially pp. 336 ff., and the passage on _lâc_, p. 340.

Footnote 1080:

On gesture as common and universally understood expression, see
Darwin, _Descent of Man_, 2d ed., I. 276 f. “Men of all races” have a
“mutual comprehension of gesture-language”; they all have “the same
expression on their features,” and “the same inarticulate cries when
excited by the same emotions.” See also Tylor, _Early History of
Mankind_, chapters on Gesture-Language; and _American Antiquarian_,
II. 219, G. Mallery on Indian Sign Language. This universal validity
of gesture is highly significant for the beginnings of poetry, for the
rude cries which precede language are probably of the same order as
the gestures. See Chap. II., Wundt’s _Völkerpsychologie_.

Footnote 1081:

Bastian, “Masken und Maskereien,” _Zst. f. Völkerpsych._, XIV. 347.

Footnote 1082:

See Grosse on the two “roots” of the drama, _Anf. d. Kunst_, pp. 254
f. On the mimicry of different tribes in the communal dance, see
Bruchmann, _Poetik_, pp. 208 ff.; Wallaschek, _Prim. Music_, Chap.
VIII.

Footnote 1083:

The conspicuous performer,—the “entertainer” or soloist,—grows less
and less prominent as one gets upon lower levels of culture. The
earliest distinction of this sort was probably achieved by the priest,
conjurer, medicine-man, shaman, or whatever his special function.

Footnote 1084:

As Wallaschek recedes from his proposition, the examples have more and
more mention of words and song together with the action; for example,
pp. 217 ff.

Footnote 1085:

This must always be taken into account. As Wallaschek says of an
Australian “corrobberee,” however primitive it may seem, “it is a
well-prepared and elaborated dance, which it takes both time and
practice to excel in.”

Footnote 1086:

Wallaschek, pp. 223 f.

Footnote 1087:

From gesture back to facial expression and other signs now unknown
because speech has taken their place, is an inviting path, but not to
be trodden now. From the _Kansas City Star_, date unfortunately lost,
may be quoted an interview with Hagenbeck, the lion-tamer. “We can’t
see,” he said, “the expression of a lion’s face, except of rage, but
his companions can.... Did you ever see one animal fail to understand
another? I never saw such an instance.... I am inclined to think that
what we call mind-reading is mere survival here and there of the lost
sixth sense, which was probably common to primitive man, and which
animals possess to this day.” Mr. Hagenbeck could furnish an
interesting supplement to Darwin’s book _On the Expression of
Emotions_.

Footnote 1088:

Work quoted, p. 28, speaking of Australian song and dance. See also p.
201.

Footnote 1089:

Sign-language of later date, as studied by Mallery among the American
Indians, cannot be regarded as primitive in this genetic sense. It
comes to be a highly developed art and calls for considerable skill in
the making as well as acuteness in interpretation.

Footnote 1090:

As in dances of the Greeks, now felt to be a lost art. On this matter
of gesture and signs, see an excellent book by Sittl, _Die Gebärden
der Griechen und Römer_, Leipzig, 1890; his accounts of the attempt
“die Völker durch die Zeichensprache zu verbrüdern,” with reference to
Leibnitz and others; of orgiastic ecstasies; and, of course, the study
of Greek gesture in art and poetry, are all instructive. For primitive
relations, Darwin’s book _On the Expressions of Emotions_, etc., 1872,
is still main authority. Gestures, like sounds, are either instinctive
or called out by the will; and any study of progress in the dramatic
art must concern itself with these fundamental elements of acting.

Footnote 1091:

It would be useless to attempt a bibliography of this subject. A. W.
Schlegel’s historical account of the drama and its relations to epic
and lyric is still useful. See especially _Vorles._, I. 124; II. 317,
321, 325. Eugen Wolff’s return to the priority of epic,—_Prolegomena_,
etc., p. 10; “Vorstudien zur Poetik,” _Zst. f. vgl. Litt._, VI.
425,—fails to satisfy the student of ethnological evidence; like most
writers from the æsthetic point of view, Wolff neglects to study the
poetry of the throng, the choral, the dance. Barring this same fault,
there is considerable truth in the view of Burdach (letter to Scherer,
in the latter’s _Poetik_, pp. 296 f.), that epic and drama are wrongly
taken as extreme antithesis in poetry, whereas lyric and drama are
really “die beiden Urphänomene.” Little profit for the historical
student of poetry is to be found in essays like Veit Valentin’s
“Poetische Gattungen,” in _Zst. f. vgl. Litt._, N. F., V. 35 ff.

Footnote 1092:

See Blankenburg’s excellent article on the ballet in his _Zusätze_, I.
154 ff. La Motte, in his ballet of _Europe Galante_, 1697, made the
ballet an object in itself and in its own action; here “entspringt
Tanz und Gesang aus der eigenen Gemüthsstimmung der handelnden
Personen.” This is communal revival.

Footnote 1093:

That is, ὄψις.

Footnote 1094:

“Daudet me dit ... ‘Je crois décidément avoir trouvé la formule; le
livre c’est pour l’individu, le théâtre c’est pour la foule.’”
_Journal des Goncourt_, VIII. (30 Jan., 1890), 129.

Footnote 1095:

_Vorlesungen_, Stuttgart, 1884, I. 329 ff., 342, 344 ff.

Footnote 1096:

_Ibid._, III. 110.

Footnote 1097:

See the present author’s article on “Mythology” in the new edition of
Johnson’s _Cyclopædia_.

Footnote 1098:

A dozen years ago or more, a professor lecturing on this subject in a
German university, after giving all the myths about a certain goddess,
spoke somewhat as follows: “Gentlemen, this goddess is either a star
or the early summer grass, I am not certain which. I am studying the
matter carefully, and hope soon to reach a positive conclusion.”

Footnote 1099:

Compare Lucretius, dealing now lovingly with the Venus of myth—_alma
Venus_, the beloved of Rome’s own god—and now, a few lines below,
scornfully, passionately, with the cruel rites of the worship of Diana
and the sacrifice of Iphigenia at her shrine: “_illa_ Religio,” he
says, with a touch almost of blasphemy.

Footnote 1100:

See the chapters on animism and mythology in Tylor’s _Primitive
Culture_. A. W. Schlegel was on this trail, but let himself be
befogged by Schelling’s philosophy. See the _Vorlesungen_, I. 329,
337.

Footnote 1101:

See his _Germanische Mythen_.

Footnote 1102:

_Mythologische Forschungen_ (_Quellen u. Forschungen_, No. 51,
Strassburg, 1884), Vorrede, p. xxv; the lesson came from Tylor’s book
which Müllenhoff had set Mannhardt reading. This letter was written in
1876. See also Müllenhoff’s own definition of mythology in his
_Deutsche Alterthumskunde_, V. 1, 157.

Footnote 1103:

_Cultur d. Ren. in Ital._, I. 288.

Footnote 1104:

_Zeitschrift f. Gymnasialwesen_, Berlin, Nov., 1861, p. 837.

Footnote 1105:

Mr. Tylor lets animism of this sort have too free a play among quite
primitive men.

Footnote 1106:

Too much stress is laid by some writers on primitive studies of death,
and of dreams about the dead, as productive of myth. Modern peasants,
like savages, often show a heavy and stupid indifference in the
presence of death; and its problem, though it doubtless suggested a
cult of spirits, was far less insistent with early man than the
problem of life. Before he thus worked out a world of dead spirits, he
knew by instinctive, really unconscious inference, a world of living
spirits, not of his own breed, but vaster, subtler, in those
operations of nature which struck into his actual life, interfered
with it, or conspicuously helped it.

Footnote 1107:

“_It_ hurts me; _it_ makes me cry,” says the child, pointing to the
seat of affliction; this “it” corresponds with savage and primitive
animism. It is not personification, as one is often told. Human beings
do not crawl into other human beings and hurt them; not he or she, but
“it” hurts. One remembers the remark of J. Grimm, that the neuter
gender means not lack of sex, but the undeveloped, initial stage.
_Deutsche Grammatik_, III. 315.

Footnote 1108:

Posnett, _Comparative Literature_, pp. 162 ff. The idea, however, is
by no means as new as Posnett thinks it to be.

Footnote 1109:

See above, p. 380.

Footnote 1110:

Vignoli, in his _Myth and Science_, notes that a dog growls or bites
at a stick thrust toward him, a kind of animism; although as Spencer
said,—with quite unwarrantable inference in the denial of nature-myths
among primitive men,—a dog takes no notice of ordinary natural doings,
swaying boughs, sunrise, and all the rest.

Footnote 1111:

Max Müller’s “disease of language” as source of myth is absurd; the
myth does not wait for the misunderstanding of a metaphor, but begins
with the metaphor and lives with its life,—both being, of course,
unconscious at the start.

Footnote 1112:

A child who saw a flash of lightning once said, “God is winking at
me”; and the phrase was seized upon as a fine illustration of
primitive myth-making. But the child had been presented, by the whole
process of human culture and thought, with at least two-thirds of this
“myth,”—the idea of God, of a distinct, supreme personality, and the
reference to God of whatever goes on in the sky.

Footnote 1113:

See E. H. Meyer, _Indogerm. Mythen_, Berlin, 1883, I. 87.

Footnote 1114:

In the reaction from ideas of a golden age one must not go too far,
and “call names” which now mean vice, degeneration, rottenness. It is
possible that even earliest myth touched here and there a chord of
poetry as we now know poetry, and appealed to that constant element
which belongs to our humanity and not to our history.

Footnote 1115:

Or, of course, a tradition; so Prometheus and the origin of fire may
account for the stealing of fire from some neighbouring tribe. See
Gruppe, _Griechische Culte and Mythen_, p. 206.

Footnote 1116:

See above, p. 236.

Footnote 1117:

Comparetti, _Kalewala_, pp. 154 f., in his excellent remarks on
popular myth and popular poetry, has left his analysis incomplete by
leaving throng-poetry quite out of the account.

Footnote 1118:

Grimm’s chapter on gender in the third volume of his _Grammar_ remains
the masterpiece of investigation in this subject; but his theory has
been attacked by Brugmann. See, too, President Wheeler, “Origin of
Grammatical Gender,” _Journal Germanic Philology_, II. 528 ff. Grimm
defines gender, III. 346, “eine in der phantasie der menschlichen
Sprache entsprungene ausdehnung des natürlichen auf alle und jede
gegenstände.”

Footnote 1119:

_Ibid._, III. 354.

Footnote 1120:

Grimm says the Englishman calls “she” whatever is dear to him—the
sailor his ship, the miller his mill; III. 546.

Footnote 1121:

_Reflexions Critiques_, ed. 1770, I. 298. “La Poësie du style fait la
plus grande différence qui soit entre les vers et la prose.... Les
images et les figures doivent être encore plus fréquentes dans la
plupart des genres de la Poësie, que dans les discours oratoires....
C’est donc la Poësie du style qui fait le Poëte, plutôt que la rime et
la césure.... Cette Partie de la Poësie la plus importante.” See also
p. 312, in § xxxv.

Footnote 1122:

_Essay on Poetry with Reference to Aristotle’s Poetics_, ed. Cook, p.
11.

Footnote 1123:

Some representative definitions of this sort are collected and quoted
by Dr. Gertrude Buck in an interesting paper, _The Metaphor: a Study
on the Psychology of Rhetoric_, being No. 5 of the “Contributions to
Rhetorical Theory,” edited by Professor Scott, Ann Arbor,—no date, but
about 1899,—p. 40.

Footnote 1124:

_Poetik_, p. 87 f. See also p. 83. On p. 262 he opens, however, a
dangerous door for the interests of this theory.

Footnote 1125:

_Altgermanische Poesie_, p. 20.

Footnote 1126:

Modern writers on æsthetics make the same error: so Biese, “Das
Metaphorische in der dichterischen Phantasie,” _Zst. f. vgl. Lit._, N.
F. II. 320, makes the primitive process from simile to metaphor.

Footnote 1127:

On pp. 90 ff.

Footnote 1128:

St. Evremond thinks them distracting; in any case he will banish such
things from drama. _Œuvres Meslées_, London, Tonson, 1709, III. 72 f.,
in an essay, “Sur les poëmes des Anciens.”

Footnote 1129:

See above, p. 190.

Footnote 1130:

It is the case with later reaches of poetry. Chaucer, for example,
offers very few figures or metaphors as compared with later poets; “no
other author in our tongue,” says Professor Lounsbury, _Stud._, III.
441, “has clung so persistently to the language of common life.”

Footnote 1131:

_The Anglo-Saxon Metaphor_, Halle, 1881. The theory of the metaphor
there advanced was due to the study of poetical material alone, and
had no help from psychology. The latter, however, is quite favourable
to the theory of poetic evolution as stated in the text. See the
quotations from Taine and others in the essay of Dr. Buck. The false
conclusions of Heinzel in regard to simile and metaphor are of little
moment compared with the general value of the essay which contains
them: _Ueber den Stil der altgermanischen Poesie_, Strassburg, Q. F.,
1875, a stimulating piece of work.

Footnote 1132:

_Modern Language Notes_, I. 83.

Footnote 1133:

Logically Gerber is right, _Die Sprache als Kunst_, I. 256, in putting
interjections at one end of the linguistic process and metaphor at the
other; but chronologically, historically, genetically, the assumption
fails to hold.

Footnote 1134:

The subject is too wide for further treatment, and can be regarded
here only in its relations to the beginnings of poetry. See, however,
for the early stages of a metaphor, J. Grimm’s essay on “Die Fünf
Sinne,” _Kleinere Schriften_, VII. 193 ff.; and F. Bechtel, _Ueber die
Bezeichnungen der sinnlichen Wahrnehmungen in den indogerm Sprachen_,
Weimar, 1879, where he shows how the idea of “bright” underlies so
many of our words,—“glad,” for instance, which even in Anglo-Saxon
meant “gleaming.” See, too, in this book the confusion, or
flexibility, of words for the “bright” and the “loud,” seeing and
hearing; also J. Grimm, “Die Wörter des Leuchtens und Brennens,” _Kl.
Schr._, VIII. 263 ff.

Footnote 1135:

Allegory, now a huge projection of metaphor from the style into the
subject-matter, is a consistent series of personifications not unlike
the later stages of myth; in fact, late myth is allegory.

Footnote 1136:

On the tendency of rhythm and music to suggest images and stir the
powers of language, see the wild but interesting words of Nietzsche,
_Geburt d. Tragödie_, p. 48.

Footnote 1137:

See above, p. 211.

Footnote 1138:

Joshua Poole, _English Parnassus_, London, 1677, like Italians just
before him, and like Vinesauf and others of earlier time, has an array
of kennings whence the poet may pick and choose. Abel, for example
(pp. 221 ff.), you may call “death’s first fruit,” or “death’s
handsel.” Then there are “forms of invocating Muses” (p. 630),
followed, alas, by “forms of concluding letters”—in prose.

Footnote 1139:

“The language of the age,” wrote Gray to West, April, 1742, “is never
the language of poetry.”

Footnote 1140:

Kennings often read like riddles: so in Finnish, “contents of
Wainamoinen’s milk-bowl,”—the sunshine. See, moreover, Scherer,
_Geschichte d. deutsch. Lit._, pp. 7, 15; and R. M. Meyer, _Altgerm.
Poesie_, p. 160.

Footnote 1141:

In this sketch of differentiation in poetic style only outlines are
essayed. The subject is uncommonly attractive, and a book on the
history of metaphor would be welcomed by all students of style.
Nothing has been said here of symbolic metaphor from animals and the
like. See Brinkmann’s study of “Thierbilder in der Sprache,” _Die
Metaphern_, Bd. I. Bonn, 1878. His researches in German, English,
French, Spanish, Italian, Latin, Greek, should be extended to half
civilized and savage conditions, and should take a historical and
genetic range. Of course, the æsthetic side of this whole subject is
treated in Gerber’s well known book, quoted several times on preceding
pages, _Die Sprache als Kunst_.

Footnote 1142:

It is noteworthy that Aristotle excludes improvisation from poetry;
and in modern times Gerber (_Die Sprache als Kunst_) finds this rude
kind of verse so opposed to his definition of poetry (“die Kunst des
Gedankens,” _ibid._, I. 50; “enthusiasm plus deliberation,” I. 77),
that he too rules it out, and says it belongs simply to “the art of
language.” It is not well to drag such a ball-and-chain by way of
definition when one is dealing with primitive poetry.

Footnote 1143:

See above, p. 215. There is a lively if exaggerated account of the
rhapsode in Blackwell’s _Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer_,
pp. 104 ff. Limits already transgressed forbid the author to add any
material on the minstrel in his relations to the making of poetry. See
a brief account, with a few references, in _Old English Ballads_, pp.
310 ff. Further, see Piper, _Spielmannsdichtung_ (Vol. 2 of the
_Deutsche National-Litteratur_); Scherer, _Gesch. d. deutsch. Dichtung
im 11 u. 12 Jhrh._ (_Quellen. u. Forschungen_, XII.); Wilmanns,
_Walther v. d. Vogelweide_, especially pp. 39 ff.; the general account
in Axel Olrik’s _Middelalderens Vandrende Spillemaend_ (_Opuscula
Philologica_), Copenhagen, 1887; Freymond, _Jongleurs und Menestrels_,
Halle, 1883 (for the Romance side of the question); and portions of
many other works, such as Jusserand, _Théatre en Angleterre_, p. 23,
note; F. Vogt, _Salman und Morolf_, pp. cxxiii f.; notes here and
there on Widsith and Déor, the earliest types of English minstrel; and
so on.

Footnote 1144:

There were pedants before paper, however, in the days of great
mnemonic feats. See Max Müller, in the _Nineteenth Century_, November,
1899, pp. 798 ff.

Footnote 1145:

This evolution of the solitary and deliberate poet has been outlined
in Chap. IV.

Footnote 1146:

Burckhardt, _Ren._, I. 172. See also p. 250.

Footnote 1147:

_Della Storia e della Ragione d’ogni Poesia_, Vol. I., Bologna, 1739,
pp. 155 ff.

Footnote 1148:

“Tutta volta bisogna ancor confessare, che questo fu il primo genere
di Poesia, che fosse al Mondo.” There is a long account of
improvisation in Crescimbeni, _L’Istoria della Volgar Poesia_, Venice,
1731 (written in 1697), pp. 219 ff. An old and very interesting
_gradus ad Parnassum_ is Ruscelli, _Del Modo di Comporre in Versi
nella Lingua Italiana_, Venice, 1582 (a new edition), “nel quale va
compreso un pieno ordinatissimo Rimario,” and there are directions for
using the voice both for prose and for verse. The seventh chapter is
on the “stanze d’ottava Rima,” and treats of improvisation, mentioning
even an infant phenomenon in this art (“essendo ancor fanciullo ...
non arrivava ai sedici anni”), who made verses off-hand on any subject
which was given to him.

Footnote 1149:

From two books, one Italian, _Saggi di Poesie parte dette all’
improvviso e parte scritte dal Cavaliere Perfetti patrizio Sanese ed
insigne Poeta estemporaneo coronato di laurea in Campidoglio_ ... dal
Dottor Domenico Cianfogni, 2 vols., Florence, 1748 (Vol. II. has the
account of the crowning); and a Latin pamphlet of 56 pp., _Josephi
Mariani Parthenii S. J. de Vita et Studiis Bernadini Perfetti Senensis
Poetae Laureati_, Rome, 1771. They are interesting in many ways.

Footnote 1150:

Latin, xix.

Footnote 1151:

The pious father tells elsewhere of mitigating contrivances: “Frigida
inter canendum uti solebat, ad fauces nimirum recreandas et ad nimium
fervorem, quo incendebatur, restringuendum!”

Footnote 1152:

Along with Perfetti’s moribund art of individual improvisation dies as
well the improvised flyting, even in its more complicated and artistic
phases. Through sundry references made above (pp. 208, note, 325, 416
f.) in regard to the interlaced stanzas of ballad and song. I have
come into a bit of unintentional and quite explicable confusion. These
_serranas_ were called artificial, and yet were cited in the proof of
communal origins. Artistic and even artificial these _serranas_
undoubtedly become; and yet so does the refrain. They are very common;
as Professor Lang points out in his _Liederbuch des Königs Denis von
Portugal_, Halle, 1894, pp. xlvii, lxiii, they make “die Norm des
altportugiesischen Kunstgedichtes,” and are found alike in songs of
love and in the various kinds of flyting. Here, in the public
song-duel, one crosses into communal territory; and the _serranas_ go
back to that rivalry of variation based upon a refrain or a repeated
traditional verse.

Footnote 1153:

See above, p. 349.

Footnote 1154:

I regret that all references to Bücher’s _Arbeit und Rhythmus_ have
been made from the first edition, and not from the second, which came
to my hands after the foregoing chapters were printed. In bulk the
book has more than doubled, increase lying mainly in new songs and
refrains of labour, particularly of _Bittarbeit_ and _Frohnarbeit_.
Neither this new edition, however, nor the new edition of Bücher’s
_Entstehung der Volkswirthschaft_ (see my note above, p. 107) changes
materially his theory as quoted in defence of communal poetry. Not so
much the priority of play is conceded as the early lack of a definite
boundary between play and work. Again, references have been made above
to Yrjö Hirn’s book, _Förstudier till en Konstfilosofi_; this
material, and much more of the sort, are now to be found in the same
author’s _Origins of Art_, London and New York, 1900. Possibly some
modification, due to the chapter on “Erotic Art,” should be made in
the statements of ethnologists with regard to the lack of this motive
in savage poetry.

Footnote 1155:

The science of poetry has had its share of wild theories meant to
establish “laws” of progress. See Tarde, _Les Lois Sociales_, pp. 24
ff. But the play of collective and individual forces is too evident,
too reasonable, to be classed with Vico’s _Ricorsi_ and with Plato’s
or Bacon’s cycles.

Footnote 1156:

In Chapters III and VII.

Footnote 1157:

See the brilliant description of this epoch in the opening chapter of
Pellissier’s _Mouvement Littéraire au XIXᵉ Siècle_, 5th ed., Paris,
1898.

Footnote 1158:

Notably Bücher, _Entstehung der Volkswirthschaft_,² Tübingen, 1898,
“Der Urzustand.”

Footnote 1159:

See Professor Keasbey, _International Monthly_, April, 1900: “The
Institution of Society.”

Footnote 1160:

_Arbeit u. Rhythmus_, 2nd ed., p. 340.

Footnote 1161:

In dances, of course, as well. To references scattered through the
preceding pages, add Mommsen on the Camenae, _Hist. Rome_, trans.
Dickson, 2d ed. London, 1864, I. 240.

Footnote 1162:

See above, p. 155.

Footnote 1163:

You see me, Lord Bassanio, where I stand ...

—_Merch. Ven._ III. 2.

Footnote 1164:

See above, pp. 140, 155.

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Transcriber’s Notes

Added missing footnote anchor on page 158.

Missing close quote added to “clerk” in footnote on Page 210.

Remains/Remaines of Gentilisme

L’Algérie Traditionelle/or double nn

Added page numbers to “Lithuania, songs of,” in index - they were
missing

a[** à?] celle in first FN on p35

a[** à?] la Rochelle FN p247

_bésoin[**besoin] de réverie[**rêverie]_, p157

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