THE BEGINNINGS OF POETRY

THE

BEGINNINGS OF POETRY

BY

FRANCIS B. GUMMERE

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN HAVERFORD COLLEGE

New York

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd.

1908

All rights reserved

Copyright, 1901,

By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1901. Reprinted

October, 1908.

Norwood Press

J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

I ne have no text of it, as I suppose,

But I shal fynde it in a maner glose.

Canterbury Tales, 1919 f.

PREFACE

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

F. B. G.

9 September, 1901.

CONTENTS

THE BEGINNINGS OF POETRY

THE BEGINNINGS OF POETRY

CHAPTER I
PURPOSE AND METHOD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Say, warriors, why, when arms are sung,

And dwell on every native tongue,

Do thoughts of Death intrude?

Why weep the common lot of all?

Why think that you yourselves may fall,

Pursuing or pursued?

There is more in the same pensive but smooth and elegant vein; and one regrets to learn that this excellent Wanapaska, who would have pleased Chateaubriand, “died suddenly ... a few nights after having sung this song to the translator,”—who, however, unblushingly lived on. But he could be truthful on occasion, this translator, and he tells the truth about two Cherokee songs of friendship which may not have seemed capable of conversion into tender English monody. Here is silly sooth. The songs, one is told, “consist of but one sentence each with a chorus. Nothing of greater length seems to exist among” the Cherokees. “They repeat the song and chorus until they are tired. The words of both were written for me[^[35]] by Mr. Hicks, a Cherokee of the half blood, with his own hand, both original and version.... Neither among the Osages nor the Cherokees could there be found a single poetical or musical sentiment founded on the tender passion between the sexes. Though often asked, they produced no song of love.”[^[36]] The two songs follow,—they have the same chorus and belong together,—with interlinear translation:—

Can, nal, li, èh, ne-was-tu.

A friend you resemble.

Chorus—Yai, ne, noo, way. E, noo, way, hā.

Ti, nai, tau, nā, cla, ne-was-tu.

Brothers I think we are.

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

Death is easy.

To live, what boots it?

Death is peace.

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

Praise no new horse till to-morrow,

No wife till two years are over,

No wife’s brother till the third year,

Praise thyself not while thou livest!

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER II
RHYTHM AS THE ESSENTIAL FACT OF POETRY

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

“What does it all mean, poet?—Well,

Your brains beat into rhythm....”

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

“O Dijon, la fille

Des glorieux ducs,

Qui portes bequille

Dans tes ans caducs,”—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery,

And life unto the bitter in soul?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hold your light, Brudder Robert,—

Hold your light,

Hold your light on Canaan’s shore....

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

Jordan River, I’m bound to go,

Bound to go, bound to go,

Jordan River, I’m bound to go,

And bid ’em fare ye well,

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

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

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

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

per audaces nova dithyrambos

verba devolvit,

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

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

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

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

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

I pitied thee,

Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour

One thing or other: when thou didst not, savage,

Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like

A thing most brutish, I endow’d thy purposes

With words that made them known.

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

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

Absent thee from felicity awhile,

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,—

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

CHAPTER III
THE TWO ELEMENTS IN POETRY

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

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

Natura fieret laudabile carmen, an arte,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER IV
THE DIFFERENCING ELEMENTS OF THE POETRY OF ART

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

A Nant’s, à Nant’s est arrivé,

Saute, blonde, et lève le pied,

Trois beaux navir’s chargés de blé;

Saute, blonde, ma joli’ blonde....

and Béranger sings:—

Une plainte touchante

De ma bouche sortit;

Le bon Dieu me dit, Chante,

Chante, pauvre petit!

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

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

Let clowns get wealth and heirs: when I am gone ...

If I a poem leave, that poem is my son.

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

Sens-tu, par cette instinct vague et plein de douceur,

Qui révèle toujours une sœur à la sœur,

Qu’à cette heure où s’endort la soirée expirante,[^[305]]

Une âme est près de toi, non moins que toi vibrante,

Qui bien souvent aussi jette un bruit solennel,

Et se plaint dans l’amour comme toi dans le ciel?

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

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

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

Dic ubi Salomon, olim tam nobilis?

Vel ubi Samson est, dux invincibilis?

Vel pulcher Absolon, vultu mirabilis?

Vel dulcis Jonathas, multum amabilis?

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

Ast ubi nix vetus, tam effusibilis?

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

Winter wakens all my care!

Now these trees are waxing bare,

Oft I sigh and mourn full “sair,”

When it cometh in my thought

Of this earthly joy, how it all goeth to naught.[^[316]]

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

Sous le tombeau tout Ronsard n’ira pas,—

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

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

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

Up spake the son on the nourice’s knee,

“Gin I live to be a man, revenged I’ll be;”

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

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

On the shore

Of the wide world I stand alone and think.

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

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

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

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

Is this the face, and these the finding eyes?

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

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

CHAPTER V
THE DIFFERENCING ELEMENTS OF COMMUNAL POETRY

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

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

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

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

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

Thou art mine, I am thine,

Of that right certain be!

Locked thou art within my heart,

And I have lost the key:

There must thou ever be!

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

A l’entrada del tems clar,—eya,

per joja recomensar,—eya,

e per jelos irritar,—eya,

vol la regina mostrar

qu’el’ est si amoroza.

Alavi’ alavia, jelos,

laissaz nos, laissaz nos,

ballar entre nos, entre nos.

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

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

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

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

This song was made on the eve of Lady Day after supper.

It was made by twelve men dancing on the knoll by the chapel.

Three are ragpickers; seven sow the rye; two are millers.

And so it is made, O folk, so it is made, and so it is made, this song!

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

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

He that made this songe full good,

Came of the northe and of the sothern blode,

And somewhat kyne to Robyn Hood,—

Yit all we be nat soo.

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

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

There came a bird out o’ a bush

On water for to dine,

And sighing sair, says the king’s daughter,

“O wae’s this heart of mine,”—

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

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

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

There were three ladies lived in a bower,

Eh vow bonnie,[^[430]]

And they went out to pull a flower

On the bonnie banks o’ Fordie.[^[430]]

They hadna pu’ed a flower but ane,

When up started to them a banisht man.

He’s taen the first sister by the hand,

And he’s turned her round and made her stand.

“It’s whether will ye be a rank robber’s wife,

Or will ye die by my wee pen-knife?”

“It’s I’ll not be a rank robber’s wife,

But I’ll rather die by your wee pen-knife.”

He’s killed this may,[^[431]] and he’s laid her by,

For to bear the red rose company.

He’s taken the second ane by the hand,

And he’s turned her round, and made her stand.

“It’s whether will ye be a rank robber’s wife,

Or will ye die by my wee pen-knife?”

“I’ll not be a rank robber’s wife,

But I’ll rather die by your wee pen-knife.”

He’s killed this may, and he’s laid her by,

For to bear the red rose company.

He’s taken the youngest ane by the hand,

And he’s turned her round, and made her stand.

Says, “Will ye be a rank robber’s wife,

Or will ye die by my wee pen-knife?”

“I’ll not be a rank robber’s wife,

Nor will I die by your wee pen-knife.

“For I hae a brother in this wood,

And gin ye kill me, it’s he’ll kill thee.”

“What’s thy brother’s name? Come tell to me.”—

“My brother’s name is Baby Lon.”

“O sister, sister, what have I done!

O have I done this ill to thee!

“O since I’ve done this evil deed,

Good sall never be seen o[^[432]] me.”

He’s taken out his wee pen-knife,