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PURPOSE AND METHOD

PAGE

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

RHYTHM AS THE ESSENTIAL FACT OF POETRY

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

THE TWO ELEMENTS IN POETRY

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

THE DIFFERENCING ELEMENTS OF THE POETRY OF ART

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

THE DIFFERENCING ELEMENTS OF COMMUNAL POETRY

SCIENCE AND COMMUNAL POETRY

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

THE EARLIEST DIFFERENTIATIONS OF POETRY

THE TRIUMPH OF THE ARTIST

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

THE BEGINNINGS OF POETRY

THE BEGINNINGS OF POETRY

PURPOSE AND METHOD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RHYTHM AS THE ESSENTIAL FACT OF POETRY

"What does it all mean, poet?--Well, Your brains beat into rhythm...."

"O Dijon, la fille Des glorieux ducs, Qui portes bequille Dans tes ans caducs,"--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hold your light, Brudder Robert,-- Hold your light, Hold your light on Canaan's shore....

For Robert, another name would be given, then another, and so on for half an hour. This seemed to Colonel Higginson "the simplest primitive type of 'spiritual.'" Next in favour was:--

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

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

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

per audaces nova dithyrambos verba devolvit,

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

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

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

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

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

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