CHAPTER VII

THE EARLIEST DIFFERENTIATIONS OF POETRY

That primitive horde with its uncouth but rhythmic dance, its well timed

but seemingly futile song, has now, let us hope, found its justification

as the source of poetry. Not like the dance and song among Botocudos and

Veddahs, a thing of degeneration or at least of sterile and unpromising

kind, was this beginning of the beginnings; rather a feat of vast moment

for the coming race of men, an achievement not to be measured by

ordinary phrase. In the long reaches of growth and differentiation which

stretch from this beginning to the present time, we are now to take our

steps forward; the backward mutters of dissevering power which sought to

resolve poetry unto its communal elements must now yield to a record of

its progress; and our first task is to catch sight of the poet, the

master of his art, as he detaches himself from the throng and sets out

upon that path which leads him to his present state of grace. Another

and an interesting question concerns the waning communal element, how it

loses its hold upon poetical production, and how far it still modifies

the poet’s work.

Where and how, then, does the poet appear? Coöperation, however unlike

what one now understands by coöperation, was the beginning of social

progress, and the discovery or perception of rhythm had to play the main

part in this first communal act whether of work or of play. Rhythm is

the expression of a sense of coherence; and the first coherence was of a

kind to suppress the individual: all evidence goes to show this fact.

The Veddahs live mainly in isolated pairs, a brutish existence, except

when some great tribal interest brings them together; at such a time

that monotonous, leaderless dance about the arrow, man clasped close to

man in an almost solid ring,—the Botocudos, too, and many other tribes,

are pictured as thus forming a fairly compact mass, with only a part of

the individual body free to move in unison with the same part of every

other body,—is the way by which the clan or horde finds itself in this

unwonted relation. Then the individual detaches himself from his singing

with the throng, and for a verse or so sings to the throng; but how

tentative, how momentary his effort, and how short his range away from

the repeated communal chorus! For this individual is not acting as

individual, acting freely in isolated life, but as member of a body

which is just beginning to be a body and to understand its power of

social and therefore of mutual influence. Moreover, as Spencer points

out, primitive imagination is purely reminiscent, not constructive; the

earliest working of what may pass as poetical imagination, then, is an

individual utterance reminiscent of communal utterance and prolonging it

with shy and tentative variations. This is precisely what one finds in

the song of Veddahs and Botocudos. In the Eskimo singing-house the

soloist has come to greater importance; he sings always a song of his

own making, while the women join in the chorus “_amna aya_, the never

failing end of each verse.” In this singing-house “almost every great

success in hunting is celebrated ... and especially the capture of a

whale.” When the soloist is not singing these adventures, or satiric

songs, also great favorites, the flyting or song-duel is in order.[977]

Great, however, as the independence of the singer seems compared with a

bard of the Botocudos, the chorus is still imperious, and no one singer

is eminent. Everybody sings,—not only in chorus, but in his turn as

soloist; and everybody makes his own song. How utterly alien to this

conception of early social life is the monarchical idea, the great man

idea, human history begun by the tyrant of a submissive band! Take a

half civilized state of society, as among the Germans described by

Tacitus; here it is evident that democracy prevailed in peace, while in

war, with concessions to men of “royal” blood, the strongest and boldest

men acted as chieftains gathered in the thin end of the wedge, going

into battle as exemplars and leaders, but not as generals, not as

commanding, overseeing genius of a deliberate plan. As with government

and war, so with property. Grosse[978] notes in those tribes that

approach primitive ways few marks of individual ownership, but a mass of

marks which denote claims of the horde or clan. So, too, with language,

a problem which nobody in these days is fain to undertake;[979] but

surely the mystic style of Donovan’s article must not hide the soundness

of his views,[980] already noted, on the festal origin of human speech.

Religion, however, may have offered an earlier chance for centrifugal

forces. It is probable that the medicine man, the shaman, with his

visions, his abnormal states and doings, closely connected with that

perilous stuff which every man of the horde had upon his individual

heart in ordinary dreams, furnished the earliest example of a commanding

personality acting in such an eccentric way as to make sharpest contrast

with the coherence of communal action. Here, said the community, here is

a man with a “gift,” a man apart; and his use of wild dance and song in

exorcism may have begun at a very early date. Later, too, something of

the sacred and the mysterious inherent in a shaman’s vocation may have

been transferred to the poet; priest and singer alike came to refer

their ecstasy to a divine source. Yet magical ceremonies, whatever the

advocates of prose-poetry may say, offer no good opportunity to observe

the actual beginnings of the poet. We can see him detaching himself, not

as magician or in special rites, but as a simple singer and dancer, from

the singing and dancing throng; and this is the proper point of

departure in our study, for the good reason that here is a fissiparous

birth. Offspring of the communal chant by the simplest process, his own

chant merely continues that of the community, which for an instant or so

turns silent and passive for his profit. Again, this first of singers is

no artist in verse, favourite of the muses, no man apart, son of the

golden clime and solitary wanderer over Parnassus; he is every member of

the throng in turn. To prove this vital point, we must not only take

ethnological evidence, here conclusive as well as abundant, but must

also follow that method which has led to some good results in foregoing

pages of this book; we must try to connect the evidence of savage life

with those survivals in an advanced stage of culture which by their mere

survival indicate the persistence of a habit rooted deep in human

history and human nature. We must study by this double light a few facts

in regard to that improvisation in which Aristotle found the beginning

of poetic art.

The fissiparous birth of individual from communal poetry is confirmed by

the process observed everywhere among savage tribes. Solitary

performance has come there to a considerable pitch of skill, but it

yields always in importance to the chorus, and along with profit and

reputation of a sort it often involves a kind of shame. Prostitutes do

the individual singing and dancing in many parts of the Orient;[981]

singing-women and dance-girls, even in advanced stages of culture, pay

dearly for their eminence; and something of this decline in caste clings

to the most respectable solitary performances, now and here, of the

skilled “entertainer.” The mimes of the Middle Ages were often held to

be without the pale, not only of the law, but of the church itself;[982]

and while other causes worked to this end, something must be conceded to

that attitude of every public to its entertainer or even

teacher,—extravagant praise and delight, extravagant rewards, but with

it all a sense of aloofness, an inclination to wave away this

centrifugal element which has set itself over against the communal body,

now an indulgent contempt, where mere pastime is concerned, and now

dislike and distrust at an exhibition of independent thought.

It has been repeatedly shown that short improvisations are the earliest

form of individual poetic art, and are sung in the intervals of a

chorus, or to relieve the monotony of labour, where again they detach

themselves from the parent refrain, modify it, add to it, and so build

up a song. There is no need to dwell on the evidence for savage

improvisation. The African is amazing in his power to turn an event into

verse; it is a communal affair for the most part, with a chorus in the

background. At public dances the Indians of America improvise, man for

man, indefinitely, leaning also on the monotonous refrain. Throughout

the South-Sea Islands[983] improvisation of songs is as common as

speech; even the children improvise. The lower the level of culture, the

more general this gift of improvising; “among the Andamans every one

composes songs.”[984] The same holds of Australia, of far Siberia, and

throughout the savage world; moreover in all these cases the habit is

not solitary but festal. The oldest poetry known to tradition among the

Afghans was improvised in reply to an insulting verse;[985] but the

professional singer is on hand, and improvisation has become an art. The

history of poetry among civilized races always shows a surplus of

improvisation in the initial stage known to the records; so it is with

the Greek _skolion_, as well as with dramatic beginnings; and so, to

take a different case, with the Arabs, where improvisation long held

almost absolute sway,[986] although drama had no place and a subjective

spirit reaches back to the earliest tradition. Again, where a literature

is undeveloped, although under civilized conditions, improvisation is

the main force; in this case are the Basques.[987] In fine, it is not a

vain tradition which puts a general gift of improvising verse before the

development of any national literature; and Plutarch, in his treatises

on Music and on the Pythian Oracle, speaking of a time when all formal

utterance was in poetry, and when even men without poetic fire were wont

to make verses on any subject, is telling not a fable but something very

close to truth. The proof is not far to seek, and comes from

ethnological as well as literary sources.

Improvisation in this early and general sense, however, must be

distinguished from the later sort which was purely professional, an art

which Schlegel[988] calls “poetic rope-dancing” and sunders from the

older and nobler gift, from “natural and partly amœbean, extemporaneous

poetry, which was and still is a source of social entertainment.” The

drama, he notes, began in this way.[989] As a social gift, indeed,

improvisation lingers long with civilized folk; a hundred years ago the

poet was ready with his “impromptu on seeing Miss —— asleep in the

moonlight;” and games were common enough where every one had to make

verse. Lady Luxborough[990] wrote to Shenstone: “It is the fashion for

everybody to write a couplet to the same tune—an old country dance—upon

whatever subject occurs to them.” The couplets, it would seem, were

satiric; and here, of course, is a late stage of the flyting. Then there

was the clever man of society, like Theodore Hook,[991] who would

improvise you verses on anything; but this phase of the art is best

studied in Italy. It is to be noted that such verses were generally

sung;[992] and, indeed, they come close to the professional

improvisation which is to be considered below. For the present we are to

look at the older and more communal stage, where art is just putting on

a show of independence and learning to walk alone.

The question is not of the fact of improvisation in primitive stages of

culture, familiar to every student in this field, but of the manner in

which improvisation begins, grows, hardens into a profession, and dies

out in vain rivalry with song of a more deliberate art. A mass of

improvised verse could be quoted which differs from the refrain and

chorus of the throng only in respect of a trifling variation in language

and a trifling addition to the matter. Leaving this fissiparous

offspring, we turn to that form of improvisation which shows an organic

structure of its own, and keeps the refrain at greater distance,

discarding, too, the more persistent forms of repetition. Mungo

Park[993] tells one story of his African wanderings which may be assumed

as a faithful report of the facts; for it is to be believed, or hoped,

that Park’s pen, unlike the pen of many travellers in general, and the

pen of Mr. Brooke of Middlemarch in particular, was not “a thinking

organ” apt to run into adventures of its own. The wanderer, wet and

tired, was taken into the hut of a native woman, who gave him food and a

mat for bed, going on with the other women to “spin cotton” most of the

night. “They lightened their labour[994] by songs, one of which was

composed _extempore_,” says Park, “for I was myself the subject of it.

It was sung by one of the young women, the rest joining in a sort of

chorus.... The words, literally translated, were these: ‘The winds

roared and the rains fell; the poor white man, faint and weary, came and

sat under our tree,—he has no mother to bring him milk; no wife to grind

his corn. _Chorus_: Let us pity the white man; no mother has he,’ etc.”

Here the young woman seems to lead the chorus and suggest its words,

while in the more primitive type of improvisation it is the chorus which

supplies the main theme, and the tentative, momentary singer only adds

his flourish. Here, too, is the element of the _honorarium_; for Park

was so affected that he gave his landlady “two of the four brass buttons

which remained” on his waistcoat, and surely the poetess could claim one

of them for her poetry. We have all read far worse at far higher rates.

True, the chorus or refrain is still very potent; the little

contemporary event is the sole suggestion of verse which looks neither

before nor after; but the incremental factor is less hampered and less

timid, and a touch of reflection and sentiment—provided this was not the

product of Park’s reminiscent mood—is at hand in the sympathy for a

motherless man.[995] Australians, too, though lower in the scale than

Africans, make songs on the spur of the moment which “refer to something

that has struck the attention at the time,” and add a bit of reflection.

Actually subjective and reflective poetry among such people, now and

then reported by missionaries,[996] may be rejected with confidence as

either mistaken in the hearing or else as echoed from hymns or pious

stories told to an excessively imitative folk. It is still the tribe,

clan, horde, for the party of the first part, and an event, an emotion,

affecting this body as a whole, for the party of the second part, which

gets into the communal verse even when sung by a single deputy.

Individual emotion as a thing for itself is nowhere in the case. Indeed,

if there were time for it, a raid upon philological ground would show a

tendency to avoid the first and second person singular in all primitive

speech; surely that observation of Schleicher[997] is not antiquated,

along with his other theories, when he says that the varying stems of

the personal pronoun point at a deliberate process aimed to avoid

expression, “as indeed often in language one finds a shyness to use the

_I_ and the _thou_.” Romanes,[998] too, notes that “in the earliest

stages of articulate utterance pronominal elements, and even predicative

words, were used in the impersonal manner which belongs to a hitherto

undeveloped form of self-consciousness.” Perhaps this belated individual

expression came into poetry in the guise of robust satire, which at

first clannish and collective, like the songs of the maids about

Bannockburn, like the mutual satire of rival villages even now, like the

mocking songs sung by African girls at a dance, passed into the

particular mood as a kind of flyting. An excellent survival of this

clan-satire turned upon an individual member occurs some hundred years

ago. Pastor Lyngbye,[999] long a resident among the Faroe islanders,

tells, without the faintest desire to advance a critical theory,

precisely how a ballad was made in a throng and under circumstances

which were primitive in every respect save the accident of date. The

whole community meets on even terms to spend a few hours in sport. The

expression of communal feeling is first and foremost the dance; and to

this dance, as was once the universal custom, they sing their own songs.

Now the song may be one about Sigurd or other hero of yore; and in this

case one can determine, so far as possible, whether the “common fund or

patrimony” of race tradition furnishes the theme or whether the story is

borrowed from abroad. But the song is not always about Sigurd; and

Lyngbye’s simple story of one which is local, spontaneous, communal,

should be taken to heart by comparative literary accountants. Some

fisherman has had a misadventure, whether by his fault or his fate, and

comes to the public dance. Stalwart comrades seize him, push him to the

front, and before the whole community dancing and swaying to a

traditional rhythm, stanza after stanza is improvised and sung, first by

a few, then in hilarious repetition by the throng; and so, verse by

verse, the story of the accident “sings itself,” with the hero dancing

willy-nilly to the tale of his own doings. Now, adds Lyngbye, if this

ballad takes the fancy of the people, it becomes a permanent thing,

repeated from year to year. Here, indeed, is what may well pass as

“objective” poetry;[1000] an absolute antithesis to the subjective and

reflective poetry with which modern conditions of authorship have made

us so familiar that we ignore the fact of any other kind.

Similar makings and traditions of the improvised song of satire come

from the Highlands; witness the words of J. F. Campbell.[1001] “It was

quite a custom in the Highlands, and that not long ago, to meet for the

purpose of composing verses. These were often satirical, and any one who

happened not to be popular was fixed upon for a subject. Each was to

contribute his stanza, and whoever failed to do his part was fined.

Whenever a verse happened to be composed that was pretty smooth and

smart, it took well ... and spread far and wide.” Campbell notes the

corresponding habit of Icelanders, as told in the _Njalssaga_. All this

is still fissiparous offspring of the festal dance and song; but just as

all mankind now loves a lover, so in more robust days it may be assumed

that all mankind most loved a fight; and the fight in alternate stanzas

of a song-duel concentrated attention on the fighting pair, spurred them

to independent effort, and brought about an organic, individual song.

This flyting is a venerable affair; and every one knows the dual combats

in verse so common among the Eskimo, a pretty makeweight to amœbean

verse under the Sicilian skies. In Iceland not only were sarcastic

verses made upon one another by professed poets like Gunnlaug

Snake-Tongue, but at the dance _mansöngvar_, that is, satiric stanzas

exchanged by men and women, were in vogue for every one, and in their

Fescennine license often called out futile protest from the

church.[1002] Civilized Europe itself is covered from end to end by

traces of a custom once, it would seem, universal among folk of low and

high degree; and it is beyond doubt, save with theorists who decline to

look at the evidence of comparative literature, that amœbean verse of

the classic kind, rude dramatic beginnings, survivals like the

_strambotto_ and _stornello_ of Italy, the _coplas_[1003] of Spain, the

_stev_ of Norway, the _gaytas_ of Galicia, the _schnaderhüpfl_ of

Germany, all go along with these rough flytings of half-civilized and of

wholly barbarous races as offshoots of communal song where the

individual singer detaches himself from the chorus and sings stanzas

which mainly incline to rivalry with another singer. Moreover, this was

once a universal gift. Wherever communal conditions survive, there

survive also traces of a time when one could talk of a “folk in verse”

as well as of a folk in arms. Improvisation is a fairly easy process

with Esthonians, Lithuanians, Finns, where classic tradition is out of

the question, just as it is an easy process with the peasant of Italy.

The substitution of love for hate or satire, of frank erotic stanzas of

the times when the way of a man with a maid was matter of communal

interest, is easy to understand, if hard to date and place; even now,

rustic love-making at picnics is conspicuous for epithets that might

easily be understood as belonging to a quarrel. The publicity of these

amatorious stanzas still survives in games and country revel. A game now

played among the young people of Swedish Finland, “Simon i Sälle,” was

described by a native to the present writer; in a dancing ring of both

sexes, with chorus and refrain, a youth steps up to a girl and says he

has something to give her. What has he, is the more or less defiant

question; and he must improvise his stanza descriptive of the gift,

while all the other young men continue dancing forward and backward as

he sings, the girls standing. When a girl has to improvise, the other

girls dance and the young men stand still.[1004] This universal

improvising power must be put in the clearest possible light, in order

to show that the formula of exceptional bucolic wit, rustic bard, simple

but noted singer of the countryside, as offset to the polished singer of

a better time and place, is utterly inadequate to explain the

beginnings, growth, and decline of what is called popular poetry.

Communal labour, of course, echoes in these improvisations as well as

communal satire and love. Until recent days, people in the Scottish

Highlands gathered at a farmer’s door on the first night of the year,

singing a few lines in Gaelic, while one of their number dragged a

cowhide and the rest beat time with sticks; in this fashion they marched

three times round the house. Then all “halt at the door, _and each

person utters an extempore rhyme_, extolling the hospitality of the

landlord.”[1005] Workmen in Dunkirk[1006] still improvise verses to a

favourite tune, singing the chorus with great energy:—

Ali, alo, pour Maschero!

Ali, ali, alo,—

and in solo, improvised then and there, a line such as,—

Il boit le vin et nous donn’ de l’eau,—

with another choral “ali, ali, alo.” In fact, when one comes to a

certain class of peasant life, improvisation is as universal a “gift” as

it is among the savages, and as it was by general consent of

ethnologists[1007] among all primitive folk. For a glimpse at the past,

Cædmon is evidently a case of improvisation—it was expected of the

merest hind, one sees—lifted to literary performance. When Anglo-Saxon

laws[1008] say a priest must not get drunk and “turn gleeman or

ale-bard,” they mean that he is not to improvise convivial songs, and

they have no reference to the professional minstrel; he is to resist a

common temptation and refuse a traditional duty of every reveller, much

like the duty of the Greek to make and sing his _skolion_ at the

banquet. So, again, it is inversion and perversion of the plain facts

when one thinks of Welsh _pennillion_ as scattered brands from the old

Eistedfodd fire; it is the growth of a professional class of bards out

of the general turn for improvising which is to explain the Eistedfodd,

and it is the survival of old and universal habit when Welshmen even now

sing one _pennill_ after another in rapid alternation. Professor

Schuchardt[1009] heard such a friendly contest not long ago, and was

struck by the close resemblance of these quatrains to the German

_schnaderhüpfl_ and the improvised stanzas of Italy. Improvisation is

the first step and not the last step in art; theories that the ballad is

a belated bit of art taken up by countryfolk after the lords of letters

have flung it aside,[1010] that songs of the people echo old opera tunes

and concert ditties, and all easy little _dicta_ of the sort, are

confuted by a study of comparative literature both in the genetic and in

the sociological phases of it. Peasants who make verse-combats their

source of entertainment might be regarded as imitating a troubadour

_débat_, if one did not consider how universal and primitive a custom

this is known to be. Eskimo song-duels are not borrowed from the

troubadours. Italian peasants might be said to derive their _strambotti_

from amœbean verse like that of Vergil, were it not for the fact that

Roman peasants loved and practised this sort of thing from the

beginning. As Horace says, speaking of the old breed of Roman,[1011]—

/# Fescennina per hunc inventa licentia morem versibus alternis

opprobria rustica fudit, libertasque recurrentes accepta per annos lusit

amabiliter ... #/

a festal and communal affair. This rustic communal interchange of satire

in improvised verses works up to the level of art not at first by aid of

the poets, but by singers of note, men who began to take a pride in

their special gift of improvisation, as will be shown in the following

pages. Meanwhile a specimen of the verse-contest under partly communal

conditions can be found in an Irish _carmen amoebacum_, as Mr. Hyde

calls it, improvised alternately by a guest and his hostess. The latter

has the hard end to carry, as she must finish the quatrain which the man

begins; and no wonder she yields, especially as the Blarney Stone has

evidently lent aid to her gallant visitor.[1012] It is clear, then, that

idyll and eclogue in degeneration are not to explain the verse-combats

whether of savages or even of peasants; the Roman and Oscan farmers

improvised such songs in their _satura_ and in their rough comedies,

innocent of all literary influences; and the Italian peasant of to-day

keeps up this custom wherever schoolmasters and other plagues of

civilization bide afar off and leave him to his own communal devices.

What Theocritus[1013] and Vergil did was to use these rude

improvisations as suggestion or even foundation for their art.[1014] For

rustic survivals these _strambotti_ and the _coplas_ of Spain, with

other quatrains of the sort, made in and for the dance throughout the

length and breadth of southern Europe,[1015] are less useful for

purposes of study in primitive song than the _schnaderhüpfl_ and the

_stev_, one German, the other Scandinavian, of northern lands. As to the

former, J. A. Schmeller’s brief account,[1016] made sixty years ago, is

still authoritative, though much has been written about these quatrains

since; most readable as well as most learned is the essay of Gustav

Meyer.[1017] Collections and discussions[1018] are plentiful; and it is

to be noted that the name of this sort of verse is not constant, being

now disguised as “songlet,” “dancer,” and the like, and now as

_rundâ_.[1019] Schmeller defines the _schnaderhüpfl_ as “a short song

consisting of one or two riming couplets, _but in any case of four

lines_, which is sung to certain local and traditional dance-tunes, and

is often improvised on the spot by the singer or dancer.” Singer _and_

dancer, of course, is the primitive form, and this as hendiadys: “the

singing dancer.” A typical quatrain of the sort, so far as this

consideration goes, comes from Vogtland:—

I and my Hans,

We go to the dance;

And if no one will dance,

Dance I and my Hans.

Hinterhuber[1020] describes the modern process; the waltz goes on

awhile, then in a pause the throng sings a few stanzas, then the dance

is resumed and youth after youth improvises, without ceasing, to a

traditional tune. “_They never sing the verses of local and popular

poets, but all is original._” What is of particular interest in this

process is the communal scene and occasion, mainly a village dance, the

traditional tune, the frequent chorus, and, against this background, the

individual performance of the singer. We seem to find here the point of

departure for artistic poetry; for in the actual quatrain one seldom

meets repetition, that inevitable note of the refrain and of the

fissiparous single song which detaches itself, as among savages, from

the refrain; and while the reapers’ song may be behind all this rude

lyric of the hills, it is no festal recapitulation of communal labour,

no echo of work or village triumph, that one hears, but rather the

personal sentiment, either erotic or defiant, of the individual singer.

Moreover it is always from one person and mainly to one person.

Nevertheless, it must have dance, throng, communal conditions through

and through, or it is not the _schnaderhüpfl_. So interesting a case as

this excuses some breadth and detail in the treatment of it.

The home of the _schnaderhüpfl_ is centred in the Bavarian Alps,

spreading thence in many directions and to some remote districts, which

may all be found described in the careful summary of Gustav Meyer; the

concern now is not with the vogue but with the thing itself. It is

slowly degenerating and even disappearing, in spite of its tenacity, its

vigour, and the love for it felt by the peasants of those conservative

regions. As with the rural refrain, so here, lewd fellows of the baser

sort lay hold upon it as the communal and universal character of it

lapses; near Weimar one may still hear peasants singing these quatrains

in a kind of emulation, but the frankly erotic has become licentiously

rotten. Here and there, however, it lives in its old estate, but by a

very feeble tenure; singing societies, friends from the city, concert

tunes, what not, are hounding it from its last retreats. The quatrains

now gathered are mainly traditional, not freshly improvised like those

of earlier days, and it is interesting to note how many variants can be

found of one theme. Direct borrowing occurs, of course; but a more

frequent process is the use of a popular initial line which is continued

in varying fashion into a corresponding variety of verses. Something

like this, but not really the same thing, is or was common in cheap

theatrical exhibitions, where some catching but meaningless refrain

introduces a series of local “hits.” The _schnaderhüpfl_, however, has a

far more dignified way, reflecting a nobler mood whether of joy or of

grief. Thus a pair of quatrains, perhaps amœbean in origin, from near

Salzburg:[1021]—

When it’s cold in the winter,

And snow-tempests whirl,

How cozy and warm

In the room of my girl!

When it’s cold in the winter,

Go warm you a while;

And the love that is old

Cannot easily spoil.

Close to the amœbean, and with two lines essentially the same, are

these,[1022] in mild satire:—

No mountain so high[1023]

But the chamois can pass,

And no youngster on earth

Can be true to his lass.

No mountain so high

But the chamois climbs over,

And no girl is so fair

But she’ll take to a lover.

This is improvisation on crutches. Often, however, the standing line has

variations; for example:[1024]—

No sea without water,

No wood without tree,

And no night when I sleep

Without dreaming of thee.

No night without star,

And no day without sun,

And no heart in the world

But beats for some one.

But we are nearing the “keepsake” and “annual” tone; it is well to hold

the dance in plain sight and hearing, where one gets either the mood of

Eros:[1025]—

O sweetheart, be wiser,

And dance with no tailor,—

Dance only with me,

And my love is for thee!—

or the mood of Anteros:—

I thought you were pretty;

It’s false, I declare;

You’re goitred and crooked,

A girl with red hair,—

one specimen out of many, but quite sufficient, for that lyrical

exchange of compliments at the dance which has satisfied the sense of

humour in rustic and even savage communities everywhere; a nearer echo,

even, of the dance, in the spirit of the Miller of the Dee, is in this

quatrain:—

I’ve a cow and a calf

And a donkey, all three;

And what do I care

Who the leader[1026] may be?

So the dancing youth, at Innsbrück, flinging his money to the musicians

for a good turn, likes to proclaim to the throng his own self, not

forgetting his guild:—

What needs has a hunter?

A hunter has none,

Save a girl with black eyes,

And a dog, and a gun.[1027]

Or a girl proclaims her lover’s prowess:[1028]—

My lover’s a rider,

A rider is he;

His horse is the kaiser’s,

The rider’s for me.

So, too, the rude compliment:—

You girl with the black eyes

And chestnut-brown hair,

When you look at me so,

I turn fool, I declare.

Easy and silly, one says. Precisely. Easy because made by everybody and

still close to the repeated refrain of the throng, and silly in the old

meaning of simple and plain. All the great lyric poets know that they

must be silly in this sense, or they are mere ink and paper, divorced

from life and the lilt of communal song; Goethe, Burns, Heine, will tell

that tale plainly enough, and let one compare Matthew Arnold’s _Geist’s

Grave_, not to speak of Wordsworth’s and Landor’s triumphs, with the

genuine pathos but irritating intricacy of T. E. Brown’s _Aber

Stations_. Perhaps this bit from Salzburg[1029] shows the improvisation,

still simple to a fault, working up to the note which one demanded for

real poetry:—

My heart is a clock,

And it stops now and then;

But a kiss from my lassie

Can start it again!

Or with a little pressure on the form, with hint of art, this from

Steiermark:[1030]—

You are fair, you are dear,

But you are not my own;

You’d be fairer yet, dearer yet,

Were you my own!

Familiar as a source of quatrains is the youth pleading or querulous

outside of the fair one’s window, and the maid doubtful or scornful

within; there are a few English fragments of this sort which are printed

in Chappell,[1031] and some are still heard in the rural parts. The

Salzburg youth pleads thus:[1032]—

Ah, love, lift the latch,—

Here the wind is so bleak;

With thee in the house there

How cozy and sweet!

From this, with hundreds of the sort, runs a lyrical path, if one could

but trace it, to the elaborate ode of Horace,[1033] imitated, of course,

from the Greek, and its type long become the conventional treatment of

an unconventional situation, but no doubt at the start expanded from

shorter and more vivid songs of “the excluded lover,” of which one finds

a scrap in the other and more famous ode on the courtesan’s old age:—

Audis minus et minus iam

“_Me tuo longas pereunte noctes,

Lydia, dormis?_”[1034]

One has heard the Salzburg youth; and the Salzburg maid is explicit in

her reply:[1035]—

Go away from my window,

And leave me alone;

The door I’ll not open

However you moan,

a striking contrast to the complacency of a _schnaderhüpfl_, said to be

one of the oldest recorded, taken down by Tobler at Appenzell, in 1754:—

Mine, mine, mine, O my love is fine,

And to-night he shall come to me;

Till the clock strikes eight, till the clock strikes nine,

My door shall open be.

But one must stay by the dancing throng, the rivalry of the singers, the

question and answer, a succession of stanzas thus tending to group about

a theme given by the occasion and kept in mind by a constant suggestion

of rime and repeated or slightly varied verses; from all this it is

highly probable that one will learn something of the communal origins of

lyric poetry. Thus there is nothing immediate or suggestive of the dance

in a detached quatrain with question and answer like this:[1036]—

Why crying, my pretty,

By the tree there alone?

Why should I not cry

When my sweetheart is gone?

But the dance and the throng are not far away from saucy bits of another

type:[1037]—

Black-eyed and bright one,

Were I not the right one

For you of them all ...

If I loved you at all?

Or this:—

You lass with the black eye,

Now leave me alone;

I’m not your Darby,

And you’re not my Joan.

Similarly there comes from Carinthia a challenge of youth to youth, with

audible lilt of the dance, too often prelude to a grim struggle not in

Touchstone’s version of the code, but based on Touchstone’s theory of

“mine own”:—

You will not, you will not my lassie be loving,

You will not, you will not a simpleton be;

You’ll have to, you’ll have to go find you another,

You know well, you know well my lass is for me!

What now is to prevent these quatrains, whether in question and answer,

or in a succession of related and varied harpings on one theme, to form

a little poem, a lyric? Professor Brandl says it does not so happen, as

if solitude and paper and emotion at second hand always had to be in the

case; facts, however, say that the process is not only probable in

theory but definitely before one on the record. To begin with, a

quatrain of undoubted communal origin, a genuine _schnaderhüpfl_, often

finds its way into a folksong; so with this from Alsace:[1038]—

’Tis not so long ago it rained,

The trees are dripping yet;

And I had, I had a lover once,

I would I had him yet.

There is a pretty little English ballad called _The Unquiet

Grave_,[1039] which begins in the same tone:—

The wind doth blow to-day, my love,

And a few small drops of rain;

I never had but one true-love,

In cold grave she was lain....

and the ballad goes on with a dialogue between the lover and his dead

sweetheart.[1040] On the other hand, amœbean forms of the

_schnaderhüpfl_ could easily lead to such alternate stanzas as one finds

in the pretty ballad, common in France, to which Child supplies “a

base-born” English cousin, _The Twa Magicians_,[1041] with a catching

refrain suggestive of the dance. So plain is the connection between

these _schnaderhüpfl_, the _stev_ of Norway, all similar isolated

quatrains, and the actual songs of situation, question, and answer, that

Landstad declared for the quatrains as _débris_ of longer poems. But

Gustav Meyer[1042] is surely right in his energetic rejection of this

way of looking at the process; his proof seems convincing to a degree.

Nobody will say that the artistic lyric as we have it, or even the later

communal ballad, is made by direct union of scattered stanzas; but it

seems clear enough that these isolated quatrains furnish the material

for such poems, and that part of the process could be achieved in the

grouping of quatrains improvised about a common subject and on a

communal occasion. Those repeated questions why the forsaken lass is

crying, still echo in a lyric like Scott’s _Jock of Hazeldean_:—

Why weep ye by the tide, lady,

Why weep ye by the tide?

and it is demonstrable that improvised quatrains give a situation, and

so group themselves into a little poem; Meyer[1043] quotes such a song

of two stanzas which has been made in this way, and yet could be easily

foisted upon Eichendorff or some poet of the sort:—

My lover has come,

And what did he bring?

For the evening a kiss,

For my finger a ring.

The ring it is broken,

The love is all gone,

And out of the window

The kisses have flown.[1044]

A little more circumstance, a touch of nature, a touch or two of art,

and out of the question and answer in improvised quatrains comes a

ballad, with the help of that neglected but so unjustly neglected

refrain, for which notice has been demanded already as for an important

communal element in poetry. So one might guess the origins of the pretty

ballad of the sickle:[1045] given a traditional refrain of the reapers,

and a couple of _schnaderhüpfl_ improvised in the familiar strain of

question and answer, and why not such a poem?

_I heard a sickle rustling,

Rustling through the corn;

I heard a maid, had lost her love,

A weeping all forlorn._

“O let the sickle rustle!

I care not how it go;

For I have found a lover

Where clover and violets blow!”

“And hast thou found a lover

Where clover and violets blow,

’Tis I am weeping lonely,

And all my heart is woe!”

_O rustle, sickle, rustle,

And sound along the corn!

I heard a maid, had lost her love,

A weeping all forlorn._

No stress, of course, is to be laid on this particular case, which

simply serves to show how unquestioned improvisation of quatrains on one

of the little tragedies common in rural life could be combined with the

traditional refrain of a reapers’ dance, and so pass into popular lyric.

Often this making of a lyric calls in the aid of repetition, and an

iterated line serves as thread to tie the quatrains together; such poems

have been noted already,[1046] and were called more or less artificial.

But they certainly suggest now and then the improvisation of quatrains

at the dance, and belong there originally; a clear case may be given

from Steiermark.[1047]

To thee I’ve gone often

So happy and gay;

To thee I’ll go never,—

Too long is the way.

Too long is the way,

And the wood is too thick;

God keep you, my sweetheart,

I wish you good luck!

I wish you good luck,

And all blessings at need,—

For the times when you loved me

I thank you indeed![1048]

Gustav Meyer has followed this combination of quatrains into a popular

song,[1049] perhaps sprung from improvised collaboration, or else

rivalry, at the dance, with a pretty but cynical stanza added in the

process of oral tradition,—itself a quatrain heard singly in Tyrol,

while the others, also sung separately, seem to be of Swabian origin.

The song may follow as a farewell to these _schnaderhüpfl_, now rapidly

passing into a memory of simpler days.

When the Dingelstädt bells ring,

The street seems to shake;

And I wish you good luck

For another fine mate.

And I wish you good luck,

And all blessings at need;

For the times when you loved me

I thank you indeed.

The times when you loved me

Need give you no pain,

No thousand times shall you

Think on me again.

A little bit loving,

A little bit true,

And a little bit faithless,—

What else could you do?

“The most genuine of all folksongs, and almost the only kind which is

still made,” as E. H. Meyer says of it, this _schnaderhüpfl_ is a single

strophe of four lines,[1050] complete in itself, always

improvised—though it often becomes traditional—and always in the native

dialect; it is not a fragment of some older and longer song, but rather

lends itself to combination into a popular lyric of oral

tradition.[1051] Careful comparison shows that similar quatrains,

probably of similar origin in the dance, occur not only in Welsh, in

Italian, French, and Spanish, in Lithuanian, in Hungarian, in Roumanian,

Greek, Russian, Polish, everywhere in European speech, but even in

Syrian, in Malay, and such distant languages. It is known in Chinese.

Most closely related to it are the _stev_ of Norway, of which

Landstad[1052] gives a small collection in his book of Norwegian

ballads. Granting that the real _stev_ must be improvisation, he is too

quick to connect them with the old scaldic poetry and with earlier and

longer poems, regarding these quatrains—he hesitates, however, in

stating the case—as wreckage of ancient ballads and once an effort of

the bard. The theory of _débris_, thus tentatively asserted, is

successfully answered by Gustav Meyer, as it is by a consideration of

the _schnaderhüpfl_ quoted in these pages; and it fares no better here

than it does when applied to Italian _strambotti_ and the artistic work

of Theocritus and Vergil. Indeed, Landstad’s own account of the _stev_

confutes his theory about them. Making these quatrains, he says,[1053]

was once a universal social custom, and lingers even yet.[1054] His

picture of the peasants gathered for a winter evening’s amusement,

guests and especially the older people sitting at tables which run along

the walls, men at one end, women at another, while the young people

dance in the middle of the room; the “drinking” staves sung as the ale

cups go round, where women often answer to rough but jolly quatrains

from the other end of the tables, and where every person must sing his

stave; the rude compliments and vivacities of the dance: all this points

to a survival of primitive custom. Traditional verses often serve to

open the contest nowadays, but improvisation begins with the personal

combat, and the fun grows fast. These older staves have a standing

refrain for the second and fourth lines of the quatrain;[1055] but the

modern kind are like the _schnaderhüpfl_ and are improvised throughout.

A touch of “sentiment and reflection” is not unusual; for

example:[1056]—

I know where to look for my bridal mirth,—

In a coffin black deep down in the earth;

I know where my bride-bed soon shall stand,—

Deep in the earth in the grit and sand.

Verse of this sort points to the improvisations already treated in part

under the _vocero_[1057] and to the songs which go with refrains of

labour, not so much the swift and jovial verses of flax-beaters and

other workers in bands, as the often tender and melancholy songs of

women grinding at the mill.[1058] But enough has been said and quoted to

show that improvisation, as it detaches itself from communal refrains,

tends to be individual, sentimental, reflective, and so artistic and

lyrical in the modern sense. The quatrain sung by youth to maiden in the

dance is still communal in its connotation; detached, it smacks less and

less of the public occasion, tries a deeper note of sentiment, has more

and more of the reflective and confidential; so one can come to the

mingling of passion and art in an ode of Sappho, in a lyric of Burns.

Moreover, parallel with this change of quality, runs a process of

grouping into songs. The scattered traditional stanzas, once improvised

as isolated quatrains, gather at first in pairs,—the prevailing type is

question and answer,—to which a stanza or two is added explanatory of

the situation and the season, often with that refrain which is

recognized as belonging with the original occasion; and this is the

communal lyric, or, as it is called in a stricter use of the term,

folksong. Henceforth, the difference between a folksong and a lyric is

mainly between oral, traditional origin and the deliberate and artistic

composition of recorded literature.

This study of the beginnings of lyric has dealt mainly with sentiment,

hostile or erotic, as expression of an individual, slowly detaching

itself from expression and interests of the clan. But reflection,

another note of what passes now for lyric poetry,[1059] the element of

thought, comes into poetic expression just as sentiment comes, and seems

to be of equal date. As the individual erotic song may go back to the

concerted dances, cries, gestures, of a whole horde, at periods of

sexual excitement which were probably once of uniform occurrence, so the

reflective note of a lyric poem could be traced to early communal

thinking. “Communal thinking” is perhaps a vile phrase; comment on

doings and interests of the horde, as distinguished from those chanted

verses merely descriptive of the event or fact, ought to be less open to

objection. As a feat of primitive epic, the statement of what the horde

has just accomplished, whether in hunting or in war, has been found to

be a constant element in the songs sung by savages to their communal

dance; while gesture, shout, recapitulation in cadenced movement, of the

same feat, has the dramatic note. Now it is well known that little

sentences detached from the story or acting of the event, but suggested

by it, belonging to it, are often sung by these same savages, now in

chorus, and now in individual improvisation. “Good hunting to-day!” sang

the Botocudos; which is a very different matter from particular

recapitulation of the hunt, as in a buffalo-dance or the like. These

sentences, like gnomic poetry at large, are of most ancient date;[1060]

but it is clear that they soon passed under control of the acute

thinker, and shunned the fellowship of choral song:—

Einsam zu denken,—das ist weise;

Einsam zu singen,—das ist dumm.

It is also clear that this element of thought and meditation would help

very materially the change from a sung to a recited verse, and hasten,

wherever it could act upon poetry, the disintegration of communal song.

Of course, an alliance with sentiment was inevitable; the acute thinker

deserted verse for prose and science, and with the lapse of communal

singing and the rise of solitary reading, lyric came to mean three

things: a subconscious harmony of rhythm, legacy of the consenting

throng; sentiment, as the expression of individuality, fostered by this

confidence between solitary poet and solitary reader; and reflection,

which is now the comment of the individual on the doings of the world as

a whole, on the burden and the mystery, that final horror, expressed by

Leconte de Lisle, at the idea of unending human woe,—

Le long rugissement de la vie éternelle.[1061]

This at one end of the chain, and the Botocudos’ choral reflection,

“Good hunting to-day!” at the other; a link midway, perhaps, is the half

individual, half choral expression of pity which those African women put

into their song about Mungo Park, and dwelt upon in their refrain.

So much for the beginnings of modern lyric poetry, as an individual and

artistic expression, compared with the lyric of a communal dance, the

iterated refrain of a throng. “Modern,” of course, is a relative word;

and the whole process has been hinted rather than described. Holding

fast, however, to the facts of earliest and rudest improvisation among

savages, holding fast to the facts of universal improvisation as

observed among European peasants, and to the making of single songs out

of groups of these improvised stanzas, we are warranted in asserting

that the process is one from communal to individual conditions, and

begins on a level of general, if not equal, ability to make and sing

verse, preferably in the form of a single couplet or quatrain, which is

at first subordinate to the chorus of the throng, then meets it on even

terms, and at last, losing its general origins and its particular

individuality and coming to be part of an artistic poem, drives the

discredited chorus from the field.

As regards epic poetry, the relations of the ballad and the choral

refrain have been studied in preceding pages. This ballad, or narrative

song, holds far more closely than the lyric to conditions of communal

making. It abhors sentiment and reflection, for it keeps to the

impersonal, public path; it is averse even from the arts of variation

save in the form of incremental repetition, and it clings to the

communal refrain and to the communal dance. For this reason the ballad

is without rival among recent forms of poetry as a field for the study

of surviving communal elements; joined with the materials of ethnology,

it gives the soundest reasons for constructing that curve of evolution

which marks the steady increase of lyric, individual, emotional, and

reflective characteristics in poetic progress. With its relations to the

epic there is here no space to deal in any satisfactory way.[1062] The

epic, however, is now conceded by every one to belong to times which by

no means can be confused with the beginnings of poetry; M. Tarde and his

theory that literature begins with a “great book” like the Bible or the

Homeric poems,[1063] can hardly expect an answer on any serious and

scientific ground. The narrative song or ballad goes back, of course, to

that universal gift of people in low levels of culture, the power to

turn a contemporary event into song, into the rhythm of the communal

dance, as is still done by Samoans and by nearly all savage tribes. All

was momentary in this initial act. The rhythm was there in cry and beat

of foot; the event was there; and the bridge of articulate words to

connect these two elements was of the shortest and simplest kind. The

variation, the incremental repetition, are obvious advances; but it is

worth while to note that the almost endless repetition of a verse or

two, describing some event or situation close at hand, is diminished in

corresponding ratio to the growing power of tradition, as if the memory

of yesterday’s poetry, of last year’s poetry, gradually took the place

of this contemporary repetition,—the “stretched metre” coming in course

of time to be the “antique song.” Everywhere among savages, when the

improvised song at feast and dance finds favour, it is passed down as

part of the traditional stock. And so one comes to that state of things

where, as Ten Brink has put it so well, song oscillates between

production and reproduction, that is, between improvisation and memory.

This is the period of the early epic. When deliberation and conscious

art come in, and yet the old alliance of spontaneous production and

living memory is not broken up, then is the golden age of epic verse;

then Homer, whoever or whatever he may be, can work out the perfect

union of art and nature.

Turning to the drama, one asks whether improvisation can also be found

in this form of poetry, taking it, as in the case of epic and lyric, out

of communal control into the province of individual art. Aristotle has

answered the question in that interesting account of Greek drama quoted

above; and he has distinctly affirmed the passage from a communal origin

in a wild chorus through rude improvisations up to the triumphs of

Hellenic tragedy. Nietzsche, in a book also quoted above at considerable

length, has studied this transition as a contrast of the Dionysian and

Apollinian elements of poetry. Latin drama, of course, is a copy of the

Greek; but the imitations of a foreign and finished model were preceded

among the Romans by rude improvisations at the festivals of the

countryfolk, where anything like copy and importation must be ruled out

of the case.[1064] In Italy this rude improvisation of comedy lingered

later in survivals that were of course mingled with many literary

influences; so too the rough drama of the fairs in France,[1065] the

popular plays in Germany, and even mysteries and moralities as played by

the guilds, retained much of the old communal character and were long at

the mercy of improvised speeches, however fixed and intricate the plot

and scenes. Many of these survivals—such as the mummers’ plays—became

also fixed in the words, but that was when the plays had gone to fossil

and the custom itself lingered as by a sort of inertia. Italian comedy

for some time had a dialogue “mainly extemporaneous”;[1066] and as these

plays grew into urban favour, the improvised dialogue was graced by a

higher tone and a more dramatic purpose, lasting almost into the

eighteenth century. The _commedia dell’ arte_, in other words, is simply

the improvised play of peasants passing into artistic and professional

control, but still holding to certain communal features.[1067] The

realistic elements of dialect, satire of certain professions, and the

like, point back to the satiric quatrains and songs at the dance; and

the dance is always at hand in farce and low comedy down to this day. In

Spain the _coplas_ took a dramatic turn; improvised question and answer,

with the situation to fit, easily became a kind of drama, although the

records are by no means full or accurate, and other influences played a

conspicuous part.[1068] The dance and play, described in _Don

Quixote_,[1069] at Camacho’s wedding, may be a “beautified” country mask

with more or less extemporaneous songs and dialogue. The main point

about these popular plays is their testimony that the drama passed from

communal chorus,—dancing, song, gesture, and refrain,—by the way of

improvisation, into its new estate of art; even under Elizabeth the

theatre was no stranger to extemporaneous dialogue, and that pathetic

appeal, in which, perhaps, Shakspere more completely drops his “irony,”

his objective mask, than anywhere else, not only testifies to a nobler

conception of the drama, but to the clinging abuse. It was not the

clowns alone who spoke more than was set down for them; though their

fooling was most hurtful because they made jests offhand with persons in

the audience,[1070] and sang irrelevant doggerel verse. Some of these

verses have perhaps crept into the text of _Lear_. Often, however, the

jester had full license to entertain the crowd by a piece long known as

a jig. Tarlton, the famous jester,[1071] “was most celebrated for his

extemporal rhyming and his jigs,” which were a combination of improvised

song and a dance, accompanied by tabor and pipe. But the jig was also

used for songs in dialogue, with a dramatic leaning; “a proper new Jigg,

to be sung dialogue wise, of a man and woman that would needs be

married,” is preserved among the Roxburghe Ballads. Amplified a little,

the jig was carried across the water by English comedians, and meeting

similar native forms of more or less extemporaneous verse, with dance

and farce, became the _singspiel_.[1072] But the improvisation of one’s

lines to fit the “plot” or _scenario_ of far nobler performance was

common on the English stage,[1073] and may have had Shakspere’s

indulgence if not his sympathy; Von Stein[1074] goes so far as to say

that the formal character of Shakspere’s dramatic work is “a fixed

mimetic improvisation,”—whatever that may mean. Of the fact, however,

there is no question. Tom Nash, in his _Lenten Stuffe_,[1075] telling of

the trouble he had from that “imperfit embrion of my idle houres, the

Isle of Dogs,” explains this description of his play by saying that

having “begun but the induction and first act of it, the other foure

acts, without my consent or the least guesse of my drift or scope, by

the players were supplied,”—a source of mischief for all hands. It was

from Italy that the custom came to improvise even tragic speeches; and

the passages in the _Spanish Tragedy_,[1076] where Hieronymo is

preparing his play, show what was expected:—

It was determined to have been acted

By gentlemen and scholars too;

Such as could tell what to speak....

Here, my lords, are several abstracts drawn,

For each of you to note your parts,

And act it, as occasion’s offered you.

Italy, to be sure, may have influenced the habit of improvisation in

formal drama; but the custom is a survival rather than a growth, and the

statement that Sir Thomas More in his youth—the tradition is preserved

also in a tragedy which bears More’s name as the subject—showed

extraordinary power of improvisation in a play, must not be taken[1077]

as indicating a tendency in Henry VIII’s time which came to be a

widespread habit under Elizabeth. Such skill of improvisation in plays

diminishes as artistic and deliberate drama comes to the fore. So with

the mask. At first a dance, with songs and improvised dialogue for the

maskers, it offered great opportunities for artistic work; Ben Jonson

and Milton can tell how the process went on, and with what results.

Improvisation in the drama of comparatively modern times could be

followed into remoter places, for example into Persia, where the

comedies are mainly in extemporaneous dialogue. Even in Tahiti what

passes for drama is improvised;[1078] and all evidence makes for this

state of things in the primitive play. The earliest form of the drama

consists mainly of action and gesture in the dance,[1079] so as to

repeat a contemporary event of communal interest,—war and the chase, or,

with farming folk, and more in reminiscence, the doings of seedtime and

harvest; it is clear that the rude songs and shouts that went with step

and gesture[1080] and mimicry must have been improvised. In late stages

of tribal life, certain dances and the songs that go with them become

absolutely fixed, a ritual calling for unusual care in the learning of

it; such is the American buffalo dance.[1081] But in the earliest drama

dance, gesture and choral song were the main elements, and the variation

from those repeated shouts took, so it would seem, the path of short

improvised and individual utterance. Those improvised stanzas, to be

sure, which plagued the frustrated Faroe fisher, dancing perforce to his

own shame before the dancing and singing throng, led to a narrative

song, a ballad, and so in time might lead to an epos; but in the making

of the stanzas, along with mimicry and dance, there is more of the

dramatic than of the epic element.[1082] The improvised song-duel, of

which so much has been said, is incipient drama; and all those songs

sung in cadence by groups of workers in the wine-press, at reaping,

pulling, even when marching, and rushing into the fight, have the

dramatic trait so far as they go with the appropriate action. So, too,

the festal recapitulation of labour, with its appropriate songs and

movement, would lend itself to dramatic improvisation more easily and

hence earlier than to narrative; the art of telling a tale, as may be

learned from ethnology as well as from the observation of children’s

games, is an accomplishment which comes much later than the art of

mimicry and rude improvisation at the dance. The improvising singer and

dancer detaches himself from the throng to give an isolated part of the

action,[1083] and may put it into words to suit his gesture and steps;

or two persons may dance, gesticulate, and sing alternately in what

answers dramatically to the amœbean song,—an actual fight may have found

this kind of recapitulation at a very early stage of the poetic art.

True, as was noted above, Wallaschek will not allow that this primitive

form of drama had anything to do with poetry; it was pantomime, he says,

without words, like the mimic dances of the Damaras, the Fans, and other

savage tribes. But it is beyond question that rude songs are often sung

along with the acting and the mimicry; and every consideration[1084]

makes it probable that the pantomime pure and simple, with distinct

repression of the desire to give vent to the feelings by shout and word

and song, is an artistic not to say artificial development[1085] of the

original drama along the lines of a painful, concentrated imitation, and

is almost a professional affair. Then there is the “speaking pantomime,”

so called.[1086] In short, the communal origin of the drama was surely

where Wagner declared it to be, in a combination of gesture, dance, and

song, the whole man active “from top to toe,” and also, one may add,

active as a member of a thoroughly and concertedly active throng. Even

the animal and bird dances, favourite among savage tribes, and supposed

to be pure pantomime, have the imitated cries of the model in time with

the dance; and this is a kind of poetry, lingering in refrains like

Walther’s _tandaradei_. More than this, it is fairly certain that word

and gesture[1087] went together in the early stages of speech. As

Letourneau points out,[1088] the word was too uncertain to stand by

itself, and needed the bodily movement that went with it;[1089] while

the sounds instinctively uttered in tune to the cadence of labour and

play were felt to lend force to the dramatic representation and fill out

the mere suggestion of gesture. An artistic series of movements

alone,[1090] an artistic series of words alone, would be a later

triumph; improvisation of new words to the traditional cadence, and to

the given, and in a sense obligatory gestures, would mark early progress

in the making of this primitive kind of poetry.

Drama, then, in the widest sense, is the “imitation” of life by means of

remembered and repeated movements, induced by the feeling of social

elation, and made possible by the cadence of social consent in the

dance, accompanied by sounds which instinctively follow this cadence of

the action and find their stay as well as their suggestion in the

regular recurrence of rhythm. It must have followed hard upon the

discovery of consent in common step and common cry, which, if one

choose, one may call primitive lyric; the other may pass as primitive

drama. In perspective they seem almost contemporaneous in origin. The

question of priority, debated with so much warmth, thus becomes a

question of names, and not a very important question at best. It is a

matter of differentiation and growth from a common origin, which may be

described as dramatic or lyric, according as one understands the terms,

and which certainly had both elements in it. It was rhythmic, and it was

an outlet for communal emotion; it was imitated action, with momentary

and spontaneous suggestions; and it can be called narrative or epic only

by unwarranted stretching of the words, though the slightly reminiscent

factor in the case may be called an epic germ. Finally, the

differentiation and growth from this communal poetry of a primitive

stage of culture must have been mainly the work of improvisation, or

individual assertion, acting on the communal elements, and leading to

disintegration and new combinations in processes which varied with the

conditions of race and environment.[1091] One suggestive fact, however,

is to be noted. The drama, in a broad sense, is the beginning of poetry;

it is also the end and perfection of the art, and this by a communal

reaction. There are centripetal as well as centrifugal forces; if the

individual is forever breaking away from the throng and carrying poetry

into lonely paths of deliberation, sentiment, artistry, the throng,

mainly by that subtle suggestion of consent in rhythm, is forever

calling the poet back to his communal point of departure. We have seen

how slowly the communal beginnings of poetry,—to us like geological

periods, because they have sent down to us no records, and only a few

hints of their existence,—yielded even to the tentative progress of

individual art, and what long ages must have contented themselves with

songs of the horde and the iteration of the refrain in a tribal dance;

it is equally true that the communal instinct still summons poetry back

from its hiding-place with the poet in that “ivory tower,” and bids it

tread the ways of open and crowded life. In the drama poetry may,

indeed, find its final form, as Goethe declared, but it is also coming

back in some degree to the instincts and habit of its prime; it is

recalling its forces from the scattered and lonely paths of individual

thought for a distinctly communal reaction. Even the opera, the

ballet,[1092] though in less marked degree, show this reactionary

communal spirit. The communal elements of action, dance, music,

scene,[1093] all of which Aristotle had reckoned along with drama and

epos as a part of poetry, are thus variously restored. Narrative is

banished in favour of the plot, which at least seems to be natural

action; deliberate lyric effort, the solitary thought, is rejected for

what at least seems to be improvised or spontaneous speech of the

actors; dancing and festal expression may or may not be present, and so

with music, but the rhythm is deputy for the cadence of dancing feet;

and finally there is what seems to be the real world of men, the scene.

These realistic effects, these chariot-races and locomotives on the

stage, whatever one despises most heartily in the degenerate drama of

the day, are the reaction from excesses of subjective poetry toward

actual life and the tendency toward communal conditions which art always

shows when it deals with a public and abandons the confidences of author

and reader.[1094] It is perhaps too much to assert that the drama was

done to death through excess of that “lyric cry,” and by a tendency

which developed character at the expense of action; but the counter

movement has been toward the mass and rude effects of force. In the eyes

of some uncritical folk, the lack of distinct individual characters, the

effect of a homogeneous mob of actors, the crude but vigorous course of

events, in early histories and miracle plays, would make better claim to

the title of drama than the subtile characterization of Shakspere and

the humours of Jonson; _arma_, they might maintain, should come before

_virum_ for the playwright; and if any comfort can be gathered from our

deplorable modern drama, it may possibly lurk in this idea of the return

to communal art. In any case, it is the price which our age has to pay

for the piercingly subjective character of its lyric poetry. Epic, in

any objective and vital form, has vanished, and the drama, desperate in

its struggle for life, turns to demos as to a long-forgotten friend.

Before one leaves the beginnings of poetry, its earliest disintegration

in point of treatment and theme, and goes back to that improvising poet,

in order to glance again at the beginnings of artistry and the decline

of communal power, one has two elements of the main subject with which

it is well to come to terms. Besides the subject-matter of poetry, there

is its style, its form; between the style, or figurative element in

poetry on one hand, and on the other hand, its material divisions of

drama, epos, lyric, is that vast and ill-defined province assigned to

myth. Now claimed as metaphor, and offspring of earliest language, now

as drama of nature, now as the tale told by primitive fancy in response

to primitive curiosity, now as the lyric or hymn which embodied man’s

first religious impulse, this fugitive and exquisite creature has had as

many masters, has been dragged over as many paths, and has kept as

unimpaired beauty, as that famous daughter of the soudan of Babylonia,

affianced to the king of Garbo. Of all these temporary masters none is

so comprehensive in his gallantry as A. W. Schlegel,[1095] who hails

myth as the source of poetry, of philosophy even, as the soul of

primitive language, as “nature in poetic robes,” and goes so far as to

say that modern physical science could easily be stated in terms of

ancient mythology. Myth, indeed, is such a wide word with Schlegel that

it covers the romances of Arthur and Charlemagne;[1096] and when one

reflects that folklore has since claimed its share of mythological

territory, while, on the other hand, brutal folk who speak for a new

euphemerism call myth an impudent baggage with no religion in her and

only a touch or so of poetry, the case is complicated. Over a path so

riddled with pitfalls one is not anxious to walk; but to treat the

beginnings of poetry without touching myth is out of the question, and a

few steps must be made if only to secure a point of view. We shall

consider myth in its relation to primitive verse, and shall then turn to

the kindred topic of early figurative language and poetical style.

Concerning the source and function and meaning of myths[1097] a long

battle has been waged, and noise of it is still ringing in our ears; but

the fiercer struggle seems just now to have come to a kind of truce, and

the warriors, as in that other contest over the origin of language,

appear to be lying on their arms. The more one knows of early

civilization, it would seem, the less one feels inclined to dogmatize

about the source of myths; while with regard to their meanings, that

exhilarating and harmless pastime, where scholar after scholar came

forward with his solution, where Bacon in older days turned classic myth

into the wisdom of the ancients, and where, in later times, Simrock gave

a _haec fabula docet_ for every shred of Germanic fancy and fable;[1098]

where Uhland, in his beautiful book on the Myth of Thor, blew one of the

most exquisite and iridescent bubbles that ever delighted the poetic eye

and broke at the touch of common sense; where Max Müller and his friends

converted the primitive Aryan now into a fellow of the prettiest and

most fanciful habit of mind, with his interest in sunsets, and stars,

and vanishing dewdrops, now into a resolute and saner Lear bent on

knowing the cause of thunder; a pastime, finally, in which even Jacob

Grimm, for all his “combining” powers, refused to join,—this mania for

the direct interpreting of myths has had its day and ceased to be. The

end came with the establishment of two facts, one negative and one

positive. Anthropology, ethnology, a close study of the history of

culture, of social institutions, of religion, led to the sound

conclusion that whatever else it might be, the mythology of early man

was not conterminous with the religion of early man;[1099] for religion

in those stages is chiefly a matter of ceremony and ritual forms.

Suppose a person ignorant of the rites of the Roman church undertaking

to get a notion of its ceremonies, and of the heart of its faith, by a

study of the _Legenda Aurea_, or any such body of tales! That was the

negative fact; the myth is not primitive religion, and is rarely

primitive creed. Again, anthropology, notably through its great exponent

Professor Tylor, established the positive fact that myths are due to a

kind of poetic faculty in primitive man, the habit of animating, or, in

modern phrase not quite accurate for early stages of culture, of

personifying what went on about him.[1100] Mr. Andrew Lang, while

following Professor Tylor in principle, has made room for the obscene,

the brutal, the silly, which can be found so plentifully in savage myth

and sporadically in the myths which we call classical. To these ways of

thinking came the sturdy Müllenhoff, and after him, Mannhardt, an avowed

student of customs and popular thought; with Mannhardt’s later work,

myth-guessing, in which he had once been as wild as any,[1101] came to

an end. It is now conceded that the source as well as the meaning of

most myths is veiled in the obscurity of early animistic processes,

while their later development belongs to the poet altogether. “I have

learned,” wrote Mannhardt[1102] to Müllenhoff, “to value poetical and

literary production as an essential factor in the formation of

mythology.” Indeed, it is not considering too curiously when

Burckhardt[1103] declares that the renaissance in Italy so thoroughly

revived the gods of old pagan belief, that poets made new myths in the

ancient spirit.

It is a great mistake, however, to infer with certain bold followers of

Mr. Herbert Spencer—the German Lippert, for example—that myths have

nothing to do with primitive religion and belong altogether to the

poetic or fantastic instinct. True, myths of the classic kind, barring

the names of god and goddess, were pretty well divorced from faith; but

Homer and Hesiod told tales unknown to the primitive worshipper of

Greece, and he had myths of his own. Schwartz, a valiant guesser, but

rational on certain lines, pointed out forty years ago[1104] that

perspective must be observed, and that the origin of a myth must be held

apart from its development; often, indeed, by a hint here and a survival

there, one can feel one’s way back from the graceful, celestial romance

to a rude myth with all the awe of belief upon it. It may be said with

confidence that early myth excluded mere tales of nature, drama of the

shifting seasons, the flash of sunlight on the waves, and all the

romance of blushing dawns and shepherded or wandering stars; these tales

of later origin belonged to the poet and his fantasy. Early man did not

go about commercing with the skies, nor did any spur of occasion put him

upon the telling of a natural process, duly observed, in terms of a

human history proportioned and duly recorded. That is a definite

poetical or allegorical process, and means that the mind has a clear

idea of two separate systems, and can hold apart the world of fancy and

the world of fact, welding them together in conscious purpose. It is

poetry,[1105] not primitive myth, which sees the heavens as the psalmist

saw them: _in them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun, which is as a

bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to

run a race_. Myth, indeed, may now and then lie at the heart of such

poetical achievement; but that elementary myth, the work of unconscious

animism, is rude and shapeless by comparison with this finer stuff.

Primitive myth is a block of marble with more or less resemblance to

some creature, a kind of fetish; poets come and carve it into definite

shape, individualize, idealize, polish; next is formed the group, the

celestial romance, figures as on the frieze of a temple, with the loves

and the quarrels of the gods; and then, last stage of all, allegorical

and satirical poets, a Lucian, a singer like him of the Norse

_Lokasenna_, make free with those fragments of myth where no awe of

belief can linger and hardly even the vital grace of imagination. In all

this coil but one stage has interest for us; what can be said of the

beginnings of poetry in their relation to the beginnings of myth?

A good test for the primitive stage of myth is first the necessity, not

the possibility of it, and secondly, the unconscious character of the

animating process. Dawn, starlight, and laughing waters put no stress of

questioning upon early man; but the bolt from a stormcloud which laid

low the sheltering tree, or struck down members of the horde, a nameless

Terror bursting out of the unknown, came in more questionable shape, and

must have found expression in those statements which a communal chorus,

as was seen in the case of the Botocudos, is fain to make about the fate

and doings of the horde itself. Mere ancestor-worship is not enough to

explain such a case;[1106] every analogy of human action fails in the

presence of this flash and roar and destruction; the unknown was there,

as with modern phrase—“it” thunders[1107]—and the statement, repeated in

indefinite chorus, had in it the awe and fear and yearning about the

unknown which still go a long way to make up the idea of religion. But

it was unconscious, this process of animism; before one consciously

attributes personality to a force of nature, one must have the two

distinct ideas before the mind, and for early man such a clear view was

out of the question. Moreover, the idea of a definite force, a definite

personality, hardly belongs to the primitive stage of myth; one must

look at environment[1108] and the social organization. It is known that

even the sacred bull, and still more the “father” of the spirits, the

chief god, reflect nomadic life under a leader; while the leaderless

horde is girt about with a horde of spirits, the “they” of primitive

worship corresponding to the “we” of the social group.[1109] In this

stage of culture only the horde itself, the social group, can be in the

case; poetic fancy on one side, ordered bands of deities, high and low,

with a supreme god over all, on the other side, must be excluded.

Earliest myth is simply communal emotion, in choral statement, provoked

by some overwhelming act of vague and unseen powers. Early poetry is

always “occasional”; what strikes, like this thunderbolt, into the life

of the horde,[1110] is a theme quite as solicitous as good hunting, or

the fight with rival clans, to fill a refrain with repeated statement of

fact, and, in time, to tempt the improvising soloist into a phrase of

wonder, awe, pity, propitiation. Here, then, is a common ground for the

beginnings of poetry and the beginnings of myth,[1111]—in communal,

choral statement. True, explanation of these doings of nature may be a

fertile source of myth in the later period when poetry and science are

allied in a search after causes; but it is clear that stating a fact is

a process anterior to any explanation of a fact. Is there not for modern

man himself a comfort in the lucid statement of things even before the

things are explained? The lawyer who states his case clearly has half

explained it and has prepared the jury to accept his explanation of the

facts. Scherer says that myth is due to some primitive genius who

listened to a thunderstorm, wished to explain it, and conjectured that

“the gods were fighting,”[1112] a theory adopted by the fellow-citizens

of this genius, who thus had “founded” a myth. But communal statement,

with unconscious animism in the terms of it,—communal, that is, in its

expression, and religious in its source,—is the only formula for early

myth which will agree with the conditions of primitive life. To the

cadence of the dance, in iterated refrain, the horde as a social group

took comfort in getting the facts into a coherent statement; to repeat,

in a rhythm which made repetition easy and coherence possible, that the

“they” in question had done things which the “we” were now recording,

was a process not far removed from the iterated statement that “we” had

found a good hunt, made a good catch, or what not. From the awful and

inevitable, this communal choral statement could pass to less

destructive doings; and from the pandemonium, the rout of spirits, step

by step with differentiation of the horde, with the rise of tribal

leaders, with the coming of an improvising singer, this statement could

pass to the pantheon[1113] and hierarchy of gods.

That myths of this sort, statements based on the feeling for animated

nature in its more obtrusive forms, were as early as the worship of

ancestral spirits, is denied by Mr. Herbert Spencer and his school, but

without good cause. It is illogical to affirm the beginnings of reason

and in the same breath to deny the beginnings of fancy. If

ancestor-worship, belief in “them,” was one of the earliest inferences

of the human mind, if one of the first conclusions which man made

outside the round of his daily struggle for food and safety was to

animate an unseen world, as early an act, earlier indeed, was to animate

the world he saw. Statements about the doings of an animated nature, a

horde of echoes, movements, violent activities, girdling the horde of

men, were thus in all probability the earliest form of myth. This

statement, however, had less of that scientific leaning than Scherer

would make one believe; childish fear of harm and childish hope of gain

is a more likely attitude of mind in primitive folk than childish

curiosity about causes. The choral statement, one may assume, took most

easily a reference to human needs and so became a hymn. The hymn is

essentially choral, and even under literary conditions implies a

congregation; the majesty and power of a real hymn like Luther’s is out

of all proportion to its merit as a poem. It is the source of the hymn

in a communal emotion, and the direction of it to unseen forces, that

give it this majesty; and the poorest words gain might from these

conditions alone. A rude hymn of the horde to those spirits unseen but

felt, was therefore the probable beginning of myth,—not a performance of

the shaman before a passive throng, and not a tale of celestial doings

invented by some early genius who took it upon him to pry into the

mystery of things. Of course there are fetish myths which have come to

be brutal and obscene, but were not brutal and obscene when they were

first formed;[1114] there are also myths invented in a later stage of

culture to account for a ritual or a belief[1115] come down from early

and obscure origins, often with something of the fetish in them, as is

probably the case with the myth of Rome and the wolf; and there are

crude tales, due to as crude scientific instinct, to account for

physical phenomena, popular everywhere and in all times down to the day

of Uncle Remus. But all evidence of ethnology, all the facts which have

served to trace the line of poetical evolution, go to make probable the

social and communal and choral beginnings of the myth which has the awe

of belief upon it. As might be expected, fragments of this old choral

refrain which bound the myth to the community and to its religious

emotion, have come down to us embedded in later and poetical myth; and

it has been shown that a refrain of grief[1116] for the loss or

departure of a god, demigod, hero, has often been made a proper name and

the nucleus for a new myth. This choral cry of the horde has great

interest for the student of myths; and if the etymology be probable

which makes the word “god” mean “one that is called upon,” here is more

beckoning that way. Heavier stress should be laid upon the choral hymn

as expression of emotion from a homogeneous horde of men toward a

homogeneous horde of spirits, and upon the dance and symbolic action

which went with the song, taking in time now a ritual and now a dramatic

guise.[1117] In other words, this choral hymn, danced and sung,—if one

will, danced and sung about some symbol of animated and superhuman but

by no means individualized or “personified” powers, and with

accompaniment of sacrifice, with festal recapitulation, even, of action

inspired by the help of these powers,—was on one hand the source of

religious ceremony, which later, in its mutilated and incomprehensible

refrains held so stubbornly in festal worship, with the worshipped

powers hovering about unseen, and, on the other hand, source of a

secular drama, where, as in Greece, only an altar remained as visible

hint of sacred origins, and only the intervention of gods and the

abiding sense of fate kept alive the old purpose of the hymn. This

chorus, dealing with the doings of spirits, like the chorus that dealt

with labour and hunt and communal experience at large, was also the

beginning of myths which, like the older refrain, fell under the power

of improvisation and so passed into poetic control, keeping pace with

the tribal development of hero, chieftain, conqueror, king, blending

with legend, and at last finding record in the epos.

The impression of natural forces upon man, and the reactionary process

which imposes man’s imagination upon natural forces, have another side;

they make up not only the material of poetry, but also its manner, its

style. The second process, when it animated nature with something like

human will, human passion, human fate, and while it did this with the

awe of belief upon it, has been seen to pass into myth. Roughly

speaking, one may say that the early and unconscious process is myth,

and the later, conscious process, when directed not to a statement or

story but only to a word or phrase, is the figure or trope of

personification. The first process, however, where human life is treated

in terms of nature, is conveniently known as metaphor, although

precision in the use of these terms is not so much observed as desired;

and metaphor, too, must be regarded as first an unconscious and then a

conscious process.

Myth and personification need no further comment, and we shall now

consider the metaphor as mainstay of poetical style; one word, however,

may be in place for an early and unconscious form of personification,

which deals with language rather than with fact, and so must be sundered

from myth—the grammatical gender of words.[1118] A bit of myth may lie,

of course, in those expressions which hover between the natural and the

grammatical gender, and is not always easy to explain from the primitive

point of view, however appropriate the choice may seem to a modern mind;

why is the sun feminine in all Germanic languages, and the moon

masculine? Day is masculine, night is feminine; earth seems always

feminine, and “mother” is no new epithet for her. Death, pestilence,

sickness, have personifications that are more than gender; Servians

think of the plague as a woman in white who steals upon her victims, and

to modern Greeks sickness is also a woman, blind and old, who feels her

way from house to house.[1119] But even now the process may be

unconscious, as one observes in languages like English, which have lost

their inflections and can give gender only by pronouns; Grimm’s

elaborate categories for the three genders are sadly baffled by the

habit which calls a ship a “man-of-war” and bids the bystander watch

“her” sail by.[1120] Again, there is transfer to reckon with; the first

name for an object, as will be shown presently to be the case with

metaphors, yields later to a name more precise; and when a ship, or the

like, is in question, motion and seeming life could give one vague name,

while later and nearer acquaintance found an appellation in technical

qualities. On the whole, it will be best if we leave gender to animism,

to incipient myth, unconscious metaphor, and whatever other forces went

to the making of words, and turn to metaphor itself.

To those who hold with the Abbé Dubos[1121] that poetic style is the

most important factor in differencing poetry from prose, and demands the

greatest genius in the poet, it may seem a hard saying to call the early

stage of figurative language unconscious metaphor. The habit of

describing primitive poetry in terms of modern verse imposes on these

early stages a teleological element quite foreign to the conditions

which ethnology and the sense of evolution compel one to assume for the

beginnings of such an art. Poetry, says Cardinal Newman, in his little

essay,[1122] has to adopt metaphorical language as “the only poor means

allowed for imparting to others its intense feelings,” which refuse “the

feebleness of ordinary words”; and with this _raison d’être_ for the

metaphor, one goes on to inquire how it is made. The transfer from a

literal to a figurative or metaphorical expression, one finds, is made

on the basis of a comparison and an observed resemblance, so that a

metaphor is compressed or abridged simile, and the simile must be the

fundamental figure in poetry. So the schools have taught time out of

mind.[1123] Even Scherer,[1124] eager to hit the new note, and fixing

his gaze on primitive conditions, is sure that poetical figures spring

from the innate love of comparison; even Dr. R. M. Meyer,[1125] studying

old Germanic poetry, finds that its metaphors prove the fundamental

character of the simile from which they spring.[1126] A little

reflection, however, ought to convince candid minds that in the

chronological, if not in the logical, order of development, the metaphor

comes first and the simile is an expanded metaphor; this is proved not

only by the psychological argument, but by the facts in the case. Those

similes from Polynesian poetry given by Letourneau[1127] represent no

primitive stage, and to the long comparisons of Homer[1128] no wise man

will now appeal as examples of the artless and natural in poetic style.

Savages, like Mr. Shandy, may dearly love a comparison; but it is a

logical process, a kind of incipient science, in any case subsequent to

the unconscious stage of metaphors. For, as a matter of fact, wherever

one finds verse which all tests of value show to have the primitive

quality, similes and the comparative impulse in general conspicuously

fail; this is the case with ballads,[1129] with choral and refrain of

communal origins everywhere, and with the ruder stages of our old

Germanic poetry.[1130] Anglo-Saxon poetry, though all its artistic and

literary influences urged it to comparison, simile, allegory,—the latter

a peculiarly Christian invention,—is absolutely hostile to the simile

except in passages copied almost slavishly from a literary source; and

this consideration led the present writer[1131] twenty years ago to find

ground for opposing the traditional doctrine of metaphors as founded in

the first instance upon an observed likeness. Everybody grants that

early metaphor differs from late; a child calls the bird’s nest a house,

not because it compares the nest with a house, but because it has the

idea of house and has not the specific idea of nest; and so it would and

does call the horse’s stable, the rabbit’s burrow, what not, a house,

until wider knowledge and specific information give a distinct name for

each. Then, and not until then, with two separate ideas before the mind,

is the metaphor based upon a definite comparison, and the transfer a

conscious process. In other words, the metaphor was not a metaphor at

the start, save in the unconscious force of it; so with the early myth,

where there was no thought of comparing a force of nature and a human

act, but simply an effort to express the force along the only possible

path, the path of animism. This, moreover, is at first nothing but

direct statement. In all primitive verse, including its survival, the

ballad, it is simple statement, and not metaphor in any modern shape,

that constitutes the style. One cannot express the literal by the

figurative until one has got a conception of literal and figurative as

discrete things; the first stage of metaphor, then, is unconscious, a

confusion, if one will, or, better, a flexibility in application of the

small stock of words. In a little article[1132] on metaphor and poetry,

the writer proposed this sequence of development in poetical figures:

metaphor pure and simple, what has just been called the unconscious

metaphor, stands first;[1133] then comes metaphor with the literal

peeping through, that is, where literal and figurative are joined, but

in a separable fashion, the literal statement involving but not

expressing contradiction in its terms; lastly the quite conscious

metaphor, where both terms are expressed, and where the mind is fully

alive to the gap between reality and trope, a metaphor which may be

either the implied simile (“he is a lion”) or the stated simile (“he is

_like_ a lion”). Evidently now, there comes a stage in poetic expression

where that need for freshness and force sends the poet back over this

path; the logical expression of resemblance is too literal, and he turns

to the metaphor again, and so justifies the standing definition of it as

a compressed or abridged simile. That, however, is not the history of

its evolutionary growth.[1134]

Turning to the nearer subject, we may now ask how the differentiation

came about in poetic speech, and where it belongs in the beginnings of

poetry. It is more than probable that earliest language was social in a

sense now hard to understand; so tremendous was this step from brute

forms of intercourse to human speech that it must have taken place under

a social pressure infinitely removed from conditions of what now passes

for “conversation.” As with the earth itself, these psychical changes

were volcanic. The refrain of concerted labour, upon which Bücher has

wisely laid such stress, the refrain of festal emotion over a victorious

fight, the cadenced sounds in concert with consent of individual

energies alert for a common cause,—it was under such vast and unusual

social pressure that the greatest of social triumphs came about. Hence

it may well seem absurd to talk of earliest song in words as a

“heightened” or emotional speech, speech raised above the level of

ordinary conversation; for what needs could have produced ordinary

conversation before the wholly imperative and extraordinary occasions

which called out the greatest resources of social effort? It is to be

denied, therefore, that “poetic” expression was lifted out of ordinary

and conversational expression; and it may well have been that choral

hymns with earliest statement of myth,[1135] choral song with earliest

statement and gestured imitation of communal achievement, and choral

refrains of labour, formed the beginnings of speech, which was mainly a

recapitulation of action, and therefore mainly a matter of verbs. It is

conceded that verbs came before substantives, for action, as in labour,

is easily paired with gesture and sound; names for things, the

substantives, the singular forms of the pronoun, are a different affair,

and lend themselves more readily to the individual and to improvisation.

A statement of action, subjective or objective, contemporary or

reminiscent, is easily made by a chorus, whether of primitive men, or of

modern children with their “Now we go round the mulberry-bush”; and the

statement as naturally repeats itself as refrain to the dancing or

whatever cadenced motion is in the case. This is the communal or

centripetal impulse. The centrifugal, individual impulse lays hold of an

unvaried repetition of rhythm,[1136] and evolves couplet and stanza,

with variations of rime, assonance, and the like; laying hold of the

expression itself, and by a parallel process applied to style instead of

to form, this impulse leads to variation in expression,[1137] to

something in one verse very like the corresponding part of the preceding

verse, yet different. Step by step, with the aid of the “Apollinian”

instinct, metaphor becomes conscious of itself and of its own effort; it

works out a poetic dialect, which, contrary to the common notion, is an

increasing and not a decreasing factor in poetry. It begins with

flexibility of application, unconscious of a difference, for there is no

difference; sees at last a gap between itself and the literal, which has

been formed by the rise of a conversational and “ordinary” language;

avoids this literal, and shuns this ordinary, until in absurd excess it

reaches the scaldic kenning, or finds a pedant[1138] making dictionaries

of metaphors proper for the poet to use in this or that case. Finally,

it returns upon itself, seeking simplicity, if it can find it, with a

Wordsworth, but still refusing to join hands with the talk of everyday

life.[1139] Be all this as it may be, the metaphor of the verb is both

older and more communal than the metaphor of the substantive, which

better fits the inventor’s case and may well have been the origin of the

riddle,[1140] conceded to be a very ancient form of literature. As in

the beginning, so even now. The more individual, artistic, and

subjective poetry becomes, the more it tends to deal in intricate

metaphor, the less it has of the simplicity due to statement of action

in simple because communal phrase; and whenever reactions set in toward

that communal state of things, action comes to the front, intricate

figure vanishes, verbs have more to do, substantives less, and

adjectives almost nothing.[1141] A reactionary movement of this sort

lies before us in the verse of Mr. Kipling.