But the dance and the throng are not far away from saucy bits of another type:^[1037]—

Or this:—

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”:—

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]—

There is a pretty little English ballad called The Unquiet Grave,^[1039] which begins in the same tone:—

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:—

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:—

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?

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]

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.

“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]—

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:—

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,—

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:—

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.