SCIENCE AND COMMUNAL POETRY
We have Dr. Johnson’s word for it that one does well “to see great works
in their seminal state, pregnant with latent possibilities of
excellence; nor could there be any more delightful entertainment than to
trace their gradual growth and expansion.” So science came to think; and
all the works of nature and of man have been treated in this spirit to
the convincing of sane minds everywhere, except in the domain of poetry.
There one still clings to a paradise and a perfect poet at the
start,—perfect, that is, because he had all the functions and privileges
and opportunities of the latter-day bard, and stood to his public as a
poet stands to the public of this age. A study of facts, records as well
as survivals, leads us to no such perfect primitive bard; at the end of
the path we see no dignified old gentleman in flowing robe, with a long
white beard, upturned eyes, and a harp clasped to his bosom, but rather
a ring of savages dancing uncouthly to the sound of their own voices in
a rhythmic but inharmonious chant. This, however, is only saying that
poetry, like all human institutions, like the earth itself, goes back to
rude and barren beginnings; and the lowest stratum of poetry to which
one can come either by sight or by inference is only what one ought to
expect from the doctrine of evolution, applicable in this case as in any
other case. With a sense not intended by Browning, “rock’s the song-soil
rather,” and even fossil signs of life are few. But it is precisely here
that Johnson’s unconscious praise of these studies should be borne in
mind. Not the bard come down from Olympus, with majesty in his mien and
the light of divine song shed about him, singing to his rapt hearers of
the deep things of life, is the nobler view: nobler by far is the sight
of those little groups gathered on the marches that lay between the old
beast and the new man, facing inexorable powers which had crushed out
life upon life before, and whole systems of life; dimly conscious of a
force that treads down the individual and dooms the solitary to defeat;
dimly conscious, too, of the resisting power that lies in coherence,
union, common front in a common cause; marshalled by the instinct of
kind into a tentative confederation of single resources; and so
beginning the long battle which humanity is still waging against foes
unseen as well as seen. The first cry of emotional consent along with
the consenting step, the cry that remembered a triumph found in
instinctive common action, and felt itself to be prophetic of a triumph
yet to come; this concerted step and shout which seemed the expression
of concerted purpose, of communal will, force, effectiveness, has more
in it even for the man of sentiment than can be found in any flight of
poetry in later time. But we are not seeking sentiment in the case; and
having come in this rude dance and song, so it would seem, to the
beginnings of poetry, we ask what was the beginning of this beginning.
If one must have a formula for the process, it need not be in those
intolerant terms of personal initiative and gregarious imitation upon
which M. Tarde insists so strenuously, but rather in the mild and quite
as scientific terms of consent, the consent of instinctive individual
gestures and sounds due to the perception by a group of human beings
that common action makes unity out of diversity. Art is of social
origin; that is the thesis of Guyau in his well-known book; and the
social sense precedes any relation of master and pupil, leader and
followers. It is overwhelmingly probable that rhythm, the simplest form
of social consent, was the earliest form of a discovery which made
social progress possible. Still, this probability must not be taken for
granted.
The question, like the democratic thought of a century and more ago, has
an outer and an inner circle.[881] For the latter, let us ask whether
poetry, queen of the arts, is an art in the sense of something invented
by the artist, not only in details, but in essence. The arts of life
belong to the artist; but is the artist anterior in every way to his
art? Is there no spontaneous, instinctive background? In the first
place, one must guard against a fallacy of terms. The invention of a
tool, for example, even though it be “organic projection,” is different
in kind from the invention of a poem, which, by the principles of
æsthetic, has no one practical end in view,—for theory, at least; in
reality, the inventor of a poem nowadays has a practical end in view,
the sale of his verse, and Scherer carried this commercial idea back to
the very origins, setting up a primitive literary market, with supply
and demand, poet and public, bargains, sales, entertainer and audience,
on the very tree-platform of our hairy ancestors. But Scherer fell into
absurdities. Gigadibs the literary man does not thrive in those regions;
and one cannot reduce the primitive choral to terms of artist,
invention, public, sale. If anything has been made clear in preceding
pages of this book, if anything can be made clear in the study of
improvisation about to follow, if there is any certain curve of
evolution in the course of poetry, it is that the passive element, the
audience, the receptive public, disappears inevitably as one recedes
from conditions of the present time, and that the throng as a productive
active body assumes more and more the functions now regarded as
belonging almost exclusively to the individual. Invention itself has
been reduced to a convenient absurdity, for this very article of rhythm,
by M. Kawczynski, in his essay on rhythmic origins.[882] Nobody denies
that an Alcæus may invent an Alcaic strophe,[883] that another master
may hit upon the elegiac couplet; but this vivacious essay declares that
rhythm itself was invented by some thoughtful benefactor of the race,
some genius of prehistoric times. A book published in the same year, the
_Æsthetics of Movement_, by M. Souriau,[884] had made temperate protest
against Mr. Herbert Spencer’s doctrine[885] of the universality of
rhythm in the realm of nature, and had asserted that rhythm, exceptional
in nature, is nevertheless “the constant law of muscular movements,” and
not the result of will. But this spontaneity of rhythm in the motion and
muscular exertion of man, this tendency in each of our motor organs “to
adopt a fixed rhythm which becomes its normal movement,” is precisely
what M. Kawczynski will not allow; he is bent upon banishing “the false
system of spontaneity” from its last place of refuge and will hound it
off the face of the earth. Not only was this or that dance invented,
this or that march and walk; dancing, marching, leaping, yes, walking,
are inventions all. This is very clear language of M. Kawczynski, but it
is a trifle too clear; one asks for a bill of particulars,—first for an
explanation of the inventive process, and secondly for an account of the
imitation; and here one meets difficulties. The individual mind plays
about general instincts, modifies them, develops them into a thousand
forms, precisely as it does with the raw material of nature. It invents
a dance as modification of the general instinct to dance; it invents the
steam-engine, but is not yet credited with inventing steam and iron. So
one easily understands the invention of a distinct song; but what of
singing? Or say of breathing? The Dogberry who says that these things
come by nature, and asks how they could come by art, is pained to find
the advocate of invention wrapping himself in a cloak of biological
mystery not unlike the theological garment donned, under similar
questions, by Jacob Grimm himself. We shall see that in the outer circle
this question is answered by M. Tarde with a reference to the cell;
ultimate individual invention is an affair of the individual cell; while
the process itself is a mystery, described only in the most modest and
euphemistic hints, and to stare at it would be the part of peeping Tom.
M. Kawczynski makes no effort to explain invention, but simply asserts
it; and although imitation is a clearer case, yet even here he says
things which are not good for the interests of his theory. He is safe so
long as he keeps to general terms and describes all literature as a
gigantic system of borrowings,—German from Roman, Roman from Greek,
Greek from Egyptian mayhap, and Egyptian from creditors unknown, all
imitation, with here and there a bit of invention going on decently
behind closed doors. But M. Kawczynski dares too much, and blunders in
the particular case. A witness should be taken from the box when he
tries to help his cause by making German Siegfried an imitated compound
of Jason, Achilles, and Perseus; by naming Otfried as the founder of
really Germanic literature; by making alliteration in Norse an imitation
of German, which got it from Anglo-Saxons, who got it from the Irish,
who got it from the Latin; and by calling Germanic verse itself an
imitation of the classic hexameter.[886] “Historic influences,” one is
told, “are stronger than the natural and proper gifts of any people”;
but are not natural and proper gifts themselves the strongest of
historic influences? This question is worth a glance by the way.
No one denies the great part played in poetry by imitation; but it is
not the only element in the case. True, it is the most obvious element.
Comparative literature, as a science, is young. The task put before its
followers was plain enough; they had first of all to sift the material,
to note where deep has called unto deep in the influence of one poet
upon another, as well as to follow the fortunes of a primitive bagman’s
jest carried on the old trading routes from land to land and starting up
at last as _conte_ or _schwank_ in a hundred scattered communities, in
cloister, school, and court. But this is not all, and the task is not
done even when one has struck the balance between the borrowings of a
poet and what one suffers to pass as his individual and original genius.
Abused as the terms have been, the genius of time, place, community, is
still a factor in the growth of any literature; and M. Gaston Paris, who
has done so much for the study of sources, is emphatic on this point. In
several passages, notably in a discussion of the method to be followed
in studying poetry of the people,[887] he sets a bound to the theory of
borrowings, and insists upon the common fund or “patrimony” of national
tradition. Steinthal, too, is not altogether negligible with his query;
why assume, he asks,[888] that because Europe imported so much, she must
have been herself sterile? That old Aryan patrimony, to be sure, as
source of myth, legend, poem, rite, is out of favour, perhaps definitely
abandoned; but Comparetti,[889] who approves this abandonment, is full
of zeal for the development of all poetry, provided it has the
spontaneous and native note, within the limits of its own nation and its
own tongue. Borrowing is, after all, incidental, however conspicuous in
fact; and it would be a wild system of economics which should explain
the industrial life of the world as purely a matter of exchange, of
debtor and creditor, without any hint of agriculture and manufactures.
One sees all the faring of ship and car, the tumult of docks, drays,
storehouses, the stir in counting-rooms, banks, exchange; what of plough
and mill and mine? It is just these, so to speak, that one fails to see
in such clever literary balancing of accounts as certain scholars have
made in the study of Scandinavian ballads. Take a holiday throng of the
unlettered mediæval community, intent upon song and dance, all dancing
and all singing; will no one tell us what they sing? A score of
scholars. They produce the ballad,—no easy feat,—and for this alone
deserve lasting gratitude. As they find it, it is not likely to be
merely a local affair, for such things seldom come upon record, although
it is quite clear that perhaps the majority of ballads in this class
were of purely local interest. Very likely, however, it is borrowed, and
the scholar—again, no easy feat—traces the loan to its source. The form
of the stanza may be imported, too, with its simple air; and even now
and then the peculiar rhythm of the lines may be an echo of alien song.
Here, then, is imitation; it need not have been imitation, and in some
other place was doubtless a home product throughout; but here imitation
must be conceded. Our ingenious literary accountant, however, is
emboldened to take another step; the impulse which drives that throng to
express its feelings by rhythm, movement, cry, he takes away from
instinct and sets down to the credit of some other community; the very
dancing and singing, that is, he regards as an imitated, borrowed thing.
Rosenberg, in his book on the _Intellectual Life of Scandinavia_,[890]
tries to prove that “dancing and singing to the dance” came to Norsemen
from the Celts; and to make this probable, he has recourse to that
perilous figure, the universal negative. There were no dancing-songs, he
says, in oldest English; dancing-song and refrain, he argues from
records notoriously imperfect, were also unknown to the early German,
and came to him as a Celtic export, although the German was the first to
use these forms in narrative.[891] That is, the Germans had at first no
song for the dance, but got it from the Celts, who in their turn had not
used the narrative song for dancing, and by way of barter imported it,
as among the Bretons, from a German source. The refrain and the dance,
novelties both, came with viking spoils into Scandinavian life, made
things “lighter and more gay,” and “for the first time gave ladies the
chance of active participation in social enjoyment.” In Iceland,
Rosenberg goes on to say, there was no dancing until about the year
1200;[892] though folk there took hugely to the thing when they once had
it. Moreover, “all agree that this dance and song was at first an
exclusive prerogative of noble families.” A thousand years, then, one is
to conceive the case, foot and voice went never paired in Norland, dance
and refrain were unknown, until example came from the South! _Tantae
molis erat_; to set folk dancing to their own songs needed such
ponderous machinery and such a stretch of time! Had Rosenberg’s
comparative literature only made itself comparative beyond the shreds
and patches of written records, beyond the narrow range of Europe and
the mediæval limits; had he only taken Adam Smith’s or Lord Monboddo’s
interest in African natives like that one who danced a war dance before
the genial Adam and his friends, compelling all hands to leap upon
chairs and tables for safety! Rosenberg and scholars of his class are
not comparative enough; they forget wider and more important
reaches.[893] The habit of turning an event or a situation straightway
into improvised verse with gestures and dancing, is so well attested in
the accounts of savage life, so well attested in cases where isolated
and unlettered communities in modern Europe have been left to their own
“literary” devices,[894] that in the face of such evidence the assertion
that Norse folk waited a thousand years for a hint from the Celts before
they began to dance to rough chorus and refrain of their own singing,
falls like a house of cards. Borrowing money is not a sign of
bankruptcy; and the valuable affirmative evidence of literary loans
which these scholars give us is half spoiled by the absurdity of their
universal negative in regard to native production. For example, we know
that Finns, in very recent times, borrowed a store of Swedish ballads,
and that the name _veisa_,[895] used in Finnish for a ballad, is taken
from that source; but, as every one knows, the Finns had their own
native songs. Suppose, now, that these native songs had long since
disappeared, as they doubtless would have disappeared under the
circumstances of primitive Scandinavian ballads; and how cheerfully the
literary accountant could have assured his reader that there were no
Finnish songs whatever until those Swedish loans were made!
Let us go back now to the main question, and take its outer circle. Here
one is told to blot from one’s dictionary such words as _instinct_,
_spontaneity_, _homogeneous_; but, with these well erased, how is one to
speak of that group of primitive men huddled on the frontier of
civilization? They have no instincts, no spontaneous gestures and cries;
they are not homogeneous, and no homogeneous expression can come out of
them. They cannot borrow; for they are opening the first concern of its
kind. What are they doing, then? Getting ready, one is told, for a game
of follow-the-leader, the game of all civilized and uncivilized beings,
and the law of all animate things. Here is a formula not merely valid in
the explanation of literary progress, but the last word of philosophy
itself. It is labour lost to set up the spontaneous, communal impulse as
a factor in solving these problems of primitive poetry, if the
spontaneous and the communal are impossible ideas, mere superstitions,
props on which rationalism once leaned in passing from the grosser
explanations of ghosts, gods, what not, but now broken and cast as
rubbish to the void. By the theory of M. Tarde, for example, there is no
spontaneity possible; rhythm in its widest sense, dancing, even tears
and laughter, breathing, all cease to be outcome of emotion common and
instinctive; they are imitation by one individual of another individual,
or, to take refuge in biology, of one cell of another cell. The
microcosm is here no figure of speech; in this little world of man is a
commonwealth of individual cells, with crossing and varied interests; an
inventive, masterful cell takes the lead, sweeps along most of the other
cells, which imitate and obey, opposes and destroys others, adapts
itself by compromise to a few more,—and this is man, just as it is
society: invention, imitation, but no spontaneity. Invention is the rare
and difficult factor; imitation is the constant factor.[896] That is, to
put the case more concisely, Tarde attacks two theses, the assertion of
spontaneity in a throng and the assertion that development is from the
homogeneous to the heterogeneous.
All this is not so new as it seems to be. It is early eighteenth-century
philosophy translated into late nineteenth-century science. It is a
reaction from a reaction; for Wilhelm von Humboldt, Hamann, Herder, and
the rest, “tired of kings,” tired of the “great man,” turned to man
himself, to humanity, nature, to great forces revealed in human
institutions everywhere. Speech, said Humboldt, is no invention; it is
an energy, a power. At the beginning, says M. Tarde,[897] “a savage
genius” in a single family, invented the earliest form of language; and
families everywhere came to borrow this anthropoid’s linguistic fire. M.
Tarde is suavely bent on exterminating the idea of nature. Even Darwin
had said speech was half art, half instinct; and an early Darwinian,
Lord Monboddo,[898] believing that “everything of art must be founded on
nature,” derived language from “natural cries.” Nature, says M. Tarde,
is a superstition; and with it he tosses away instinct and spontaneity.
The solution for every possible problem of man’s destiny he seeks in one
of those _cerveaux de génie_, savage or civilized, heterogeneous factors
of life, like the masterful cell from which all has come and to which
all shall yet return. All social adaptation is reduced to the work “of
two men, of whom one answers, by word or by deed, to the question,
verbal or silent, of the other.” Men are alike, think alike, do alike,
not by any law or by any instinct of species, but by this fact of
imitation; any group, large or small, will consist of two parts, one
learning and one teaching, one producing and one consuming, “one actor,
poet, artist, and the other looker-on, reader, amateur.”[899] The group
of two individuals, the harmony of it, Tarde now pushes back to an
earlier harmony between two ideas in the brain of the individual
inventor; and this is to stretch into the infinitesimal. How, he cries
in an eloquent passage,[900] how can a Spencer, as well as the man in
the street, go on treating this infinitesimal as of no moment, as a
homogeneous, neutral thing, with naught in it spiritual and distinct?
Why make the vast range of space your theatre of existence? Within this
despised infinitesimal, mayhap, lie the chances of death or immortality,
the secret of being itself. And we call this ovule, this part of the
ovule, this part of the part,—undifferentiated![901] Darwin is right in
his general theory of descent, but he is wrong in his explanation,
thinks M. Tarde; for the true cause of the species is “the secret of the
cells, _the invention of some early ovule endowed with peculiar and rich
originality_.” What, once more, what of our little group of primitive
men, their instinct of kind, their spontaneous gestures and steps and
cries, their homogeneous character and therefore homogeneous expression?
Seek out the masterful cell in the masterful brain of the masterful
leader of that sorry set of imitators, and it will tell all secrets of
civilization and human progress, poetry and the arts included. There is
no “society” for M. Tarde, and, for the sake of dignified and decent
thought, no _milieu_, no “they,”[902]—that figment of nonsense in the
phrase “they say,”—no “social forces.” Instead of explaining the small
by the great, the detail by the mass, he explains a group of similar
things by the accumulation of minor elementary processes, the great by
the small, the mass by the detail. There is for M. Tarde no genius of a
race, of a language, of a religion; at the best, this genius of the
people is a label for the individuals, or a sort of composite
photograph. Hennequin[903] argued in the same way against an English
type in literature, against a Norman or a Gascon type in French; it is
worth noting that his arguments and Tarde’s philosophy were anticipated
at one of the Magny dinners in January, 1866. “Taine asserted,” so the
_Goncourt Journal_ reports, “that all men of talent are the product of
their environment. We took the other side. ‘Where are you going to
find,’ we said, ‘the exotic root of Chateaubriand,—a pineapple growing
in the barracks!’ Gautier came to our support, and maintained that the
brain of an artist was the same thing under the Pharaohs that it is
now.”
M. Tarde, however, with his followers, is by no means in undisputed
possession of the field, whether in sociology or in literature.
Gumplowicz[904] declares that “the behaviour of collective entities is
determined by natural and sociological laws, and not by the motives and
natural qualities of individuals.” Moreover, as he says, the horde and
the social group make a unit, and this is unlike its parts; it cannot be
inferred from its parts. Social thought came before individual thought.
Some of the best scholars in sociology have come out frankly for
dualism; and in the opinion of Dr. Barth,[905] dualism has now been
proved for the past and recognized for present and future. Professor
Giddings[906] takes this view and offers proof; he puts the
consciousness of kind before invention and initiation, for society, as
he says, is an organization and not an organism. Perhaps a majority of
French scholars hold against M. Tarde; and while Germany has been
rampant for individualism, a distinct reaction has set in with the work
of Bernheim, of Lamprecht, and of Barth himself. As Ranke grew older,
says Lamprecht, he grew less willing to lay stress on great
personalities in history, which, he thought, must more and more find its
account in the movement and condition of masses. Comte is not
discredited in the spirit of his theory, whatever has become of the
details; and, turning to psychology, one finds Wundt[907] actually
defending the social mind, so vehemently attacked by Paul in his
_Principles_. Wundt says there is such a thing as the _volksseele_, the
sum of experiences in a multitude; and the products of such communal
experiences, due to the coexistence and mutual working of many minds,
cannot be explained by conditions of the individual mind. Language,
myth, and custom, he says, are the three products of this mind or soul
of the people; and it is not hard to find room for poetry in the
province lying between speech and myth.[908] The problem thus stated and
studied by Wundt has been undertaken by several other writers, notably
by M. Le Bon,[909] and even, in a hostile spirit, by M. Tarde himself.
Von Hartmann[910] studied the “collective mind” as long ago as 1869, and
fitted it into his philosophy of the unconscious; while the _Journal of
Demo-psychology and Philology_, of Steinthal and Lazarus, fought a
losing fight for demos in the old days from 1860, merging at last into
the _Journal of the Ethnological Society_.[911] It is the fashion to
laugh at this old journal, and it had its defects; the student of
poetry, however, will do well to bear in mind that Ten Brink,[912] in
his spirited account of communal song as the basis of English poetry,
expressly declares that he “learned the most” about his subject from an
article by Steinthal in the same periodical. Again, there is Bastian for
ethnology; obscure in expression, hazy in thought, he backs his pet idea
of the _völkergedanken_ with a range of ethnological facts which no one
will neglect or despise. These are positive considerations; and with
them must go a negative but valuable result due to the failure of Tarde,
Kawczynski, and others, in applying their arguments to facts. Take M.
Tarde’s signally unfortunate illustration of his idea that invention is
the only initial power with which one reckons in literature,—that
poetry, for example, always “begins[913] with a book”—a book—“an
_épopée_, some poetical work of great relative perfection, ... some high
initial source.” And what are the examples of this law of poetic
origins? “The _Iliad_, the Bible, Dante.” Here is sheer absurdity. Each
of these cases tends to prove the exact opposite of what M. Tarde would
have it prove. Did he come to this fatal idea, that all great literature
starts with a great book, by reading Hugo’s preface to _Cromwell_?[914]
Worse, even, is his assertion that “modern literature begins with the
_Romance of the Rose_.”[915]
The theory of M. Tarde, noteworthy as it is, and salutary as some of its
appeals must prove in correcting romantic extravagances, cannot be
upheld even as a theory, and breaks down lamentably when applied to
poetical facts. A saner belief would accept the immense part played by
imitation, but would refuse to give it sole possession of the field. It
is the clash of communal and individual tendencies,[916] of centripetal
and centrifugal, with which M. Tarde forgets to reckon; now the
individual invents, rules, awes, masters, and the throng follow like
sheep, and now again this throng is—not _are_—tyrannical to such a
degree that the philosopher of that epoch cries out that there is no
individual initiative, all is law, natural forces, social forces,—and so
comes to an extreme as illogical as that of M. Tarde. It is true that a
work of art is not a mere registry of popular sentiment, of environment,
of the temper of the time; it is also true that the artist cannot take
himself out of those influences. Art is social, and without society
would not exist. It is simple recognition of facts to assert that art,
like religion, law, custom, serves as an index for tendencies which
underlie the thought and emotion of an epoch; it works below the
surface, this movement, and is often belied by all signs that can be
read on the surface, until suddenly these change too, and the period has
registered its characteristics after the fashion of a clock which moves
its hands only at the end of each minute. It is true, moreover, that
this movement must belong to the body in which it takes place; yet it is
also true that the movements of communal thought, as Wundt pointed out,
are different in kind from the movements of individual thought.
But this is too fine-spun stuff for that group of primitive men
concerned with their first effort at song. Granted the communal force
with which we would endow them, what of the instinctive step, gesture,
cry,—can these really be instinctive and not mere imitation of a leader?
As to instinctive utterance, that idea, though somewhat rudely shaken,
still stands.[917] There are instinctive sounds, and man is or was no
exception to the rule. The social influence, assumed by everybody as
real cause of articulate speech, would work not upon a new sound
“invented” by some primitive genius, but upon the instinctive sounds
uttered by each unit of a throng. That individuals discovered or
invented modifications of these sounds, no one will deny; but the
conditions of primitive life were those of a horde, with individuals at
a minimum of importance, so that the earliest progress in speech and
poetry was due to the almost unconscious changes made by a festal throng
under the excitement of social consent,—a very different thing from
invention and imitation as the terms now hold. Whether one wishes to
carry farther this mutual influence of man upon man in a throng equally
active in all its parts, or not, is of little moment. The conditions of
progress in speech and song were immediately communal, in strong
contrast to the isolated, individual, mediating conditions of such
progress at the present day. All we ask of biology is the concession of
instinct; at the basis of human poetry, that vast edifice of art, and,
as it seems to the modern man, of nothing but art, lie instinctive
utterances, homogeneous, if one may judge by chick and bird,[918] and
subject to their first modifications not from individual effort but from
social consent and the enormous force of communal emotion.
Psychology, too, joins biology in allowing that instinctive forms of
utterance and expression in primitive times may have led to that
_gemeinsames dichten_ in chorus, refrain, dance, which is claimed for
nature and opposed to art. Imitation, in any sense that concerns the
argument in hand, is after all a matter of deliberation, reason, choice;
but the expression of emotion in children as in savages is rapid,
instantaneous, instinctive. “Except fear,” says Ribot,[919] “all primary
emotions imply tendencies to movement, sometimes blind and violent, like
natural forces. This is seen in infants, animals, savages, the
barbarians of the first centuries of our era.... The passage of emotion
into action, good or bad, is instantaneous, rapid, and fatal as a reflex
movement.” Panic fright, where animals are almost paralyzed, is, indeed,
a matter of rapid suggestion and imitation in cases where the cause is
not apparent; but panic elation is active, a movement, a sympathy, an
instinctive consent of voice and limb. Moreover, the throng is always to
be kept in mind, and the analogy of children in a family, as well as of
savages brought among civilized folk, is to be held resolutely back; it
is no analogy at all. Who played the suggestive part of parent, of grown
or civilized people, to the imitation of a mass of human beings in those
earliest days? Horde conditions are too easily forgotten, and psychology
needs to take them more into account, just as it is taking instinct
again into favour. Beginning about 1850, a movement against instinct is
plainly traced through the writings of men like Bain and A. R. Wallace;
but the feud was carried too far, and Professor Karl Groos, in one of
the best books[920] which have lately appeared on this subject, notes
the reaction not only in Wundt, but in Lotze, Spencer, Sully, and Ribot,
against this effort to blot the word instinct from our dictionaries.
Groos, who has ample respect for imitation as a leading force in
development of both body and mind, refuses to give it absolute rule.
Play, he says, is not imitation, “but, if the phrase will pass, a
foreboding of the serious occupation of the individual”;[921] and again,
“particularly in the most important and most elementary forms of play,
there can be no question either of imitating the animal’s own previous
activity, _or of imitating the activity of other individuals_.” Mr.
Lloyd Morgan allowed that his young moor-hen, with imitation out of the
question, executing “a pretty and characteristic dance,” showed instinct
“even in the narrower acceptation of the term.” Now if this solitary
activity is “congenital” and “instinctive,” imitation must also yield
some ground to instinct in gregarious play of animals and in communal
play of men. When Wundt[922] says that human life “is permeated through
and through with instinctive action, determined in part by intelligence
and volition,” he states in scientific terms the old dualism of nature
and art, of throng and artist, at which the rationalists of criticism
have directed so many attacks. That fascinating book, Hudson’s
_Naturalist on the La Plata_, gives evidence about gregarious play among
animals.[923] All mammals and birds, he says, have “more or less regular
or set performances with or without sound, or composed of sound
exclusively ... performances which in many animals are only discordant
cries and chorus and uncouth irregular motions,” yet, “in the more
aerial, graceful, and melodious kinds, take immeasurably higher, more
complex, and more beautiful forms.” Again, “every species, or group of
species, has its own inherited form or style of performance; and however
rude and irregular this may be ... _that is the form in which the
feeling will always be expressed_.” Plainly, for whatever reason, the
individual is here under the control of the species; and imitation
cannot be the sole explaining cause either of the impulse or of the
performance. In fact, as Groos concludes,[924] in regard to play “the
instincts are sole foundation. Foundation, for not all play is pure work
of instinct; on the contrary, the higher one proceeds, the richer and
more delicate grow those psychological elements which are added to the
simple impulse of nature, ennoble it, elevate it, and now and again
almost conceal it. But the foundation is instinct.”
What Professor Groos has not done in his interesting books is to give
adequate importance to the choral and communal fact; he neglects the
antithesis between common action and imitated action in a social group.
This choral impulse may be referred to a pleasure in common, instinctive
action, rarely noted by psychologists, which is a quite different affair
from the pleasure of imitating as well as from the pleasure of seeing or
hearing a thing done. Groos himself notes that the mass-play of birds is
like the mass-dance of primitive men which sprang from sexual
excitement. Still, in the table[925] printed at the end of his earlier
book one sees how completely he leaves the choral and communal case out
of account. He recognizes in the first column of this table the
representation of self, the personal impulse, but not as a social
expression by social consent; these forms of play should differ
according to the solitary or social character of the performance, and
this again not simply in terms of personal instinct and communal
imitation. There is a social or communal personality, at all events
where human society is in question, created by any combined action and
deriving from the instinctive, not necessarily imitative acts of
individuals as conscious parts of a whole. Society is not the sum of
individuals, but the mass of them, differing as a mass in its parts from
these parts as individuals, plus the greater or less influence of
generations of previous masses,—in traditions, custom, and the like.
Dead and living form a combination partly organic and vital, partly
immaterial; against this stands the centrifugal, thinking, protesting,
innovating individual. But even ignoring tradition, the difference
holds. If I vote with a party, and “it” gains, my joy is not mine plus
the joy of all who voted with me, but mine because I am a part of the
voting body. How much stronger the direct case under almost exclusively
communal conditions! Communal elation, quite apart from personal
elation, any one can still study in his own mind, but under conditions
which make his elation a thing of shame to his intellectual, critical
self. This shame, which breeds the “mugwump” and breaks up political
parties, barely existed in primitive life,—so sociology concludes with
no dissenting voice. Communal elation, instinctive expression in
consent, began, by Donovan’s reckoning,[926] in the spontaneous
“play-excitement” of a festal throng, which may or may not have
parallels in the play of beasts and birds; here were human fellowship,
homogeneous conditions, “a common cause of excitement,” and a common
expression of it in the social consent of rhythm. Donovan, too, has a
table[927] to illustrate all this; “play-excitement,” instinctive,
drifts into “habits of movement” and into song; individual song-making
is a later affair, and is developed “out of the racial memories.” So
great a factor was this communal elation, this play-excitement, in the
making of poetry. But life has never been all play; poetry echoes,
perhaps even clearer than in the case of play, the stress and pain of
human effort. As was shown in preceding pages, Bücher laid stress upon
the instinctive cries and motions of labour, the rhythm of individual
and social work. Rhythm, he insisted, “springs from the organic nature
of man”; it is automatic, instinctive,[928] and nowhere so much as in
labour. Nor were the realms of play and labour very far apart. Treading
the grapes of Dionysos, treading the wild dance of Dionysos,—there was
little space between the two activities, and no distinction at all so
far as rhythm and instinctive motion were concerned. In brief, whether
one takes the instinct of play, as preparation for work, with Groos, or
the play-excitement, with Donovan, or the instinctive rhythm furnished
by work pure and simple, with Bücher, there is ample recognition in each
case for the spontaneous, and in two of the cases for the communal, as
essential elements in the beginnings of poetry. The conclusions of
psychology[929] and sociology are still in tune with the dualism hinted
long since by Aristotle, and stated just a century ago by A. W.
Schlegel. Aristotle referred the beginning of poetry to two
instincts,—imitation and “the instinct for harmony and rhythm”; but the
art itself came only with individual effort. “Persons ... with this
natural gift little by little improved upon their early efforts till
their rude improvisations gave birth to poetry. Poetry now branched off
in two directions _according to the individual character of the
writers_.”[930] So, too, he speaks of tragedy, which, like comedy, “was
at first mere improvisation,” festal excitement of the throng;[931] and
there is the same hint of communal spontaneity coming under artistic
control when Aristotle notes that “Æschylus diminished the importance of
the chorus,” and when he speaks of a time when “poetry was of the
satyric order, _and had greater affinities with dancing_.” Would there
were more historical work of this sort from that “honest and keen-eyed
observer,” as Schlegel calls him! Could the dualism be more plainly set
forth? Döring[932] points out that Aristotle distinguishes two kinds of
dithyramb; one is natural, spontaneous, improvised, and this is nothing,
in his eyes, but the raw material of poetry; the other is the dithyramb
of art. Schlegel’s position has been defined already, but part of a
brief[933] for a lecture which was never written out, may be noted as in
point; he is more generous to the ruder stage of verse than Aristotle
seems to be. “The idea of a natural history of poetry.... End of this.
_Transition to art and to the consciousness of it. All primitive,
original songs inspiration of the moment._” Now the evidence of
ethnology has set this last remark upon the surest base;[934] no fact is
better established for savage poetry. Creatures of impulse, without
individual thinking, without individual plan and purpose, with uniform
and circumscribed conditions, with homogeneous natures, they are swayed
by communal emotion to a degree which seems incredible to the man of
culture. Schlegel himself had an eye on this sort of evidence.
Speaking[935] of the songs before Homer, he calls them “quite artless
outpourings of lyrical impulse”; they were “made up of a few simple
words and outcries, constantly repeated, such as we find to-day among
savages.” Again, returning to the dualism of instinctive and artistic,
one may note his happy phrase for it when he speaks[936] of “the change
of nature-purpose into art-purpose.”
A deeper study of this change, a study of the beginnings and development
of Hellenic poetry, was made in one of the earlier and saner works of
Nietzsche,[937] written while he was still in philological harness and
before he broke with Wagner. Art, he thinks, depends on the enduring
strife and occasional reconciliation of two opposing forces which the
Greeks embodied in Dionysos and Apollo. Apollo finds expression in
sculpture, in the individual work of art, Dionysos in the impersonal art
of music; the genius of Greece united these two in Attic tragedy. Apollo
is the personification of that _principium individuationis_, the
deification of man as artist, as the solitary boatman whom Schopenhauer
imagined[938] driven and tossed in this frail bark of individuality upon
a sea of troubles. Now “individual” is as much as to say bounded,
definite, restricted; hence the Hellenic dislike of exaggeration, its
love of artistic reticence and restraint, and that “Know Thyself” as
final word of the god who is simply a deification of the individual. But
there is the other side. From time to time, say in intoxication, which
has its god in all popular mythologies, or in those great upheavals of
communal emotion due to victory, to love, to the coming of spring, rises
the Dionysian impulse and shatters all sense of the individual. Such a
movement made the chorus of the Greeks as well as the St. John and the
St. Vitus dances of mediæval Europe. Man the individual, so Nietzsche
puts it in his own dithyrambic style, sinks back, a prodigal son, into
the bosom of that nature which he has deserted. “By song and dance man
shows himself a member of the higher unity; he forgets how to walk, to
talk; he is on the way, dancing and leaping as he goes, fairly to fly
aloft. His gestures tell of the magic which holds him.... _He is no
longer artist, he is art_,”—and all this in the communal, Dionysian
frenzy, the folk as a whole, and the individual lost in the throng.
_Turba fit mens._ Here in spontaneous song, dance, gesture, of the crowd
is the opposite of that reticent, deliberative Apollinian art; “this
demonic folksong” is set over against the “artist of Apollo, chanting
psalms to his harp.”[939] The Greek dramatic chorus, Nietzsche goes on
to say, is simply the old Dionysian throng, once transformed by their
spontaneous excitement into satyrs,[940] pure nature and instinct, now
conventionalized and brought under artistic control; the separation of
chorus and spectators is artificial, for at bottom there is no
difference between them, and all make a single body of dancing and
singing satyrs,—that is, the greater part of the throng now dance by
deputy.[941] We are absurdly narrow, he thinks, in applying modern ideas
of authorship to primitive conditions. “Dionysian ecstasy,”—and
Nietzsche’s fantastic style[942] should not hide the soundness of his
idea,—“Dionysian ecstasy can give to a whole throng this artistic power
of seeing itself ringed about by a host of spiritual forms with which it
feels itself essentially one.” This passing into another character on
the part of a throng, homogeneous of course and instinctive, is the
beginning of the drama, and differs from the work of the rhapsodist.
“All other choral lyric of the Greeks,” says Nietzsche, “is only the
Apollinian solitary singer intensified; but in the dithyramb there
stands before us a community of unconscious actors[943] who see one
another as transformed.” The drama, in short, came from the union of a
Dionysian spontaneous, communal song, in itself chaotic outburst of
passion, and the ordering, restraining, artistic, deliberative spirit
which breathed order into this chaos and is known as the spirit of
Apollo. Thinking on the functions of this artistic, Apollinian spirit,
one is reminded of De Vigny’s definition of art, as “la verité
choisie”[944]; while it is clear that in the cadences of his verse, and
in the emotion that surges through it, the poet is still a part of that
Dionysian throng. In a word, the Apollinian process, which is the only
process one now connects with one’s idea of art, or of poetry,
intellectualizes and therefore individualizes emotion. An instructive
essay by Dr. Krejči[945] regards the fundamental dualism of poetry as a
contrast between the involuntary or mechanical element, and the element
of logical or voluntary creation. As we follow back the course of
poetry, he asserts, the voluntary and creative element decreases, while
there is a steady gain in the automatic, the mechanical, and the
spontaneous,—a gain which is made still more probable by Bücher’s theory
of rhythm. If one could see the conditions and hear the songs of a
primitive time, one would find poetry, so Krejči makes bold to assert,
entirely swayed by the unreflective, mechanical, and spontaneous
element.[946] In this sense, Apollo is thought mastering emotion, art in
control of that spontaneous, chaotic, and yet rhythmic expression of the
Dionysian throng.
Instinctive and spontaneous expression, then, is to be assumed for
primitive song; but the communal idea involves something more. It
demands a homogeneous body of people. Again tradition points this way,
as in the case of rhythm and of the dualism between nature and art;
again, as before, voices are raised in protest; again M. Tarde is in the
field with a formula directly opposed to the formula of tradition; and
again we must turn to modern science for some definite answer, only to
find it fairly in favour of tradition and backed in this respect by
ample evidence from ethnology and literature. Modern psychology, it
seems, leaves one free to conceive a throng of primitive men so
homogeneous that a common emotion would call out a common and
simultaneous expression. Thoughts diverge, and thought, or purpose,
controls modern art as it controls modern emotion; but primitive folk
did little thinking, if one may here trust ethnology and the savage,
backed by the controlling evolutionary facts of literature.[947] Savage
thinking is limited to the few objects of the savage world, and any
effort beyond this is painful; the wild man complains of headache the
moment he is forced to “think.” Deliberation implies memory, and purpose
regards future complications; but we saw that the Botocudos have no
legends, and we know how accurately care for future needs marks progress
in culture; barring those ancestral shadows, as with Eskimos, it is true
of all savages that they have no history at all. So utterly disappears
our sharp individual thinking as one touches savage life. Herodotus was
surprised to find a tribe “that had no name”; but, as Schultze notes,
Bushmen now do not know one another by any individual appellation. The
language of all savage tribes reflects this lack of individual thinking
in our sense; and it is to tribal emotion, instincts of tribal life and
their social expression, that one always looks for what must pass as the
intellectual life of the savage. The individual savages do not think,
but they feel; and feelings, unlike thoughts, tend to converge. Nor,
again, a most important point, is the communal elation of the primitive
throng to be confused with the imitation of a modern crowd, yielding,
after individual mental suicide, to the suggestions of a leader who does
the thinking while the crowd acts out his thought. Ethnology records the
fact, but few if any scholars have noted its significance, that savages
are formidable and command civilized respect in proportion as they act
in mass and as a unit, while modern man is contemptible in the mass;
modern man is formidable as an individual, while the individual savage
is little better than an idiot. Detached from the throng in which and by
which he thinks, feels, acts, he is a silent, stolid fellow, into whose
silence romantic folk like Châteaubriand and Cooper have read vast
philosophies, and from whose forced conversation, uncentred and mobile
as a child’s, missionaries have drawn most of their conflicting and
suspicious statements about savage myths, customs, beliefs, and ways of
thought. Evidence about savages in the mass, about their communal life,
on the other hand, is nearly all straightforward and consistent. Hence a
conclusion of vast reach and meaning for the beginnings of poetry: just
as individuals are superior now, just as the mob, the masses, the
_profanum volgus_, what not, are objects of contempt in these latter
days,[948] so this mob, these masses, were far and away superior to
individuals in conditions of primitive life and at the start of social
progress. By the very terms of the case, and in the struggle for
existence, social man was forced to win the early fight by social
consent, and this was the overwhelming fact to which all individual
considerations had to yield. This superiority attached, of course, to
what the mass did and said and sang as compared with individual
utterance. Human nature remains unchanged, but human conditions are
always changing. One must not treat primitive man, with regard to the
conditions and outcome of his life, in terms of modern man. The mob, the
masses, exist for us mainly as the raw material of social and political
factions. Lack of bread, of work, or the infringement of fancied rights,
leads to a common and intense emotion, the first requisite of mass
movement; a leader of some sort, with a plan which comes of more or less
thinking, sways the mob to a definite act. But the behaviour of a mob,
the doing and expression of a mob, are now in sharp antithesis to that
doing and expression of individual men at the bidding of individual
thought, of deliberation, plan, and definite purpose. Conditions of
primitive life, so all evidence goes to prove, reversed this order; and
it is a totally evil process when one transfers the value of a modern
mass of men to the communal throng, the horde, if one will, which began
our social progress. Hence the error in Tarde’s ingenious argument.[949]
Attacking the idea that a mass of men ever created language, he
conceives the mass in terms of a mob, language in terms of our highly
intellectualized and individualized speech; and he applies the same
impossible test to religion and to poetry. Who, he cries, “ever saw a
masterpiece of art ... planned and wrought out by the collective
inspiration of ten or a hundred poets or artists?” None of us,
certainly, save in some form of survival hard to recognize, has seen
such a thing. Primitive man, on the other hand, knew nothing of a
poetical masterpiece in M. Tarde’s sense. When communal “inspiration”
was dominant, when the throng absorbed the individual, when thought
hardly dared to show its solitary visage before a solid communal
emotion, the masterpiece of art, that is, of individual planning, hardly
had a place; under modern conditions of individual thinking, communal
emotion is just as unproductive in the æsthetic realm. The masterpiece
waited for the master; and one remembers M. Tarde’s delusion about the
origins of all poetry in some “great book.” In stating his case for the
artist, which is perfectly true for modern conditions, he is really
stating the case, by implication, for primitive communal song.
But was this throng really homogeneous? Are the facts in accord with
this theory of communal conditions and the outcome of them? Mr. Spencer,
as every one knows, laid down the law that all social progress is from
the homogeneous to the heterogeneous;[950] and M. Brunetière has adopted
this principle as a guide to the study of literary development,[951]
regarding it as the one doctrine of evolution, held by Spencer as by
Haeckel, which stands the test of criticism and is beyond the reach of
doubt. The history of culture, so M. le Bon thinks,[952] points the same
way; “counter to our dreams of equality, the result of modern
civilization is not to make men more and more equal, but to make them
more and more different.” Comte assumed that the common trait of biology
and sociology is this passing from the whole to the parts; and although
Mr. Spencer, with his doctrine of cells, has largely set Comte aside,
that part of the old system is intact. Popular books, supposed to sum up
the best results of science, are to the same effect. In primitive times,
says Reclus,[953] “all felt, thought, and acted in concert. Everything
leads us to believe that at the outset collectivism was at its maximum
and individualism at its minimum. The individual,” he declares, “was not
the father of society; society was the mother of the individual.”
Studies of prehistoric man, as in the stone age, point to a sameness of
individuals now quite impossible to imagine.[954] Hennequin is not with
Tarde on this point; the primitive community was homogeneous, and its
members “were all nearly exactly alike in body and in mind.”[955]
Gumplowicz is explicit for the beginning of society in homogeneous
hordes.[956] A recent writer who has made a study of the horde and the
family in primitive development,[957] and who is by no means of the
extreme school,—he rejects promiscuity, for example,—declares the horde
to have been the starting-point of social progress. Grosse, casting
about for a state of savage life which shall give the best idea of the
life of primitive man, finds it in a “homogeneous, undifferentiated
mass,” thus backing Spencer at least in his sociological assertion;[958]
and the best authorities bear out this view. The hordes which serve, in
lack of better ethnological material, as the type of primitive man, are
small and scattered; they have no arts, no division of labour;
individual property is almost unknown, and the one piece of property,
their hunting-ground, belongs to all the adult males in common. As
little difference of rank exists as of property; seldom are there any
leaders, and where, in a few cases, these are found, their authority is
pitifully small. The only individuals who break this “homogeneous and
undifferentiated” monotony are the supposed possessors of a magical
power.[959] So runs the certainly unprejudiced account of Grosse. Even
by Sir Henry Maine’s extreme patriarchal views, the family itself, the
first social group, was a homogeneous and undifferentiated mass in those
characteristics with which the student of poetry must deal. Mr. Tylor’s
group of Caribs,[960] with uniformity of physical and mental structure,
amply bears out the communal and homogeneous argument for earliest song;
but perhaps the shortest way with dissenters is a passage by Waitz,[961]
where he sums up the evidence for this uniformity of the individuals in
a horde and in social groups of a low order. All their relations of
life, he says, are simple, and are bent in one direction, the procuring
of food; there is a maximum of instinct and common appetite, and almost
no stir of mind such as follows the division of labour; and this uniform
mental habit works upon the outward person, so that, physically as well
as intellectually, the single man fails to stand out from the mass.
Waitz, who quotes Humboldt to the same purpose, thus explains why the
Romans, with their complicated civilization, found the Germans all
looking alike, all of one type.[962] Wherever the horde is visible, even
in a comparatively civilized case, as with the Scottish clans, there the
resemblance of individuals, the emphasis of a type, is unmistakable; and
it is precisely under these conditions that we find the survivals of
communal song. Primitive man, moreover, dependent on the nature about
him, and acting in his horde like other creatures in the face of a power
which they fear, surrounded himself with a like horde of spirits,[963]
themselves as little differentiated or distinguished in any way as the
human horde which conceived them. Even under the highest civilization
such conditions of the horde survive in communal worship. True, the
informing power of Christianity is its individualism, its “flight of the
one to the One”; but the litany, the general confession, the spirit of
congregational worship, are suggestive not so much of the “O God, I” as
of the “O Spirits, We,”—homage once paid by all the living souls to all
the souls of the dead, and still lingering as a shadowy survival in two
great festivals of the church. Religious emotion is still the strongest
communal element in modern times, particularly when it takes the form of
a great revival.
Against all this in general and Mr. Spencer’s theory in particular, M.
Tarde, as was noted, set up his theory of the infinitesimal and the
cell; against the narrower idea of differentiation in poetry,—epic,
lyric, and dramatic regarded as developments from an earlier compact
form in which the three were still united,—Professor Grosse,[964] who
was so bold in his assertion of homogeneous life, asserts heterogeneous
poetry from the beginning. Yet he presently lays down[965] the larger
truth, which carries with it a confusion of his own particular denial on
poetic grounds. “In the lowest stage of culture,” he says, “art appears,
at least for us, simply and only as a social phenomenon.... In the
higher stages, however, along with the influence which art exerts upon
social life, there comes more and more into view the value of art for
the development of individual life.... _Between the individual and the
social function of art is a deep antithesis._” In other words, he proves
by his admirably selected facts, throughout the whole book, that the art
of primitive times was mainly social, whereas the art of modern times is
mainly individual. Moreover, he is very sure that primitive society was
homogeneous. The inference is inevitable. Dr. Wallaschek, we saw, set
down the “collectiveness of amusement” as main characteristic of
primitive life. These things cannot be said in one breath, only to be
followed in another by such amazing contradictions as the implication of
Grosse[966] that the egoist in man is the first of poets, or the jaunty
talk of Scherer about primitive poets and their public, their royalties,
their authorship, when only a few pages away he tells us that “mass
poetry,” poetry of the throng, is the differencing element in primitive
æsthetic life. Posnett, to whom all students of poetry are under deep
obligations for his vigorous sketch of comparative literature, does
justice to the communal element in early song and reduces the
individual, heterogeneous element to a minimum; his formula for poetic
development is “the progressive deepening and widening of
personality.”[967]
It is to be conceded that a superficial view reverses this order of
progress. What does one meet oftener in history and song,—
O nimis optato saeclorum tempore nati,
Heroes, salvete, deum genus[968]—
than talk of a “heroic” age in the remote past, and of the commonplace,
average-ridden present, the epoch, as Le Bon calls it, of crowds?
Against the mediocrity, the hustings, the juries, the lynching-bees, the
“suffrage of the plough,” the dead level of uninteresting masses, there
floats up a vision of the knight on his quest, of the solitary hero at
odds, like Hercules, with divinity itself, of the good old king who sits
to judge his people in the gates. Have not we moderns the homogeneous
mass, and was not the individual a child of the early world? Wilhelm von
Humboldt[969] finds the secret of Homer in his “sense of individuality”
and “individualizing impulse.” Haym, a careful writer, talks of the
individualism of the Middle Ages as opposed to modern times.
Blémont[970] admits that democracy is individualism, but contends that
it makes for anything rather than for individuality, and simply levels
human life; the mind ceases to be free, and men act in masses, simplify
everything, make life monotonous. Against this, however, one needs only
to recall that quotation just made from Le Bon: the process seems to be
toward sameness, but is really toward diversity. Men may dress alike,
may show concerted action, may discourage the unusual and set up a god
of averages; but the individual is stronger than ever before, and he
does more thinking for himself. Men move in masses, true; but it is less
and less the herd instinct and more and more the voluntary coherence of
thinking minds. Instinct has yielded to thought. The history of
civilization is the making and unmaking of communities; society means
more than it ever meant; but this is not denying the fundamental law of
progress from homogeneous to heterogeneous, from communal to individual
and artistic. One must not juggle with these terms. It is true that an
army, a group of men for any purpose, which marches as one man, is the
end and not the beginning of communal effort. It is true that the savage
is notoriously fitful; there is anything but splendid purpose in his
eyes; combined action, under certain conditions—that is, conditions of
civilization—is difficult even for members of one tribe; their
prevailing force seems to be individual and centrifugal; the bond that
binds them to the community often seems slight beyond belief; as to
their feelings, just now assumed to be almost a unit, “emotional
variability” is the report of many a traveller.[971] This has been
extended to primitive life, and to the moral side of the case; early
man, says Pulszky,[972] was ruled by “unqualified selfishness,” and
asserted “his individuality in every respect.” The same author speaks of
“a gradation, the first word of which is selfishness, and the last,
public sentiment.” Where in all this coil of caprice and incoherence is
the homogeneous community expressing a common emotion by a common
utterance? The answer is clear enough. Escape from this caprice, this
incoherence, this centrifugal force, is found primarily in social
consent, in the communal utterance which began the long struggle against
purely selfish ends; and communal utterance begins, as has been shown,
in the consent of rhythm. Strong as the selfish impulses were, so strong
the need for at least an incipient check upon them in social action; and
from social action and utterance sprang all those altruistic virtues
which Pulszky lauds—patriotism, piety, duty to kin and to the race. The
end of society is to take brute man and make him a civilized man, to let
“the ape and tiger” in him die; man when nearest ape and tiger, at the
beginning of social union, was individually brutish, stolid, selfish,
idiotic, fitful, in a word, individually bad; and just so far as he
submitted to social consent, lived for the horde, the clan, kin,
country, so far he was socially good. Hence it is easy to see that in
this homogeneous society all the beginnings of civilization, art,
poetry, religion, would be overwhelmingly homogeneous, social, communal;
the condition of their existence was the abnegation of the individual
man in favour of the social man. In a word, society itself began in this
social consent, and since it had such tremendous forces of selfishness
arrayed against it in the primitive individual instincts,[973] the only
way in which it could make its way was by utter suppression of the
individual in so far as he was a party to the social bond itself. Hence
a contradiction that is only apparent. The savage as a creature of
animal instinct is as capricious and centrifugal as one will; as a
creature of social act, emotion, thought, he has no individuality, and
puts none into his expression; for it was precisely this tuition of
social consent which little by little gave him the impulse to deed,
feeling, deliberation, as member of society. Here is the solution of the
problem. Arab boatmen who can not pull ropes in unison,[974] sing and
dance together with a consent that astonishes the traveller. They are
capricious, fitful individuals in regard to the new kind of work, but
compact, communal society in regard to the festal consent which united
their wandering hordes thousands of years ago. Descriptions of the
savage state easily bear out this contradiction and this solution, if
one will analyze the facts; and this is why one finds Spencer and Grosse
asserting on one page the homogeneity and collectiveness of savage
communities, and on another page the heterogeneous, capricious,
individual, selfish traits of the savage himself. In literature we do
not so clearly see both sides. Throng-poetry is rarely recorded; one
merely describes a village or tribal chorus,—and takes down the
individual song. Luckily, however, the “collective character” of
primitive amusement is made as certain as such things can be, by the
ethnological evidence considered in the chapter on rhythm, by the
evidence of popular survivals collected in the chapter on communal song
and dance, and by the evolutionary curves of poetry itself. Considering
all this evidence, one escapes the snare laid in one’s path by the idea
of individualism in the savage. That “emotional variability”[975] is
individual indeed, and disappears precisely as the communal expression
of emotion comes into play. It has been proved, too, that, like speech,
rhythmic utterance and rhythm itself in the sense which Bücher gives to
it, are not so much the outcome as the occasion of social union. The
sense of this union, “the consciousness of kind” as Professor Giddings
calls it, is at bottom a sense of order, and the “instinct for order” is
best expressed in rhythm; rhythm, it was seen, is not invention and
imitation, but discovery and consent. Anterior to any process of
invention and imitation, which is a social act, must be the condition
which makes this act possible,—a consciousness of kind and a social
consent. Instinctive emotions of a homogeneous horde felt in common on a
great occasion gave birth to a common expression in which the separate
individuals discovered this social consent. Invention and imitation,
begun as early as one will after this social consent, gave them the
conditions of their activity; but they must not be put before it, nor,
for considerable stretches of social development, could they be said to
have an important place, since they grew with the growing importance of
the individual in society. If one may dogmatize on the matter, one may
think of three gradations in social progress. First, there is the
consent due mainly to external suggestion working on instinctive
movements: in the dance it is due to that festive joy of victory and
that “rhythmic beating” outward, that rhythmic impulse inward, which
Donovan describes; and in labour, as Bücher thinks of it, it is either
the consent of a solitary labourer with the labour itself, or, more
often, the consent of several labourers with those instinctive and
necessary movements. Vocal and significant cries went with the movements
in each case. Secondly, but contemporary with the other, one may figure
a less festal occasion and a more active personal agency; five or six
men marching abreast fall into step and find the labour of marching is
lightened,—not a very different matter from the dance, but less communal
and more unrestrained. Imitation comes slightly into play, but it is
wholly subordinate to consent. Thirdly, imitation and invention get
their rights where the individual discovers or invents an isolated act,
in various degrees of artistic and social significance, from the jump
over an obstacle by the leader in a row of men marching in Indian file,
the sheep-over-a-fence process, as Mr. Lloyd Morgan calls it, up to the
clever throwing of a spear, the tying together of two vine branches, the
fashioning of a spear-head, which are invention outright, triumph of
individual thinking, plan and deliberation detached from communal
emotion. The leader is on hand; the “headless” hordes have heads.
Spontaneity, instinct, the automatic, still dominant in communal dance
and song, in reminiscential rites of every sort, have yielded in active
life to thought and purpose of the individual, to division of labour, to
that power to plan a protracted piece of work and carry it out in detail
which makes for progress. But before this formula of invention and
imitation can apply, before one talks of the leader and the led, there
must be a coherent body which can resolve itself into these relations of
parts; and precisely here is the beginning of society in social consent,
and here, too, the beginning of poetry in communal and rhythmic
utterance.
One thus faces a seeming paradox in the conception of poetry as at once
the highest expression of the differentiated, deliberate, artistic
individual, and, at the same time, the fullest expression of a
homogeneous, spontaneous, automatic mass; the paradox vanishes at once
if one will only see in rhythm consent and emotional cadence of a
dancing, singing multitude, and in artistic phrase and thought the
deliberate control and plan of the individual,—Apollo in the foreground,
and the background filled with a festal Dionysian throng. Why refuse to
see this social background, or, in another figure, this communal
foundation of poetry? Guyau puts beyond doubt the essentially social
character of the art, even under modern conditions; but one makes a
phrase, and returns to the old way. A long succession of deliverances on
solitary genius has befogged the critical vision and blotted this
lode-star of social conditions from the sky. In other fields such a
mistake is unknown. The student of political science would never deny
that a representative in Congress, as his name implies, is the deputy of
a throng that once, say in the forests of Germany, would have come
together as a compact legislative body and settled questions of state.
But in poetry the poet ends and the poet began, a creature of solitude,
now in commerce with the immensities and infinities, and now holding out
his hat to the public for a _honorarium_,—the public’s only part in the
poetic process. If the public is brought in, it is to explain the poet,
as with Sainte-Beuve and Taine, or to explain the gentle reader, as with
Hennequin. Poetry is a whisper, a confidence, to this gentle reader.
When the throng, not to speak of the silence about its active functions
in poetry, catches up a poem that it likes, and roars it, as it roared
Mr. Kipling’s _Absent-minded Beggar_, over all England, this is very
salt in the wounds of the critic, who declares, with some justice, that
here is no “poetry” at all; while the same author’s _Recessional_, with
its individual appeal, its recoil from popular sentiment, its assertion
of thought over emotion, is set down, and rightly, as “poetry of a high
order.” Judging poetry by the standard of modern conditions, which are
wholly individual, artistic, intellectual, the critic is right. The
war-song of to-day, all lyrics of the throng, have a hollow and unreal
ring in them; even Tennyson’s _Light Brigade_ somehow gives the effect
of armour which is laced with bonnet-strings. The real song of war in an
age of communal poetry was heard at that moment which Müllenhoff calls
the supreme moment of all Germanic life, when the images of the gods
were brought out, when the wedge was formed,—leaders of battle at the
thin forward end and women and children in the rear,—the whole community
at hand; with the hurling of Woden’s spear, all swept into the fight,
chanting the great chorus of war. Here is the folk communal in
organization to great extent, but not quite homogeneous; not a
leaderless horde, but still holding to elements of that primitive life;
here is still poetry of the people. Communal elation still furnishes the
main cause of poetic utterance; the utterance is immediate; and
development of the individual has not yet sundered the making and the
hearing of a song.[976]