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.