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:—
and in solo, improvised then and there, a line such as,—
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:—
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]—
Close to the amœbean, and with two lines essentially the same, are these,[1022] in mild satire:—
This is improvisation on crutches. Often, however, the standing line has variations; for example:[1024]—
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]—
or the mood of Anteros:—
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:—
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:—
Or a girl proclaims her lover’s prowess:[1028]—
So, too, the rude compliment:—
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:—
Or with a little pressure on the form, with hint of art, this from Steiermark:[1030]—
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]—
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:—
One has heard the Salzburg youth; and the Salzburg maid is explicit in her reply:[1035]—
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:—
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]—