1. Twining, Aristotle, 2d ed., I. 183, thinks the original treatise was written as a defence against the “cavils of prosaic philosophers” and the objections of Plato.
2. In his curious book, La Philosophie du Bon-Sens, 1737, p. 15, D’Argens speaks of Aristotle “dont les Ouvrages sur la Poëtique sont aussi bons, que ceux dans lesquels il traite de la Philosophie sont peu utiles.”
3. De Futilitate Poetices auctore Tanaquillo Fabro Tanaquilli filio Verbi Divini Ministro..., Amstel., 1697. It was answered by the Abbé Massieu in a Defense de la Poésie (in Hist. d. l. Poés. Françoise, Paris, 1739), a pious but heavy performance.
4. Table Talk, ed. Arber, pp. 85 f.
5. Lord Radnor in Spence’s Anecdotes, ed. Singer, p. 368.
6. Problèmes de l’Esthétique Contemporaine, pp. 89 ff., 255.
7. Ribot, Psychology of the Emotions, pp. 329 ff., rejects Guyau’s emendation of Grant Allen, and backs Groos in his view of the play theory.
8. “Gedanken über Musik bei Thieren und beim Menschen,” 1889, in Deutsche Rundschau, LXI. 50 ff.
9. Athenæum, III. 67.
10. Criticism has been treated of late with scientific precision. See the bibliographical array in Gayley and Scott’s admirable Methods and Materials of Literary Criticism, Boston, 1899. From the imperial critic, the “gentle reader” and patron represented by Montaigne, who gives no reasons but his own likes and dislikes, as witness that delightful essay on books, in its opening sentence, through the official critics, down to M. Brunetière, the scientific critic, faithful to the doctrine of evolution in general, and attentive to the law in the particular case, it is to be noted how criticism has been approaching the sociological domain, the study of poetry as an element of human life. Sainte-Beuve was still a critic of poets and poems, for all his “natural method”; Taine crossed the border and studied poetry, the product, under sociological and ethnological conditions. See Sainte-Beuve, Nouveaux Lundis, VIII. 87 f., 69 f.; IX. 70; and Taine, Derniers Essais, Paris, 1894, pp. 58 f. M. Brunetière, in carrying on the plan of Taine, and Hennequin, in opposing it, work on sociological and historical ground, rather than in the old æsthetics. Hennequin’s Critique is “scientifique”; while a title like M. Brunetière’s Evolution of Species in Literature can be conceded to criticism only by taking such liberties with the word as to leave it practically undefined. Still, these men work for criticism if not in it, and they give no reason for disputing what is said in the text about the paucity of books on poetry as an element in human society. They have the modern poet, the modern poem, in view; they wish to lay down metes and bounds and adjust the law. Hennequin will found a new science, “an immense anthropology,” made up of all the vital sciences (Crit. Sci., pp. 185 f.); but his place is with the critics, and not with scholars in historical and comparative literature. His æsthopsychology indicates devotion to the poetic impulse rather than to the product. Mr. Granger (Worship of the Romans, p. vii) has lately called up the word ethology, suggested by Stuart Mill (Logic of the Moral Sciences, pp. 213 ff., 218), in line with a hint that the foundations of comparative psychology must be laid in the study of the people and of their habits of thought. Something of this sort has been done by M. Le Bon in his Psychologie des Foules, quoted below.
11. Such are the Comparative Literature of Posnett, and the less didactic work of Letourneau, L’Évolution Littéraire dans les diverses Races Humaines, Paris, 1894. The former was mainly pioneer work, meant to open and define its subject; and in this it attained its end. This sociological method has been applied, of course, in a critical way, to many individual works, and to many periods of literature; not so, however, with the poetic product at large.
12. There is more to be said for the partial origin of poetry in choral songs of a sexual character sung after the communal feast of the horde or clan. This “sex-freedom,” so revolting to modern ideas, left late traces in history; and Professor Karl Pearson quotes Tsakni’s La Russie Sectaire to the effect that such license still prevails at fairs and periodic festivals in Russia, combined with choral dance.—Pearson, The Chances of Death, II. 243. There are Australian festivals of this sort; and license of May-Day, of Shrove-Tuesday, and the rest, is familiar in European survival. On the other hand, it will be found that erotic poetry of the individual and lyric sort is almost unknown among savages.
13. History of Creation, 2 vols., trans., New York, 1893, I. 355, quoting from his General Morphology. He adds that by “tribe” he means “the ancestors which form the chain of progenitors of the individual concerned.”
14. Der Fetischismus, Leipzig, 1871, pp. 61, 74 f. A pretty little parallel of savages and children in the worship of images and dolls was drawn by M. Anatole France in a review of Lemonnier’s Comédie des Jouets. See France, La Vie Littéraire, II. 10 ff.
15. Mental Development in the Child and the Race, New York, 1895, pp. 15, 335 ff.; Social and Ethical Interpretations, New York, 1897, pp. 9, 189, etc.
16. Vorlesungen, Stuttgart, 1884, I. 275.
17. Critische Dichtkunst, 1737, p. 87.
18. Esquisse des Progrès de l’Esprit-Humain.
19. Essay on “Ashiepattle” in The Chances of Death, II. 53.
20. Arbeit und Rhythmus, p. 15.
21. L’Évolution Littéraire, p. 81.
22. Ibid., pp. 15 f., “répétition, approximative, abrégée surtout; mais néanmoins elle est une répétition.” But at once he quotes some striking facts, in order to prove his thesis (that song preceded speech), and goes back for a child analogy to the book of B. Perez, L’Art et la Poésie chez l’Enfant, a book which the present writer has been unable to consult.
23. Die Anfänge der Poesie, Dresden and Leipzig, 1891.
24. Work quoted, p. 96. Even old Gottsched, Crit. Dichtkt., p. 68, called a child’s weeping “a song of lament,” and its laughter “a song of joy.” “Every passion,” he says, “has its own tone with which it makes itself manifest,” really a better hint of origins than this scientific masquerading of Jacobowski.
25. Primitive Music, pp. 76, 78.
26. The best objection against this analogy in any definite use is made by O. Gruppe, Griechische Culte und Mythen, p. 199. The child and the savage, he points out, have each a small range of perceptions; the ways in which they enlarge this range are diametrically opposed. One does it productively; the other, receptively. See, too, a bit of sarcasm over the complacent scorn for the “childish” savages felt by civilized man, Grosse, Anfänge der Kunst, pp. 51 f.
27. Dr. Brown, Adam Smith, Lord Monboddo, and others were leading Englishmen in the movement to use the savage to explain early man. Smith and Monboddo enjoyed this literary vivisection, the former once watching “a negro dance to his own song the war-dance of his own country, with such vehemence of action and expression, that the whole company, gentlemen as well as ladies, got up upon chairs and tables.” See the Essays, Edinburgh, 1795, “Of the Imitative Arts,” Parts II., III., and the fragment “Of the Affinity between Music, Dancing, and Poetry.” The main credit, however, belongs to Turgot. In his “Plan du Prém. Disc. sur l’Hist. Universelle,” Œuvres, II. 216, he uses the savages of America to illustrate the state of primitive man. He is also strong for the milieu. “Si Racine fût né au Canada chez les Hurons...!” he says, II. 264; and his other illustrations are suggestive (in the “Plan du 2. Disc.”). II. 265, he notes the homogeneity of barbaric races.
28. Outlines of Sociology, trans. Moore, p. 85.
29. The outright degeneration assumed by Le Maistre need not come into the account. Human progress is now conceded to be a resultant of opposing forces of growth and decay. Mr. Talcott Williams has an interesting paper, “Was Primitive Man a Modern Savage?” in the Report of the Smithsonian Inst., 1896, pp. 541 ff. His main point is, that the modern savage has deteriorated under pressure. Primitive man was in a more or less “empty earth,” and was not crowded by his fellows. The god of war is always a junior member of Olympus. So, too, Professor Baldwin (Social and Ethical Interpretations, p. 214) argues for a reign of peace, a “sort of organic resting-place,” in the child’s second period, which answers to social coöperation, “the rest which man took after his release from the animal.... The social tide then sets in. The quest of domestic union and reciprocal service comes to comfort him, and his nomadic and agricultural habits are formed.” One is reminded of Scherer’s argument for an epoch of peace in early Germanic culture attested by names which bear that stamp as compared with the later and warlike Gerhards, Gertrudes, and the rest.
30. It is hardly necessary to warn against fallacies of illustration. Even Bruchmann goes astray when he says the poem of Goethe is to the primitive song as a cherry tree in bloom is to a cherry stone just planted. To primitive man the primitive song was already a tree in bloom, and his appreciation of it was in line with modern appreciation of Goethe’s poem.
31. Or, indeed, any one tribe of human beings. Even in the very beginning of human activity, that activity was, as now, conditioned by the environment, and there were doubtless several types of primitive existence. Evidently, then, there could have been different types of social union even at the outset of social progress.
32. Principles of Sociology, 3d (American) ed., I. 93, 96. Dr. Eugen Wolff is equally severe on the abuse, “Vorstudien zur Poetik,” in the Zst. f. Litteraturgesch., VI. 426.
33. Anfänge der Kunst, pp. 33 ff. For falling off in civilization among Africans and others, see Tylor, Primitive Culture, I. 46, 48.
34. Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass., 1820, I. 313 ff.
35. In 1805.
36. See below, on the Darwinian theory of lyric.
37. Polynesian Researches, American ed., III., Chap. XII.
38. Waitz-Gerland, Anthropologie der Naturvölker, VI. 85.
39. Ibid., VI. 606 ff.
40. See R. M. Meyer, Altgermanische Poesie, p. 434.
41. Studies in Ancient History, First Series, new ed., 1886; see pp. 2, 35.
42. Anfänge der Kunst, pp. 21 ff., 32 ff.
43. London, 1795, pp. xlii ff.
44. Nearer to the present subject are Smith’s excellent essay “Of the Imitative Arts” and the fragment “Of the Affinity between Music, Dancing, and Poetry.”
45. Fröhliche Wissenschaft, pp. 44 f. See also p. 180.
46. Compare Ribot’s idea of what he calls the æsthetic conquest of nature, Psychology of the Emotions, p. 345, with Professor Patten’s remorselessly economic theory that appreciation of these things depends on cheap and warm woollen underclothing.
47. Pulszky, The Theory of Law and Civil Society, London, 1888, p. 107. “Selfishness,” by the way, is not a good name for the quality he has in mind; but the method is relevant.
48. “La doctrine évolutive et l’histoire de la littérature,” Revue des deux Mondes, 15 Fev. 1898. See especially pp. 889, 892 ff. See also his Évolution des Genres, particularly the chapter on Taine.
49. “Louis Bertrand, qui signait en bon romantique Aloïsius Bertrand,” 1807-1841, born at Céra in Piedmont.
50. Now very rare. It appeared, edited by M. Pavie, in 1842. See Sainte-Beuve, Portraits Littéraires, II. 343 ff.
51. C. Asselineau in Les Poètes Français, Tom. IV., 1862, p. 697.
52. Sainte-Beuve gives four specimens of Bertrand’s “poems” in prose. Brunetière, Questions de Critique, p. 202, quotes with approval Gautier’s words: “Vouloir séparer le vers de la poésie, c’est une folie moderne qui ne tend à rien moins que l’anéantissement de l’art lui-même.”
53. Italics not in Shelley’s essay.—For these very sentences, so poetical in their prose, see Hegel (on the poetic sentence), Aesthetik, III. 248 f.
54. Reflexions, ed. ¹ 1770, I. 508 ff. A poem in prose is like an engraving; all is here save colour, all is there save verse. The Princesse de Cleves and Télémaque are poems. Does not colour make the painting, though? Verse the poem? In the next section he prudently asserts, “qu’il est inutile de disputer si la partie du dessein et de l’expression est préferable à celle du coloris.” It is a matter of taste; trahit sua quemque voluptas. Both in poetry and painting “genius” is the main thing,—so he had decided in earlier sections.
55. “En lisant un poëme, nous regardons les instructions que nous y pouvons prendre comme l’accessoire. L’importante c’est le style, parceque c’est du style d’un poëme que dépend le plaisir de son lecteur.”—I. 303.
56. In the fourteenth chapter of Biographia Literaria. He has conceded the convenience of calling all compositions that have “this charm superadded”—rhythm and rime—by the name of poem.
57. Essays, Edinburgh, 1776, p. 296. “I am of opinion,” he says, pp. 294 f., On Poetry and Music, “that to poetry, verse is not essential. In a prose work we may have the fable, the arrangement, and a great deal of the pathos and language of poetry; and such a work is certainly a poem, though”—note the concession—“perhaps not a perfect one.” Verse “is necessary to the perfection of all poetry that admits of it,”—and how, pray, is that limitation to be adjusted? “Verse is to poetry what colours are to painting;” and, quoting Aristotle, “versification is to poetry what bloom is to the human countenance.” Here are pribbles and prabbles enough.
58. Poetry and Imagination.
59. Works, ed. 1854, III. 309.
60. As preface to his Lectures on the English Poets.
61. M. E. M. de Vogüé has other views. To him Robinson Crusoe is “un bon traité de psychologie historique sur un peuple,”—an historic psychology of the English race.—Histoire et Poésie, p. 194.
62. Works, Hartford, 1889, I. 213 f. Essay on Wordsworth, etc. Bruchmann, in his excellent Poetik, Berlin, 1898, gives up the attempt to mark off poetry from prose, speaks of a “neutral ground,” and then defines poetry as “Steigerung durch Form und Inhalt; die Form ist Gesang, Rhythmus, Reim” (p. 53). What more could the defender of rhythm ask as working test?
63. When only one-and-twenty. Meditationes Philosophicae de Nonnullis ad Poema Pertinentibus, 1735.
64. Jugendschriften F. Schl., ed. Minor, I. 99; a study of Greek poetry.
65. Athenæum, III. 87 f., in Talks about Poetry.
66. Aesthetik, Berlin, 1842.
67. See p. 663.
68. Problèmes de l’Esthétique Contemporaine, p. 172.
69. Ibid., p. 150,—“ce poëte sans le rhythme.”
70. Gautier, too, thought that Flaubert had “invented a new rhythm” in prose, and described it; see the report of this, Journal des Goncourt, 1862, January 1. But later, in the same journal (1876, February 24), Goncourt refers all this sort of thing to Chateaubriand: “sa belle prose poétique, mère et nourrice de toutes les proses colorées de l’heure actuelle....”
71. L’Art au Point de Vue Sociologique, p. 312.
72. See Humboldt, Werke, VI. 230 ff.
73. “Briefe über Poesie, Sylbenmaas und Sprache,” first in Schiller’s Horen, reprinted in the Charakteristiken und Critiken, I. 318 ff.; Werke, ed. Böcking, VII. 98 ff.
74. Wettstreit der Sprachen, Böcking, VII. 199.
75. Etwas über William Shakspere, Böcking, VII. 55.
76. See below, p. 134, for a still more noteworthy and yet quite unnoticed change of front made by Schlegel in the article of folksong.
77. It must be said for Schlegel that he is here—so, at least, it seems—merely clearing the way for his historical and “genetic” study of the art, and so is bound to have no hampering dogma, no parti pris in the case.
78. Notably that division of epopœia, “which imitates by words alone or by verse.” The question is whether Aristotle meant in the first case “words without metre” or “words without music.” See Twining’s fourth note.—It has been pointed out that nowhere in the fragment does Aristotle essay a formal definition of poetry.
79. Rhetoric, III. iii. 3.
80. Aristotle’s Treatise on Poetry, 2d ed., I. 289. This view of Twining is upheld in some highly sensible remarks by Mr. A. O. Prickard in a lecture, Aristotle and the Art of Poetry, London, 1891. What Aristotle clearly meant to say is that “metre is not the most essential characteristic of poetry, yet it would be a misuse of language to call anything a poem which is not metrical in form.” (Italics not in original, p. 60.) Mr. Prickard agrees with Whately, Twining, and many others, that the words of the passage in question, and the instances given, do not make against this view; and “elsewhere, Plato and Aristotle invariably assume that only what is metrical is to be called poetry; nay, that metrical writing and poetry are, for the common purpose of language, convertible terms. ‘In metre, as a poet,’ says Plato, ‘or without metre as a layman.’ ‘A good sentence,’ says Aristotle, ‘should have rhythm but not metre; if it have metre, it will be a poem.’” See the Phædrus, 258, D., and Aristotle’s Rhetoric, III. 8.
81. A clear summary of the case as argued in Italy may be found in Quadrio, Della Storia e della Ragione d’ogni Poesia, I. Bologna, 1739; II.-VII. Milan, 1741-1752. See I. 2 ff. Quadrio is outright for the test of verse and for a generous rendering of Aristotle. He gives the names of forgotten pleaders on both sides, and thinks the noes have it against a traditional Aristotelian view; not to quarrel forever, “Basta, che nacque la Poesia col Verso e col Canto: né, propagata fra le nazioni, fu altrimenti mai lavorato che in Verso.”—Spingarn, Literary Criticism in the Renaissance, New York, 1899, pp. 9 ff., points out that Mantuan was for the verse-test, Savonarola, Minturno, Daniello, against it.
82. “Censet hoc ipsum ... Caesar Scaliger, qui, quod raro facit, hac parte ab Aristotele recedit,” says Vossius, de art. poet., § 7.
83. Iulii Caesaris Scaligeri ... Poetices Libri Septem ... 1561, the first edition, published three years after the author’s death.
84. See p. 3ᵇ: “Poetae igitur nomen non a fingendo ... sed initio a faciendo versu ductum est. Simul enim cum ipsa natura humana extitit vis haec numerosa, quibus versus clauditur.”
85. Ibid., “Infans quoque prius canit quam loquitur, videmus enim plerosque haud aliter somnum captare.”
86. See p. 347ᵃ.
87. Gerardi Joannis Vossii de artis poeticae natura ac constitutione ... Amstelodami, 1647. §4, “Atque ut multi ex solo metro male colligunt aliquem esse poetam: ita contrà aberrant alii, qui existimant, ne quidem requiri metrum, ut poeta aliquis dicatur. Haec tamen sententia à nonnullis ipsi tribuitur Aristoteli ... § 5. At alii censent Aristotelem numquam agnovisse ullum poema ἄμετρον....”
88. Isaaci Casauboni de Satyrica Graecorum Poesi & Romanorum Satira Libri duo, Parisiis, MDCV, pp. 352 f. “Certum heic discrimen statuitur inter eam orationem quae poema dici potest, & quae non potest, discrimen illud est metrum.... Omnem metro astrictam orationem & posse & debere poema dici.” The rest is instructive. Borinski, to be sure, Poetik d. Renaissance, p. 66, says that Casaubon wished to call Herodotus a poet; but a detached phrase of this sort—compare Scaliger’s epic in prose—goes for little when it fails to force the barrier and break down the writer’s definition. Dryden, on the other hand, making “invention” the sole test of poetry, clashes badly with his opinion (Essay on Satire) that “versification and numbers are the greatest pleasures of poetry.”
89. As Howell translates the not too clear Latin “fictio rhetorica in musicaque posita,” poetry is “a rhetorical composition set to music.” See also an article in the Quarterly Review, with reference to the Convivio, April, 1899, p. 303.
90. See his works, ed. Blanchemain, VII. 320.
91. The whole dispute about rime shows this “importance capitale” of verse itself.
92. Advancement of Learning, ed. Wright, II. iii. 4 (pp. 101 ff.). Clearer in the Latin version, his antithesis, “nam et vera narratio carmine, et ficta oratione soluta conscribi potest,” is not identical with the proposition that poetry is independent of rhythm. He says it “is in measure of words for the most part restrained.”
93. De Poematum Cantu et Viribus Rythmi, Oxon., 1673. The reference to origins is interesting: “illud quidem certum omnem poësin olim cantatum fuisse.... Unde sequitur, quicquid non canitur aut cantari nequeat, non esse poema.”
94. Characteristics, 5th ed., Birmingham, 1763, I. 254, note, and III. 264.
95. Essays, “Of Poetry.”
96. Praelectiones Poeticae, 4th ed., London, 1760; see I. 24.
97. Programma de Vera Indole Poeseos Praelectionihus Praemissum, Helmst., 1719. See also his programme of 1720 introducing lectures on the Ars Poetica of Horace.
98. Œuvres Complètes de M. de Fénélon, Tome V., “Discours sur le poeme épique,” pp. 34 ff. There are many discourses on this theme of prose-poetry in the Mémoires of the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles Lettres. The Abbé Fraguier is dull but weighty for the test; Burette, a real scholar, is sensible on the same side (Mém. X. 212 f., in 1730). The younger Racine is very feeble; after reading his contradictory and vapid papers, one has Chaucer on one’s lips—“No more of this, for goddes dignité!”
99. A Knight’s Conjuring, Percy Soc., 1842, pp. 25, 75.
100. Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope, anon., London, 1756. The book is dedicated to Young, and in the dedication Warton gives these general views of poetry.
101. Pope said, “There are three distinct tours in poetry; the design, the language, and the versification....” Spence, Anecd., p. 23. As to prose poems, he could read Telemachus with pleasure, “though I don’t like that poetic kind of prose.” Its good sense was so great, “nothing else could make me forget my prejudices against the style.” Ibid., pp. 141 f.
102. Praelectiones, Pars Prima, Praelect. Tertia: “Poesin Hebraeam metricam esse.”
103. “Sed cum omni poesi haec sit veluti propria quedam lex et necessaria conditio constituta, a qua si discedat, non solum praecipuam elegantiam desiderabit et suavitatem, sed ne nomen suum obtinebit.” It should be added that Calmet, de Poesi vet. Hebrae., p. 15, is against this verse test, “Essentiale Poeseos quaerimus in certo quodam sermone vivido, animato, pathetico, figurisque hyperbolicis audacius ornato. Nec solam versificationem Poetas facere, nec a pedum mensura Poesin dici persuademur.” Then Plato.
104. Rhetoric, III. iii. 3.
105. The younger, of course.
106. Dichtung und Wahrheit, Book XI.; Hempel ed., III. 45.
107. “Wodurch Poesie erst zur Poesie wird,”—the erst will bear a stronger translation. Schiller, too, said that one must put into verse whatever rises above the commonplace; and Goethe agreed with him: all poetry “should be treated rhythmically.” Victor Hugo, in his Preface to Cromwell, pp. 33 f., defends verse for the drama; prose has not adequate resources.
108. Milton is thinking, too, of this in his well-known passage in the treatise on Education. “I mean not here the prosody of a verse ...” boys learn that in their grammars; but in time they must be taught the great things,—“that sublime Art which in Aristotle’s Poetics ... teaches what the laws are of a true Epic poem, what of a Dramatic, what of a Lyric, what Decorum is, which is the grand masterpiece to observe.”
109. Essay on the Imitative Arts.
110. No. XXXV. of the Lectures.
111. Of the Origin and Progress of Language, II. 50; IV. 41.