THE BEGINNINGS OF POETRY
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[Illustration: Macmillan logo]
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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_
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COPYRIGHT, 1901,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
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Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1901. Reprinted
October, 1908.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
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I ne have no text of it, as I suppose,
But I shal fynde it in a maner glose.
CANTERBURY TALES, 1919 f.
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PREFACE
The opening pages of this book contain, so one may hope, an adequate
answer to the objections of those who may have been led by its title to
expect a more detailed treatment of poetic origins and a closer study of
such questions as the early forms of rhythm, the beginnings of national
literatures, and the actual history of lyric, epic, and drama. Not these
problems have been undertaken, interesting and important as they are,
but rather the rise of poetry as a social institution; whether or not a
definite account of this process has been obtained must be left for the
reader to judge.
F. B. G.
9 SEPTEMBER, 1901.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PURPOSE AND METHOD
PAGE
Object of the book. Historical and comparative treatment.
Sources of help. Modern scientific aids. Limitations to their
value. The evidence of poetry itself. The curve of evolution 1
CHAPTER II
RHYTHM AS THE ESSENTIAL FACT OF POETRY
Definitions of poetry. The line between poetry and prose.
Summary of the dispute. Rhythm fundamental and essential in
poetry. Proofs from ethnology, psychology, and the history of
poetry itself 30
CHAPTER III
THE TWO ELEMENTS IN POETRY
The dualism in its various forms. Poetry of nature and of art.
Poetry of the people. Romantic and rationalistic theories. The
real dualism 116
CHAPTER IV
THE DIFFERENCING ELEMENTS OF THE POETRY OF ART
Communal and individual. Mediæval and modern conditions.
Evolution of sentimental lyric. Influence of Christianity.
Reactions. Modern objective poetry. Humour 139
CHAPTER V
THE DIFFERENCING ELEMENTS OF COMMUNAL POETRY
The making of communal poetry a closed account. Elements of the
European ballad. Who made it. The “I” of ballads. Style of
ballads. Incremental repetition. Variation. Siberian songs.
Bridal songs. The _vocero_ and kindred songs of mourning. The
refrain. Refrains and songs of labour. Harvest-home.
Processions. Flytings. Festal refrains. The dance 163
CHAPTER VI
SCIENCE AND COMMUNAL POETRY
Science and theories of poetic origins. Invention and imitation.
Comparative literature and the art of borrowing. The war
against instinct. Instinct not set aside. The dualism in
poetry. Greek drama. Homogeneity of savages and of primitive
men 347
CHAPTER VII
THE EARLIEST DIFFERENTIATIONS OF POETRY
The poet. Improvisation in a throng. A study of the
_schnaderhüpfl_. Stanzas and poems. Differentiation of poetry.
Lyric, drama, and epic. Myths. Poetic style 390
CHAPTER VIII
THE TRIUMPH OF THE ARTIST
Improvisation revived. Its fate. The two forces in poetry. Past
and present 453
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THE BEGINNINGS OF POETRY
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THE BEGINNINGS OF POETRY
CHAPTER I
PURPOSE AND METHOD
It is the object of the following pages neither to defend poetry nor to
account for it, but simply to study it as a social institution.
Questions of its importance, of the place which it has held, or ought to
have held, in the esteem of men, and of the part which it is yet to
play, are interesting but not vital to one who is bent upon the
investigation of it as an element in human life. A defence is doubtless
needed now and then by way of answer to the pessimist like Peacock, or
to the moralist, the founder of states ideal or real, like Plato and
Mahomet. Scattered about the Koran are hints that verse-making folk,
like the shepherd’s turncock, are booked for an unpleasant future,
although it is well known that the prophet in earlier days had been very
fond of poetry; while Plato himself, if one may believe his editors,
began as a poet, but took to prose because the older art was declining;
with the change he turned puritan as well, and saw no room for poets in
his ideal state. Attacks of this sort, however, are as old as poetry
itself, which, like “the service, sir,” has been going to the dogs time
out of mind, and very early formed the habit of looking back to better
days. For mediæval relations these remembered arguments of Plato, backed
by a band of Christian writers, had put the art to its shifts; but
Aristotle’s fragment[1] served the renaissance as adequate answer, and
it is interesting to note that the champion of poetry in Aristotle long
outlived the philosopher.[2] Petrarch, taking the laurel, was moved to
defend poetry against her foes, and yet found, as critics find now, that
she had come by some of her worst wounds at the hands of her votaries;
for who, in any age, as Goethe asked and answered in his _Divan_, “Who
is driving poetry off the face of the earth?—The poets.” Certainly not
the philosophers and men of science, though that is the common belief.
Lefebvre,[3] in 1697, thought that he had given poetry its mortal blow
when he attacked it in the name of morals and of science; and his
onslaught is worth the notice if only to show how little Renan and
others urge to-day which has not been urged at any time since Petrarch.
Selden,[4] Newton, Bentham, have been among the scoffers; so, too,
Pascal. As to Newton, “A friend once said to him, ‘Sir Isaac, what is
your opinion of poetry?’ His answer was, ‘I’ll tell you that of Barrow;
he said that poetry was a kind of ingenious nonsense.’”[5] All this is
no more than disrespectful allusion to the equator, jocose moments of
the learned; yet it is quoted very seriously by those who think to
preach a funeral sermon over the poetic art. So that when Renan expects
to see poetry swallowed up by science, and when it is said that Goethe,
born a century later, would throw poetry to the winds and give full play
to his scientific genius, that Voltaire would live altogether for
mathematics, and that Shakspere himself, “the great psychologist,” would
“leave the drama of humanity for the drama of the world,” abjure wings,
and settle to the collar with psychical research folk and societies for
child-study,—even then the friends of poetry need feel no great alarm;
all this, allowing for conditions of the time, was said long ago, and
has been repeated in the dialect of each generation. As for the past of
poetry, kings have been its nursing fathers and queens its nursing
mothers; and for its future, one may well be content with the words of
the late M. Guyau, a man of scientific training and instincts, who has
looked carefully and temperately at the whole question and concludes[6]
that “poetry will continue to be the natural language of all great and
lasting emotion.”
Vindication apart, there is the art of poetry, the technique, the
Horatian view; and with this treatment of the subject the present work
has as little to do as with defence and praise. From Vida even to
Boileau writers on poetry were mainly concerned to teach the art, and
seemed to assume that every bright boy ought to be trained as a poet.
With this idea went the conception of poetry as sum and substance of
right living and embodiment of all learning, sacred and profane,—witness
not only the famous lines of Milton, but a part of the epitaph which
Boccaccio composed for his own tomb: _studium fuit alma poesis_. J. C.
Scaliger, when that early enthusiasm of the renaissance had begun to
wane, turned from art to science; his son and Casaubon and the rest took
up the work of research and let the art of poetry languish. On this
scientific ground, where, in spite of the overthrow of Aristotelian
authority, in spite of changes in method and a new range of material,
one may still learn much from these pioneers, there are now three ways
by which one can come to poetry from the outside, and regard it not
technically but in the spirit of research: there is the theory of poetic
impulses and processes in general; there is the criticism of poems and
poetry as an objective study; and there are the recording, the
classifying, and the comparing of the poetic product at large. The
present work belongs to this third division, and in its method must keep
mainly within historical and comparative bounds. It is not concerned in
any way with the poetic impulse, or with the poem as object of critical
study; it regards the whole poetic product as a result of human activity
working in a definite field. This must be clearly understood. At the
outset of an attempt to throw some light upon the beginnings of poetry,
it is well to bear in mind that by poetry is meant, not the poetic
impulse, but the product of that impulse, and that by beginnings are
meant the earliest actual appearances of poetry as an element in the
social life of man, and not the origins or ultimate causes, biologically
or psychologically considered, of poetic expression. What the origin of
poetry may have been, and to what causes, however remote, in the body
and life of man must be attributed the earliest conceivable rhythmic
utterance, are questions for a tribunal where metaphysics and psychology
on the one hand, and biology on the other hand, have entered conflicting
claims. As for biology, until one has found the source of life itself,
it is useless to follow brain dissections in an effort to discover the
ultimate origins of poetry. To be sure, psychology has a legitimate
field of inquiry in discussing the source of æsthetic manifestations;[7]
and going deeper into things, it would be pleasant if one could lay hold
of what philosophers call “the germinal power of whatever comes to be,”
the _keimkraft des seienden_; but times are hardly ripe for such a feat.
Even Weismann[8] concedes a “soul,” a capacity not yet explainable, for
appreciating music, and, by implication, poetry. It is better in the
present state of things to assume poetry as an element in human life,
and to come as close as possible to its primitive stages, its actual
beginnings. What these beginnings of poetry were, in what form it first
made a place for itself among human institutions, and over what paths it
wandered during the processes of growth and differentiation even in
prehistoric times, are questions belonging to the answerable part of
that catechism about his own life which man has been making and unmaking
and making again ever since he began to remember and to forecast. We
have here no concern with the perplexing question why æsthetic activity
was first evolved; it is quite another matter when we undertake to learn
how æsthetic activity made itself seen and felt. In brief, to seek the
origins of poetry would be to seek the cause of its existence as a
phenomenon, to hunt that elusive _keimkraft des seienden_; to inquire
into the beginnings of poetry is to seek conditions and not causes.
Nothing, however, is harder than to carry out this simple plan; from a
work on poetry take away both theory and criticism, and what is left? It
is true that since F. Schlegel, a hundred years ago, said[9] of art in
general that its science is its history, historical and comparative
treatment of poetry has come speedily to the fore; but that mystery
which rightly enough clings to a poetic process, the traditions of
sanctity which belong to genius, and the formidable literature of
æsthetics, have all worked together to keep the study of poetry out of
line with the study of other human institutions, and to give it an
unchartered freedom from the control of facts which has done more harm
than good. Consider that touch of futility which vexes the mind when it
sets about discussion of a topic so far from the daily business of life;
consider the great cloud of witnesses who can be summoned from any
library to prove that of all printed silliness nothing reaches quite so
silly a pitch as twaddle about the bards; add, too, that no process is
so difficult to observe and analyze as the making of a poem; and it is
easy to see why writers on poetry are always flying to cover in
psychology and æsthetics or in criticism.[10] Facing the facts of
poetry, a scholar can treat the poetic impulse and keep the facts at
arm’s length, or even quite out of his range. Treating the poetic
product, whether genetically or historically or comparatively, tracing
the evolution of poetry as a whole, for its own laws of growth and
decay, or regarding its place as an institution in human society, he
must hold unbroken commerce with a bewildering mass of material. Hence
the delight which animates to their task the numberless writers of
“thoughts about poetry,” and the dismay with which the historian looks
upon his rough and unwieldy subject. Books beyond the power of any
modern reader to compass have been written on the poetic impulse; while
all the books which treat the poetic product as an element of public
life could be carried in one’s pocket,[11]—and one need be no Schaunard
for the task. Yet the facts of poetry ought to precede the
theory,—facts, moreover, that should be brought into true relations with
the development of social man. A record of actual poetry; then a history
of its beginnings and progress as an achievement of human society; then
an account of it with regard to its origin and exercise as a function of
the individual mind,—such is the process by which there could have been
built up a clear and rational science of poetry, the true poetics. _Dis
aliter visum._ There is a fairly good record of poetry, with gaps due to
chance and neglect, many of which chance and energy may yet combine to
fill. As an achievement of human society, poetry has had scant
attention; and the present work is intended, in however modest and
imperfect performance, to supply material and make an outline for such a
study.
With such an object in view, and in such a spirit, what is the method by
which one is to come at the beginnings of poetry, and what material is
one to employ? Literature itself, and the comparative, historical
method, are indicated by the very terms of the quest; but what of other
aids? There is no doubt that science has opened mines of research
unknown to a former generation of scholars in poetics; what have
zoology, physiology, psychology, ethnology, anthropology, sociology, to
say to the beginnings of rhythmic utterance? From the study of those
animals which stand nearest to man in intelligence and social instincts
there should come in course of time a better knowledge of the physical
conditions under which primitive folk essayed their earliest poetry; but
it is conceded that the present state of these studies, even in obvious
cases like the singing of birds and the social dances and amusements of
sundry animals, offers scant help to the student of poetry, and often
leads him into absurdities. Darwin’s suggestion that the lyric poem
might in some way go back to the call of the male _homo_ to the female
at mating time, induced Scherer to put the origins of poetry in general
upon this purely biological basis;[12] but Scherer’s enthusiasm has met
no hearty response and seems to fly in the face of certain important
facts. The book of Groos, to which further reference will be made, gives
a better series of analogies with the subject in hand, but is not to be
used in any positive or conclusive way.
Help of a more substantial kind can be found in the researches of modern
psychology; and indeed, when these shall have been put in available
form, they will greatly increase the materials for a study of the poetic
process. To what extent the study of the poetic product, however, may
use such aids, is a quite different question. For example, there is one
doctrine, which, if it were established upon an absolute and universal
truth, could be applied to the problem of primitive verse with such
success as to throw a bridge over the chasm between what is recorded and
what is unrecorded, and so lead one cannily into the midst of the
unknown. The theory was laid down by Haeckel[13] that “ontogenesis, or
the development of the individual, is a short and quick repetition”—or
recapitulation—“of phylogenesis, or the development of the tribe to
which it belongs, determined by the laws of inheritance and adaptation.”
Schultze, in his excellent book on fetishism,[14] uses this law, if law
it be, in determining the mental state of primitive folk; “what is true
of the child is true of the wild man, whose consciousness is in the
childish embryonic stage,” and who has reached the fetishistic epoch of
mental growth. A savage who gets a clock wants to wrap it in costly
furs; so does a child. Professor Baldwin, too, accepts the principle as
a guide in working out analogies between the development of the child
and the development of the race, of society.[15] For example, the
consciousness of the “I” in children seems analogous in point of
development to the individual consciousness of primitive man; and it is
evidently of value to the student of early poetry to find his conclusion
that such poetry is mainly impersonal backed by testimony from those who
have studied the inner life of infants and children to the effect that
fear, anger, likes and dislikes, are emotions that precede perception of
the subject’s own personality. A. W. Schlegel used this analogy a
hundred years ago;[16] and, before him, Gottsched, who had far keener
historic sense than one would suppose, explained early epic by the
curiosity which children show in their demand for tales of every sort,
adding that “primitive folk were exactly like these little creatures,
who have no experience and such store of curiosity.”[17] In fact, as is
so often the case with a new exact theory in science, the general idea
has been a commonplace time out of mind. Shelley, declaring that “the
savage is to ages what the child is to years,” is echoing
eighteenth-century thought, with its idea of humanity passing from
childhood to riper growth; and Turgot and Condorcet[18] only added the
notion of human perfectibility and infinite development to an analogy
which was first made, so it would seem, by the Italian Vico. The
parallel is everywhere; Macaulay uses it in his theory of poetic
degeneration, Peacock in his _Four Ages_, and Victor Hugo in the preface
to _Cromwell_. Not as an idea, but as a formula, Mr. Spencer makes the
biological doctrine of recapitulation a part of his sociological system.
Professor Karl Pearson appeals to the same doctrine when he wishes to
say a word for the matriarchate;[19] in the life of the child, he notes,
“the mother and the woman play the largest part; and so it is in the
religion and social institutions of primitive man.” Thus a child’s world
reproduces the primitive world; and the _märchen_, where witches are
still powerful though hated and malignant beings, show what is really
the priestess of early matriarchal cult fallen into disfavour under
patriarchal conditions. Or, finally, to choose an unexceptionable case,
Professor Bücher,[20] noting that long-continued and laborious activity
is easily kept up provided it pass as play and not as labour, takes the
dances of savages, and the games of a civilized child, as analogous to
the efforts of earliest man. It is true, too, that savages, and
presumably early man, are like the child in quick alternations of mood,
in the possibility of laughter and tears at once, in many traits of the
kind; so far Letourneau[21] is perfectly right in his parallel. Now all
these cases, in varying degree, are meant as arguments from analogy,
and, as is usual when one deals with analogy, may be regarded as more or
less desirable aids to evidence that is direct. By itself, however,
analogy must not be conclusive; in the matter under consideration it
cannot be regarded as proof; and alone this rule of ontogenesis and
phylogenesis is not enough to bridge the chasm and allow one to describe
prehistoric poetry.
Such, however, is precisely the task that some bold pioneers have
essayed. Letourneau, indeed, is hardly to be placed in this category,
although he upholds the doctrine and puts it to use;[22] for his
conclusions are invariably fortified by facts from ethnology and
literature. But the author of a book on primitive poetry,
Jacobowski,[23] belongs here; freed from all obligations of research,
all study of actual facts, he trips jauntily into the unknown, hand in
hand with this omnipotent theory as guide. True, he affects the
scientific habit of mind, and once refers the reader, for further light
on some difficult problem, to “my little essay on the Psychology of a
Kiss”; for he is by way of being a lyric poet, and seems of the tribe of
him whom Heine described as “personal enemy of Jehovah, believing only
in Hegel and in Canova’s Venus,” save that one must here make the easy
substitution of Haeckel for Hegel. So, too, Jacobowski is a
statistician, an observer, as witness that work on the kiss, evidently
in no spirit of Johannes Secundus; and he gives incidental notes on the
poetic process which have a very scientific ring. “I know a young poet,”
he says in a burst of confidence, and perhaps remembering Goethe’s fifth
Roman elegy, “who actually makes his best poems in the very ecstasy of
wine and of love.” He draws a diagram, like those convincing charts in
history and political economy, to illustrate the “hunger-curve” and the
“thirst-curve,” and to answer the question why there is so much poetry
that deals with drinking and so little that deals with eating. Here and
there a savage tribe is named, a traveller is invoked; but Jacobowski’s
main trust is in the human infant and in his own poetic self. That the
book has been taken seriously is perhaps due to the only part of it
worth considering, which traces the origin of poetry to cries of joy or
of pain. This, of course, in great elaboration; by the ontogenetic
method one may study poetry, that is, emotional expression, in the
modern infant, and then by a simple phylogenetic process “transfer the
result to humanity.” Rid of all friction from facts, literary and
sociological, the pace of proof is breathless, and pampered jades of
investigation are left far out of sight in the rear. What was the first
poem?—A cry of fright. Why?—All observers agree that the first emotion
noted in a child—as early, says Preyer, as the second day—is fear. Watch
by the cradle, then, and note the infant’s gasps, cooings, gurglings,
cryings, grimaces, gestures; these will give in due succession the
stages and the history of literature. In this attitude, too, Jacobowski
watches for the “primitive lyric.” He quotes Preyer’s account of a baby
which, on the day of its birth, showed pleasure at the presence of light
and displeasure at relative darkness. There follow more statistics of
the same sort, “lyrical sounds of delight,” heard from another baby for
the same reason. Now, says the author triumphantly, “precisely”—the word
is to be noted—“_precisely the same effect of light and darkness must
have been experienced by primitive man_.”[24] It is hardly worth while
to argue against such an extreme of absurdity as this; the lyric
expression of a new-born baby’s pleasure in light and fear of darkness
is no parallel to the lyric and poetic expression of primitive man, not
only for the reason that overwhelming evidence shows all primitive
poetical expression of emotion to have been collective, but because this
emotion was based on very keen physical perceptions. The analogy of
infant growth in expression with the development of primitive man’s
expression comes soon to wreck; who furnished for infant man the adult
speech, gesture, manner, upon which the imitative, actual infant works
in his progress through babyhood? Moreover, the infant individual of an
adult race and the adult individual of an infant race still differ,
_qua_ infant and adult, as human beings. Think of the adult savage’s
activity, his sight, his hearing, his powers of inference from what he
sees; put him with his fellows even into primitive conditions; and then
consider the claim that such a wild man’s earliest poem, a lyric, must
be analogous to the first cry of pleasure or of pain uttered by the
solitary infant on the first dull perception, say of light or of hunger!
Even the biological analogy, pure and simple, will now and then break
down. It has been asserted that the male voice was once far higher than
now in point of pitch, phylogenetic inference from the ontogenetic fact
of the boy’s voice before it deepens; but Wallaschek[25] examines the
facts in regard to this claim, and finds not only adverse evidence, but
a constant tendency to raise the pitch as one passes from oldest times
to the present. There is another law of relativity than that to which
the argument of child and race appeals,—not how primitive poetry
compares with modern emotional expression, but how primitive poetry was
related to the faculty and environment of primitive man. Looked at in
this light, it might well appear that “simple expression of joy,” or
what not, is a gross misrepresentation of the lyric in question, and
that the relative childishness of savages, and, as one argues, of
primitive men generally, is not a positive childishness with regard to
the conditions of their life.[26] In fine, the analogy and the principle
are in the present state of things useless for any direct inference
about primitive poetry. When the sequence of emotions and of emotional
expressions has been established for infant life, it will have an
interest for the student of early literature, and may even give him
substantial help by way of suggestion, corrective, test. But to set up a
provisional account of the origins and growth of infant emotional
expression, and then to transfer this scheme to primitive culture as the
origins and growth of human poetry, is, on the face of it, absurd.
Closely akin to the error which makes unwarranted use of psychological
theories is the abuse of ethnological facts. True, the value of
ethnology to the study of primitive poetry is immense; until one hundred
and fifty years ago,[27] the vital fault of writers on poetry lay in
their neglect of what John Evelyn calls “plaine and prodigious
barbarisme,” and even down to the present, this contempt for lower forms
of poetry vitiates the work of writers in æsthetics; nevertheless, there
is caution to be applied in arguments from the modern savage as in those
from the modern infant. Briefly put, the notion is abroad that the lower
one goes in the scale of culture among living savage tribes, the nearer
one has come to actual primitive culture, to unaccommodated man, the
thing itself, as it was in the very beginning of human life; but, unless
great care be used, one will follow this path to the utter confusion of
progress and retrogression. All would be easy work if one could accept
the statement of Gumplowicz,[28] that “So long as one unitary
homogeneous group is not influenced by or does not exert an influence
upon another, it persists in the original primitive state. Hence, in
distant quarters of the globe, shut off from the world, we find hordes
in a state as primitive, probably, as that of their forefathers a
million years ago.” Surely not as primitive; the very terms of the
phrase deny it; and even in the stagnation of culture, through wastes of
dull and unmeaning ages, man, like men, grows old: _tacitisque
senescimus annis_. Neither individual nor tribal life can stand still.
What one may properly do with ethnological evidence is to note how
certain conditions of culture are related to the expression of human
emotion, and to conclude that the same conditions, for these are a
stable quantity, would affect the emotional expression of primitive man
in a similar way, allowing, however,—and here is the important
concession,—for the different state of the intellectual and emotional
powers in an early and vigorous tribal life as compared with the
stagnant or degenerate life of a belated culture.[29] Two pitfalls lurk
under the analogy. It will not do to argue directly from a sunken race
back to a mounting race found at the same level; again, it will not do
to argue that because the mounting race, when arrived at its prime, has
not a certain quality or function, that it therefore never had such a
quality or function.[30] If one will but look at the thing honestly,
what a brazen assumption it is that this makeshift human creature is
always learning but never forgetting, always gaining but never losing,
and that man of to-day holds fast the unimpaired _x_ of man’s primitive
powers along with all that change and growth and countless revolutions
have brought him! It is a mistake of the first order to assume that a
form of expression now unknown among men must have been unknown to those
who made the first trials of expression as in words and song. One often
hears about the lost arts; it is quite possible that there were arts or
modes of expression used by primitive man for which one can find no
analogy to-day either among men of culture or in savage tribes. There
are rudimentary growths in literature, and these must be taken into
account just as the man of science considers the nails or the hair or
even the often-discussed vermiform appendix. The pineal gland, which
Descartes finally chose as the scene of that mysterious passage between
soul and matter demanded by his system of philosophy, has been recently
explained to be all that is left of an eye in the top of the head. This
may be a true account of the pineal gland, or a false account; but no
competent naturalist will assert that civilized man has all the bodily
functions which he had at that remote period in question. So, too, with
certain possible distorted survivals in poetry of forms of emotional
expression now unknown; it is wrong to deny them, and it is perilous to
assert them unless cumulative evidence of many kinds can establish the
probability. Again, for the first of these two warnings, it is unfair to
set up the Australian black fellow or the Andaman islander,[31] with his
“primitive” tools, dress, habits, and then, by a forcing of the
adjective, bid us look at our primitive ancestor. No one denies the
value of ethnological evidence; Thucydides himself declared that
barbarous nations gave one a good idea of what civilized nations had
been; accounts of savage life have the enormous advantage of coming
close to the conditions of primitive life; but they do not give us the
infallible description of primitive man himself, and it is an illicit
process to transfer a quality from savage to ancestor, to say that man
at the dawn of history was like this belated specimen, and that tribes
from whose loins sprang dominant races, races which fought, and spoiled,
and set up civilizations now vanished from almost every kind of record,
can be reconstructed, in each feature of mind and body, by a study of
peoples long ago shunted upon the bypaths of progress. Mr. Spencer was
one of the first to protest against this abuse of ethnology.[32]
Professor Grosse,[33] on the other hand, makes a strong and candid
effort to meet and minimize the objections to an assumption upon which
his whole study of primitive art depends. He asserts that arguments in
opposition rest on the theory of degradation, and he denies that
degradation has taken place, pointing to the remarkable uniformity of
culture conditions in the various tribes which he regards as primitive.
But it is clear that one does not need the theory of degradation to make
good the point which has just been urged. Grant that these savage tribes
have not degenerated; they have certainly failed, in every important
particular, to progress; they are stunted; and they compare with that
primitive being who held the destinies of culture in his hand, who
pressed forward, wrought and fought, and sang the while of what he did,
somewhat as a dwarf idiot of forty compares with a healthy child of
four. More than this. Long stagnation, while it cannot push culture to
new habits, may well complicate and stiffen the old habits to such an
extent that the latter state of them comes quite out of analogy with the
beginnings. For example, the festal dances of the savage are often
intricate to a degree, requiring real erudition in the teacher, and
infinite patience and skill in the disciple. Now it needs no advance in
culture, no change in the form of production, which is Grosse’s test for
culture, to make this dance progress from wild rhythmic leapings in a
festal throng to the rigid form it has found under the care of certain
experts. The earliest dancers and the latest dancers, communal and
artistic, may have lived the same tribal life and got their food by the
same kind of hunting, the same rude gathering of plants. In fact,
startling as the assertion may seem, and however it may run counter to
this convenient law that the degree of culture depends on the form of
production, and that the work of art depends on the degree of culture,
it is nevertheless highly probable that a certain combination of dance
and song used among the Faroe islanders about a century ago, and
recorded by a Danish clergyman who saw it, is of a far more primitive
type than sundry laborious dances of savage tribes who are assumed to be
quite primitive in their culture.
Granted the need to use the analogy with caution, it is well to note how
wary one must be in dealing with the evidence itself. The warning may be
brought home by an illustration somewhat out of the beaten track of
ethnological material.[34] Nearly a century ago, Dr. Samuel L. Mitchill,
United States senator from New York, was “a sort of permanent chairman
of the committee on Indian affairs”; and he gives an account of a song
“in the Osage tongue,” which was sung at his house in Washington,
“translated into French by Mr. Choteau, the interpreter, and rendered
into English immediately, January 1, 1806.” It is well to see what came
of this process in the shape of the song “On War.”
Say, warriors, why, when arms are sung,
And dwell on every native tongue,
Do thoughts of Death intrude?
Why weep the common lot of all?
Why think that you yourselves may fall,
Pursuing or pursued?
There is more in the same pensive but smooth and elegant vein; and one
regrets to learn that this excellent Wanapaska, who would have pleased
Chateaubriand, “died suddenly ... a few nights after having sung this
song to the translator,”—who, however, unblushingly lived on. But he
could be truthful on occasion, this translator, and he tells the truth
about two Cherokee songs of friendship which may not have seemed capable
of conversion into tender English monody. Here is silly sooth. The
songs, one is told, “consist of but one sentence each with a chorus.
Nothing of greater length seems to exist among” the Cherokees. “They
repeat the song and chorus until they are tired. The words of both were
written for me[35] by Mr. Hicks, a Cherokee of the half blood, with his
own hand, both original and version.... _Neither among the Osages nor
the Cherokees could there be found a single poetical or musical
sentiment founded on the tender passion between the sexes._ Though often
asked, they produced no song of love.”[36] The two songs follow,—they
have the same chorus and belong together,—with interlinear translation:—
Can, nal, li, èh, ne-was-tu.
A friend you resemble.
_Chorus_—Yai, ne, noo, way. E, noo, way, hā.
Ti, nai, tau, nā, cla, ne-was-tu.
Brothers I think we are.
And the chorus, as before. Now even the humblest student of poetry can
sift all this evidence, on the face of it equally valuable throughout,
and find that a part of it is worse than worthless, while another part
is of real value; in many cases, however, the task is difficult, and
this for two reasons. Either the missionaries, explorers, travellers,
give only a partial account, or again, they give accounts of a
misleading sort, if not actually untrue. For the former case, we may
take Ellis and his description of a New Zealand dance.[37] “Several of
their public dances seemed immoral in their tendency; but in general
they were distinguished by the violent gestures and deafening
vociferations of the performers.” And that is all. It is enough for the
purposes of the book, but it is not enough for the student of poetry.
Worse yet is the tendency to state savage thought, savage habits, in
terms of civilization, and so give a notion never true and often false.
When, for example, one is told[38] that in the South Sea islands there
are poets who retire at certain seasons from the world in order to live
in solitude and compose their poems, one is surprised at this notion of
poetical composition among races where the great mass of evidence is for
improvised songs of a line or two, with eternal chorus—savage pattern
everywhere—and with accompanying dance. However, here is the evidence,
and it must be taken with the rest. Presently comes an actual song,[39]
a pensive song, by one of these bards and akin to the Osage outburst
translated by Dr. Mitchill:—
Death is easy.
To live, what boots it?
Death is peace.
Is this a Fijian Schopenhauer, or rather Leopardi; or does it mean
contact with civilized thought and with Christian hymns? Before one
accepts this as outcome of “primitive” poetic conditions, one must bring
it into line with the poetry from such sources on which all evidence is
agreed; at once the bard and his ditty fall under strong suspicion.
Witty proverbial verses found in half-civilized tradition, say among the
Finns,[40] get the same label of “primitive,” until one appeals to the
chronological sense of fitness, and to other kinds of evidence:—
Praise no new horse till to-morrow,
No wife till two years are over,
No wife’s brother till the third year,
Praise thyself not while thou livest!
At this rate the letters of some Lord Chesterfield to his son will yet
be reconstructed for the epoch of our hairy ancestors on the tree
platform. It is clear that the great body of ethnological evidence,
unequal in its parts, and in sad need of sifting and revision, has
something of that uncertain quality as an ally in argument which Tom
Nash imputed to “law, logic, and the Switzers.” They could be hired to
fight, he said, for anybody.
Safety lies in making one kind of evidence control another kind, and in
reckoning only with the carefully balanced result. What evidence is
there that can control the evidence of ethnology? Philology, despite its
overweening claims, is said to be unavailing; it may reveal verbal
processes which belong to prehistoric times; but, as J. F. McLennan[41]
remarked, “in the sciences of law and society, old means not old in
chronology but in structure.... The preface of general history must be
compiled from the materials presented by barbarism.” Yet McLennan
himself declares that “a really primitive people nowhere exists,” and so
puts a great restriction on the use of the material he has just praised.
Can history be of help? “The study of the science of art,” says
Professor Grosse,[42] “should not turn to history or to prehistory.
History knows no primitive peoples.” Archæology, he thinks, is as
powerless; the sole refuge is in ethnology, for it shows us “a whole
series of primitive peoples in the full light of the present.” But this
full light, now and then, has blinded even Professor Grosse; and there
is a kind of history, not direct, indeed, not a matter of clear record,
but still often as valuable as ethnological evidence, which has help of
its own for the student of primitive institutions both by way of control
and by way of suggestive facts. One of the first men who went about the
reconstruction of prehistorical times by a sober application of the
“known principles of human nature” to the facts offered by ethnology and
sociology, sciences then unknown by name, was Adam Smith; in the highly
interesting account of him written by Dugald Stewart and published as
introduction to the Essays,[43] the name of “_theoretical_ or
_conjectural history_” is given to “this species of philosophical
investigation which has no appropriated name in our language.” Stewart
is speaking of Smith’s essay on the origin of speech,[44] and compares
it with the famous pioneer work of Montesquieu and others in a related
field of study, remarking on the way in which “casual observations of
illiterate travellers and navigators” are combined into “a philosophical
commentary on the history of law and of manners.” These “casual
observations” have risen of late to almost absolute power, and “known
principles of human nature” are out of office. Now it is true that one
must be chary in the application of such “known principles” to the facts
from which one has to construct one’s idea of human nature itself, a
process close to the vicious circle; but there are, nevertheless,
certain general controlling ideas to which appeal should be made when
one has to set a value on a given bit of evidence. A controlling idea of
this sort is the sense of literary evolution, an idea based on known
literary facts, and quite valid as test for alleged facts which are
brought forward as evidence in questions of prehistoric stages of
poetry. This sense of literary evolution, moreover, need be no whim or
freak of one’s own judgment. It is not merely that one feels the
absurdity of those jingling platitudes which Dr. Mitchill fathers upon
the lorn Wanapaska; it is the sense of evolution in the expression of
emotion and of thought, a sense based on experience and due to a
competent process of reasoning, which tells any person of information
that savages do not make such a song. True, if a mass of such evidence
lay before one, and it proved to be of the trustworthy sort, then the
controlling idea would be driven off, and the old sense of evolution
would be so modified as to conform to the new facts. But this is not the
case.
The controlling idea, the sense of evolution, should be an object for
the scholar in more limited fields than heretofore have been chosen for
his work. It will be found wise, henceforth, to select a narrower path
but a more distant goal, a smaller subject and a larger method, to run
down a single clew, and to run it, if possible, to the end. Works on the
History of Human Thought, on the History of Literature, of Religion, of
Civilization, on Primitive Culture, were great in their day,—and
probably no one book, apart from Darwin’s, has had such a wide and
wholesome influence as that masterpiece of Dr. E. B. Tylor; they
initiated, fixed the general direction, were the doing of genius. But
the day of discoveries has gone by, and colonization, a slower process,
is rather an affair of hard if intelligent work. Histories, if the term
will pass, are needed for the different functions of human expression
and human emotion itself. The whimsical Nietzsche[45] has called for
histories “of Love, of Avarice, of Envy, of Conscience, of Piety, of
Cruelty”; but apart from his notions, and for sober purposes of literary
study, there is need for such work as a history of sentiment, and this,
of course, should be followed back on its different lines of expression.
Two striking passages in Mr. Thomas Hardy’s _Return of the Native_ may
be cited here as bearing on possibilities of investigation which need
not be regarded as fantastic or absurd. In describing the face of his
hero, as one that bore traces of a mental struggle, a half-formed query
in regard to the value of existence, Mr. Hardy contrasts this face, so
common now in every walk of life, with the countenance preserved by
sculpture from an age when no such questions haunted the brain, and
when, to use his phrase, man “could still revel in the general
situation.” Even more suggestive is the other passage, which treats the
change of sentiment in regard to what are called “the beauties of
nature.” Much has been said and investigated of late on this attitude,
ancient and modern, toward nature;[46] but there is metal more
attractive in Mr. Hardy’s introduction of Egdon Heath as a sort of
tragic character in his story, and in his remark that with the saddening
of life men have turned more and more from mere gardens and green
meadows, and have sought wild, rugged scenes; in days to come, indeed,
they may turn even from the barren coasts of the sea, from bleak
mountains, and seek stretches of absolute desolation, forbidding,
featureless, dead, to suit their mood and give them rest from the stress
of life. These are hints, false or true, only hints; but if they can so
stir one to look into the seeds of time for the sake of mere prediction,
is there not sober gain in a reversal of this process and in a study of
the conditions and expressions of sentiment as far back as one can
follow them? It is said that the absence and the presence of personal
sentiment respectively condition the poetry of France that precedes
Villon and the poetry that comes after him; what of the larger field,
poetry itself, with regard to this important quality in emotional
expression? Can one do for poetry what a recent writer[47] has done for
civic life? Speaking of altruism, and noting the original absence of
sentiment, he constructs a curve, or, as he calls it, a gradation, “the
first word of which is selfishness and the last public sentiment.” What
curves, now, can be constructed in poetry which shall prove of value as
showing a controlling idea and warranting a sense of evolution? Clearly,
these controlling ideas in a history of literature must stand chiefly
upon the facts of literature, and the sense of evolution must be based
upon a study of literary changes and growth, the play and result of such
elements as have just now been described. The sense of evolution in
literature is akin to the genealogical point of view lately urged upon
critics by M. Brunetière,[48] but it is not the same thing; with him the
doctrine of evolution is applied to literature or to art as a safe guide
through its chronology, as a clew to its progress and retrogressions, as
a discovery of the relations which a genius bears to those who went
before him and to those who follow, and as a test of the valid and the
permanent in art. The application of the sense of evolution now to be
considered has a far wider range and must lead in time to wider
conquests. For example, if one will choose some particular
characteristic of human nature and will essay, by the aid of literature
and the arts, to follow back the manifestations of it to a point where
all records and traces of it cease, one will have a history of this
characteristic,—and one will have something more. There will be not only
the actual record made up from a series of observations which form a
dotted line from furthest historical past to present, but the dots of
this line, the line itself, will often form a curve which points either
to a general gain or to a general loss of the characteristic in
question. Or, if it is a case where one cannot speak with exactness of a
loss or a gain in the characteristic itself, the curve will show loss or
gain in any given form by which this characteristic has made itself
known. Here, in other words, is a curve of relative tendencies; and the
knowledge of such a curve not only gives us that sense of evolution to
which reference has been made, but justifies us, after careful study and
testing of these dotted facts, in a bold leap from the known to the
unknown. If the characteristic in question, from the point where it
comes into view at the beginning of records, shows a constant curve of
increase or of decrease, one is justified in making a fairly definite
statement about it in prehistoric times. Now this is not the
evolutionary doctrine championed by M. Brunetière in literary research,
for the reason that it is not dealing with poets and poems, but with
poetry, or rather with the elements of poetry. To give a practical
illustration, it is found that ethnological evidence puts in strong
relief the almost exclusive and certainly overwhelming frequency of
choral singing among rudest savage tribes. If, now, one takes a modern
popular ballad and seeks to follow it back in such a way as to join it,
as the end of a long line of survivals, to these primitive choral songs,
one falls at once into confusion and halts sooner or later before
insuperable barriers. Apart from the controversy about artistic or
communal origin, apart from the theories of the epic, of the
_cante-fable_, what not, it is out of the range of possible things to
trace ballad or folksong, as such, back to a primitive form. Yet it
seems to have occurred to no one that the way to treat the ballad for
historic, comparative, and genetic purposes is to separate it into its
elements, and to follow these elements back to the point where they
vanish in the mists of unrecorded time. Such elements—and, unlike the
ballad itself, they can be traced—are the fact of singing, the fact of
dancing, the fact of universal improvisation, the fact of a predominant
chorus or refrain. Are these elements, as far back as one can trace
them, stronger, more insistent, as one approaches primitive conditions?
What is the curve of evolution? Add to it the evidence of ethnology, and
the conclusions of sociology, in regard to the composition and character
of the early social group: here are materials which are solid enough to
bear the weight of certain and definite conclusions in regard to the
communal element in earliest verse. Again, there is another curve to
consider. The poem of our day is mainly individual and artistic; how far
back, and in what degree, waxing, waning, or stationary, can these
elements be traced, and with what ethnological and sociological facts
can they be confronted? The differencing characteristics of the poetry
of art, and those of the poetry which is rightly or wrongly called
communal, must be studied for themselves and traced back in their curves
of evolution in order to ascertain what part they played in the
beginnings of the art. And thus, too, the question must be answered, a
question neither idle nor without wide sweep of interest, whether poetry
has been one and the same element of human life from the outset, under
varying circumstances, indeed, but under fixed conditions and with
stable elements, or whether the conditions and the elements are now
different from those which obtained at the start.
The method, then, of this attempt to study the beginnings of poetry is
not to transfer outright the facts and conditions of savage life, result
of ethnological investigation, to primitive song, not to take a supposed
“popular” or communal poem of modern tradition and essay a somewhat
similar transfer, but rather to use the evidence of ethnology in
connection with the progress of poetry itself, as one can trace it in
the growth or decay of its elements. The facts of ethnological research
have been largely digested and can be easily used. The elements of
poetry, in the sense here indicated, and combined with sociological
considerations, have never been studied for the purpose of determining
poetic evolution; and in this study lie both the intention of the
present book and whatever modest achievement its writer can hope to
attain. Before, however, this actual study is begun, two propositions
must be established: the writer must prove that what he takes as poetry
is poetry in fact; and, as was hinted just above, he must show a clear
title for his use of the terms “communal” and “artistic.”