[56] Compare with this a passage in a letter of Goethe's to Schiller
about _Faust_: "Some tragic scenes were done in prose; by reason of
their naturalness and strength they are quite intolerable in relation to
the other scenes. I am, therefore, now trying to put them into rime, for
there the idea is seen as if under a veil, and the immediate effect of
this tremendous material is softened." (Translation of Professor F. B.
Gummere, in _The Beginnings of Poetry_, p. 73.)
[57] In these chapters of the _Biographia Literaria_, Coleridge was
replying to the theories of Wordsworth as set forth in his Preface.
[58] Compare the amusingly vigorous remarks of Mr. Swinburne on the want
of metre in Whitman's poems:
"'Did you ask dulcet rhymes from me?' inquires Mr. Whitman. ... No, my
dear good sir: ... not in the wildest visions of a distempered slumber
could I have dreamed of doing anything of the kind. ... But metre,
rhythm, cadence, not merely appreciable but definable and reducible to
rule and measurement, though we do not expect from you, we demand from
all who claim, we discern in the works of all who have achieved, any
place among poets of any class whatsoever.... The question is whether
you have any more right to call yourself a poet, or to be called a poet,
... than to call yourself or to be called, on the strength of your
published writings, a mathematician, a logician, a painter, a political
economist, a sculptor, a dynamiter, an old parliamentary hand, a civil
engineer, a dealer in marine stores, an amphimacer, a triptych, a
rhomboid, or a rectangular parallelogram."
(_Studies in Prose and Poetry_, pp. 133, 134.)
[59] Professor Gummere also gives this analysis of Karl Bücher's essay
on "Labor and Rhythm" (_Arbeit und Rhythmus_, Leipzig, 1896): "Fatigue,
which besets all work felt as work by reason of its continued
application of purpose, vanished for primitive man, as it vanishes now
for children, if the work was once freed from this stress of application
and so turned to a kind of play. The dance itself is really hard work,
exacting and violent; what makes it the favorite it is with savages as
with children? Simply its automatic, regular, rhythmic character, the
due repetition of a familiar movement which allows the mind to relax its
attitude of constant purpose. The purpose and plan of work involve
external sources and external ends; rhythm is instinctive, and springs
from the organic nature of man; it is no invention. The song that one
sings while at work is not something fitted to the work, but comes from
movements of the body in the specific acts of labor; and this applies
not only to the rhythm, but even to the words. So it was in the festal
dance.... That poetry and music were always combined by early man, and,
along with labor, made up the primitive three-in-one, an organic whole,
labor being the basal fact, with rhythm as an element common to the
three; and that not harmony or pitch, but this overmastering and
pervasive rhythm, exact, definite, was the main factor of early
song,--these are conclusions for which Bücher offers ample and
convincing evidence." (_Ib._ pp. 108, 109.)