The Beginnings of Poetry

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of thinking has made itself master of poetry, particularly of the lyric; while the singing of a poem is going fast out of date.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:—

140and Béranger sings:—

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 141of 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:—

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, 142as 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 143individual 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:—

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 145rage 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 146as 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 147not 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 148to 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:—

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 149pathos: But where are the snows of yester year? The Latin simply failed to add:—

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 150genius 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:—

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:—

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, 151Dunbar’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] 152In 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 153this 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 154spirit 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 155hymn. 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 156objective 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,—

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 157life; 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:—

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 158Bacon’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 159against 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 160of 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 161thought, 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 162only 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:—

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 164in 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 165romanticism 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 166phrase 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 167are 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 168found 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 169speak 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 170a 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 171and 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 172poetry 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 173overwhelmed 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 174communal 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]—

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]—

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 175traditional 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.

176What, 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] 177Even 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 178such 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 179have 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 180the 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. 181In 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, 182a 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 183for 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:—

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 184mind,^[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, 185in 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 186early 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 187such 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]—

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 188notes 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 189in 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 190of 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 191one 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, 192but 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 193not 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:—

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” 194is 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 195so 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:—

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 198of 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] 199about 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 200songs 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 201as 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 202so 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.

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,-

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:—

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]—

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 205highest 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, 206in 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:—

207and it grows worse than tiresome in Gabriel Harvey’s variation of the ubi sunt theme:—

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]—

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]—

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 208head, but also songs of the country folk buzzing in his ears; and it is no classical tone, despite the tongue, that sounds in his—

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

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 209of 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:—

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 210by preceding examples, and by the lack of variation in typical verses such as this, the opening of a pretty dance-song:^[473]—

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:—

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

turns at the end to—

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:—

may have had its counterpart in far older and far ruder verse of the throng. If the earliest form of poetry was the 211iterated 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 212working 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. 213In 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:—

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:—

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:—

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

215Improvised 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:—

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 216trace 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] 217Of 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 218stole 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 219danced 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, 220regardless 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 221not 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 222the 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]—

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 223a 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 224place 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 225to 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:—

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 226in 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:—

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 227are 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:—

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 228always 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 229the 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 230wife 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 231heart; 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 232moans, 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:—

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,—

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:—

People said,” adds Marcaggi, “that she was following the custom of a former age, and that she lacked proper reserve.”^[541] 233This 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 234they 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 235communal 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]—

Then the first stanza is repeated. The choral possibilities of this cry are clear enough, and sung to the dance 236about 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:—

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 237refrain 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]—

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, 238come 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 239grief 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”; 240but 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, 241extempore 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 242“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 243left 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] 244after 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 245with 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]—

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; 246his 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, 247and 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—

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 248sang, “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, 249and 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, 250that 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 251voice 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,—

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 252rhythm 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

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

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.” 253The 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 254original “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,—

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]—

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 255will 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]—

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

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 256certain 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 257repetition 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] 258Learned 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 259story 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 260song 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:—

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]—

The Hebrew psalms^[626] show very clearly a more or less artistic use of the refrain sung under congregational and therefore 262to 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 263to 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:—

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, 264strangely 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 265perpetually 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—

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

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 266of 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 267every 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; 268but 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 269to 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:

270but 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. 271Originally 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 272it 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 273could 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:—

and not stopping here, undertakes to set down the “chorus” of guns heavy and light as a spirited sea-fight begins. In 274the old play Common Conditions occurs a pirates’ song, the stanzas in quatrains, with a jolly refrain or chorus:—

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:—

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:—

so that two refrains are confused in the laureate’s account, and the exquisite reason, with a Lord Mayor in the case, is no 275more 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:—

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]

276Coming 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:—

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 277imitated the measure of beating upon iron, and was a mere lyrical excuse for the introduction of Old Clem’s respected name”:—

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

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:—

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?—

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:—

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

279Bell^[682] records what seems to be a real refrain of the spinning-wheel in the Greenside Wakes Song:—

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:—

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:—

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 281great black bowl with a posset in it, come before him; they come in singing:—

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:—

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 282feat when one considers the case. The songs, with an interval between, would then run as follows:—

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 283community 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,—

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 284is 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:—

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:—

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 285name 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, 286have 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 287of 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—

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 288of 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:—

with the refrain for conclusion,—

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 289satire, 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 290men 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 291these 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. 292The 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:—

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 293Pfannenschmid 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—

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 294sickles 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,

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, 295survivals, 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:—

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:—

with another repetition of the line.^[733] The men who sang this chorus were still in thrall to an old custom at the barley 296harvest. On putting up the last sheaf, which is called the craw, or crow sheaf, the man who has it cries out,—

Another asks,—

And the answer comes,—

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 297into 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:—

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 298Mecklenburg, 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:—

299There 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 300their 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,—

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

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 301worship 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]—

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

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.

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

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”—

Most stubborn, of course, is this converted or Christian survival, and almost as stubborn the custom of the village and 303of 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! 304and 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, 3051790, 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:—

306The 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:—

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]—

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:—

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—

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 308of 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]—

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 309breaks 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 310century 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:—

“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:—

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]

311Older 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.

312Lery 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 313egg,” 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:—

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 315stage 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 316the 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]

317Here 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—

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]—

distorted into—

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 318for 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 319comes 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, 320the 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:—

321The 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:—

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; 322unless 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—

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—

and Sensual Desire replies:—

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

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 323“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]—

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]—

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:—

325Here 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:—

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, 326despite 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:—

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; 327Faroe 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 328whole 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 329due 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 330of 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 331given 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 332their 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.”

333Indians 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 334New 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 335and 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:—

“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 336the 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 337records 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 338been 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:—

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 339search 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; 340but 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 341his 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] 342to 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,—

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 343banished 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 344which 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; 345and 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, 346resulting 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 348in 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 349social 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 350essay 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 351understands 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.

352No 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 353world 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 354English; 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 355not 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 356of 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 357is, 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, 358“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 359mass, 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 360Dr. 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, 361by 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 362come 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, 363until 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 364speech 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, 365and 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 366of 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 367imitated 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 368as 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 369pain 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,” 370and 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 371it 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 372himself 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 373ecstasy 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 374swayed 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, 375as 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 376this 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 377recognize, 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 378more 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 379the 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 380stir 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 381three 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]

382It is to be conceded that a superficial view reverses this order of progress. What does one meet oftener in history and song,—

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 383minds. 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 384check 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 385are 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 386expressed 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 387process, 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 388name 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. 389Communal 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 391isolated 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 392his 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 393early 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 394and 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 395every 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.

396Improvisation 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 397song 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 398his 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 399earliest 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 400and 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 401made 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 402amatorious 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:—

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

403with 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 404improvised 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 405yields, 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 406discussions^[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:—

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 407detaches 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, 408however, 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]—

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

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

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]—

or the mood of Anteros:—

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:—

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:—

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

So, too, the rude compliment:—

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:—

411Or with a little pressure on the form, with hint of art, this from Steiermark:^[1030]—

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]—

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:—

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

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:—

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]—

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

Or this:—

413Similarly 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”:—

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]—

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

and the ballad goes on with a dialogue between the lover and his dead sweetheart.^[1040] On the other hand, amœbean 414forms 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:—

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:—

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?

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]

417Gustav 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.

“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 418of 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 419of 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]—

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 420prevailing 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 421detached 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:—

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,—

422This 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 423of 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 424among 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 425even 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, 426into 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; 427Von 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:—

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 428offered 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 429own 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 430consideration^[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 431uttered 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, 432with 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 433true 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 434excess 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 435these 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 436every 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 437accurate 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. 438Schwartz, 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 439and 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 440unconscious, 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 441poetry 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 442early 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 443invented 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, 444danced 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.

445Myth 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 446could 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, 447and 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 448invention,—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 449writer 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 450conditions 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 451is 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 452have 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:—

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, 454this 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 455crowd. 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] 456this, 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 457song. 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.

458This 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 459become 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 460can 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 461not 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 462then 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 463system. 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, 464its 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 465swinging 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 466differences 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 467this 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 468in 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 469poet 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 470close, 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:—

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 471echoes 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 472Juliet; 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 473wanderers 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

• A
• 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.
• B
• 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.
• 476Borrowing 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.
• C
• 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.
• D
• 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.
• 477D’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.
• E
• 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.
• F
• 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.
• G
• 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.
• 478Grasserie, 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.
• H
• 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
• “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.
• J
• 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.
• 479Jonson, Ben, 34, 169, 316.
• Junod, 105.
• K
• 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.
• L
• 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.
• M
• 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.
• 480Monboddo, 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.
• N
• 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.
• O
• Objective, 139 f., 158.
• Ontogenesis, 9 ff.
• Opera, 424, 431.
• Oratory, 79 f.
• Ortoli, 231 f., 279.
• Overbury, 277, 291.
• P
• 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.
• 481Psychology, 364 ff., 374 f., 8 ff., 81.
• Pulci, 455.
• Pulszky, 26, 383.
• Q
• Quadrio, 43, 455.
• Quatrains (see Schnaderhüpfl), 213, 418.
• R
• 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.
• S
• 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.
• 482Shelley, 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.
• T
• 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.
• U
• Ubi Sunt, 148 ff.
• Uhland, 220, 281, 298, 306, 338, 343, 415, 436.
• Usener, 69, 84, 213, 350, 421, 423.
• V
• 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.
• 483W
• 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.
• X
• Xenophon, 34, 337.
• Z
• Zell, 198, 260, 271, 283, 404.