230.  The ethnological evidence for this statement is given in Wallaschek’s Primitive Music on nearly every page. Many good things on the origin of rhythm could be quoted from older writers. A. W. Schlegel undertook a physiological and genetic study of rhythm, but, at Schiller’s prompting, offered more attractive metal to the Kantlings with “das Beharrliche im Wechsel.” One notes, however, the modern tone of passages in the Berlin Lectures; e.g. I. 242 ff. Now and then he almost anticipates Bücher’s Arbeit und Rhythmus. Sulzer’s article in the Allgemeine Theorie is very interesting. For early material, see Blankenburg’s invaluable Litterarische Zusätze, 3 vols., 1796-1798. A good recent discussion is found in the third book of Guyau’s Problèmes.

231.  Unless it is a succession of inarticulate sounds. See Groos, Spiele der Menschen, Jena, 1899, p. 42.

232.  Compare the “meaningless” words so common in savage poetry. The art of combining with exact rhythm a series of syntactic sentences which give a connected story, or express a logical series of thoughts, is no primitive process. Earliest poetry is repetition of sounds,—not meaningless, for they were connected with the occasion,—of words, of sentences, with a diminishing use of the refrain, a diminishing frequency of repetition.

233.  In his “Art of the Future,” Gesammelte Schriften, III. 82 ff., he tells how dance, song, and poem were at first inseparable. Dance has as artistic material “the whole man from top to toe”; but it becomes an art only through rhythm, which is also the very skeleton of music: “without rhythm no dance, no song.” Rhythm is “the soul of dancing and the brain of music.” With the human voice comes poetry, all three being woven in one: out of this union of the three “is born the single art of lyric,” but they get their highest expression in the drama.

234.  Primitive Music, pp. 174, 187.

235.  Psychology of the Emotions, pp. 335 f.

236.  In an article so entitled, in Mind, XVI. (1891), 498 ff., and N. S., I. (1892), 325 ff.

237.  The tendency to use hands as well as feet in keeping rhythm is illustrated by the Ba-Ronga of Delagoa Bay (Junod, Les Chantes et les Contes des Ba-Ronga, Lausanne, 1897), where the use of sticks may help to explain Donovan’s “rhythmic beating.” With these people “tout s’y chante et ... tous ou presque tous les chants s’y dansent” (p. 21). Refrains are sung “ten, twenty, fifty times in succession”; the songs have two elements, the solo and the refrain en tutti. A circle is formed, the men holding sticks in their hands; the solo singer leaps into the middle and sings a few words; then all the dancers sing a refrain, raising and dropping their sticks in cadence, though the rhythm is primarily given by their stamping feet. Then the soloist again, only slightly varying his theme; and again the long refrain (pp. 32 f.). The war-songs are almost entirely refrain, sung by all the warriors as they dance, “antique et grandiose choral,” says Junod.

238.  From Lyre to Muse, a History of the Aboriginal Union of Music and Poetry, London, 1890; Chap. V., “Fusion of Tones and Words.”

239.  “It is said that if it is known that anybody in particular composed a song, the people in some of these places will not sing it,” Ibid., pp. 138 f. For this vexed question, see below, chapter on Communal Poetry.

240.  Of course Horace (IV. ii. 10 ff.) is thinking of Pindar’s “new” compounds and fresh expressions; but the quotation agrees as well with the history of the dithyrambic poem.

241.  “Arbeit und Rhythmus,” reprinted from the Abhandlungen d. kgl. sächsischen Gesellschaft d. Wissenschaften, philol. histor. Classe, XVII. 5, Leipzig, 1896. According to Groos, Spiele der Menschen, pp. 57 ff., some of these statements have been modified. In the second edition of the Entstehung der Volkswirthschaft, pp. 32 f., a book which the present writer could not consult, Bücher concedes the priority of play, and sees in it the starting-point of labour. This, however, does not change the validity of Bücher’s main argument for the connection of labour and rhythm, so far as they concern the beginnings of poetry.

242.  A. W. Schlegel here and there hints at this origin of rhythm in labour; so does Sulzer. See note above, p. 101. See also the Abbé Batteux, “Sur les Nombres Poëtiques et Oratoires,” Mém. Acad. Inscript., XXXV. 415: “le marteau du forgeron tombe en cadence, la faulx du moissonneur va et revient avec nombre ... le rhythme soutient nos forces dans les travaux pénibles.”

243.  Bücher, p. 101.

244.  Ibid., p. 52.

245.  “Grundelement dieser Dreieinheit,” Ibid., p. 78. Of course, he admits elsewhere similar functions of the dance, which was, after all, a kind of labour, even when not an imitation of labour. Hence Bücher gives priority to labour in its large sense. For primitive man the line between work and play was not too sharply drawn.

246.  A strong support for this social foundation of song is found in observations such as Böckel has made among the peasants of Hesse. “Their song,” he says (work quoted, p. cv.), “is nearly all choral; the countryman, when sober, seldom sings alone. It is remarkable,” Böckel goes on to say, “how these people, who singly show little capacity for music, can make such an artistic effect in chorus.”

247.  Several men, as a rule, trod the grapes with naked feet. Songs directly sprung from this labour survived for long ages. The material is indicated by Bücher, pp. 88 f. The later festal songs, of course, were symbolical and reminiscent.

248.  The famous Greek song, preserved by Plutarch, is matched by recent songs of the Africans, as well as by those of European traditions.

249.  “La sympathie pour les choses,” says M. de Vogüé, Histoire et Poésie, p. 190, is the “principe et raison de l’art d’écrire.”

250.  Bastian, in his book Der Völkergedanke im Aufbau einer Wissenschaft vom Menschen, Berlin, 1881, pp. 8 f., notes that in a modern work of art one looks for traits of the genius that brought it forth, while in the beginnings of society, of institutions, one looks “for the unconscious stirrings, in the organism, of the average man who has realized himself in them.” And in an address (same book, p. 172) on the aims of ethnology, he declares that for this science man is not the individual anthropos, but the social being, the zoon politikon of Aristotle, which demands the social state as condition of his existence. “Das Primäre ist also der Völkergedanke.”

251.  Œuvres, Paris, 1790, III. 165 ff., from the Mercure of January, 1678.

252.  Nowhere better discussed and settled than in Goethe’s sonnet, “Natur und Kunst, sie scheinen sich zu fliehen,” with its concluding lines:—

253.  Theatrum Poetarum, first published 1675, ed. Brydges, Canterbury, 1800 (who limits it to English poets, so changing the title), p. xxxvi.

254.  Ueber Ursprung und Verbreitung des Reimes, Dorpat, 1866, p. 18. “Anschauung” and “Empfindung” are the terms.

255.  Nature and Elements of Poetry, pp. 76 f.

256.  Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, Bd. III., three essays, “Die Kunst und die Revolution” (1849); “Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft,” a more important work, dithyrambic, but highly interesting and full of the “folk,” as against “Ihr Intelligenten”; and thirdly, “Kunst und Klima” (1850).

257.  Ibid., pp. 255 f., 261, 268.

258.  See especially ibid., pp. 133-207.

259.  Preface to Cromwell, p. 16: “La société, en effet, commence par chanter ce qu’elle rêve, puis raconte ce qu’elle fait, et enfin se met à peindre ce qu’elle pense,” Hugo’s well-known sequence of lyric, epic, drama.

260.  L’Art au Point de Vue Sociologique, p. 26.

261.  This doctrine is in line with modern psychological notions of the part played by intelligent mental selection upon the instinctive material of consciousness. See Lloyd Morgan, Habit and Instinct, pp. 323 f.

262.  See Shepheard’s Calender, October, Argument,—a specimen of the doctrine in that never-published English Poete.

263.  “Abbregé de l’Art Poetique,” in Works, ed. Blanchemain, VII. 318.

264.  Ibid., VII. 340. “Aussi les divines fureurs de Musique, de Poësie, et de paincture, ne viennent pas par degrés en perfection comme les autres sciences, mais par boutées et comme esclairs de feu, qui deçu qui dela apparoissent en divers pays, puis tout en un coup s’esvanouissent.”

265.  For writers in the vulgar tongue, Dante reverses the rule of more matter and less art. They are too facile. “Pudeat ergo, pudeat idiotas tantum audere deinceps, ut ad cantiones prorumpant,” de vulgar. Eloq., Cap. vi. The canzone must not be content with the speech of common life; let it essay an exalted style.

266.  Cap. iv., Pastoralia, p. 6.

267.  G. J. Vossius, de artis poeticæ natura, 1647, Cap. iii. Many subsequent writers followed Scaliger’s account of origins.

268.  Critische Dichtkunst, 1737, pp. 86, 72.

269.  Unterricht von der teutschen Sprache und Poesie, deren Ursprung, Fortgang und Lehrsätzen, Kiel, 1682. This book has been called the first attempt at a history of German, and, indeed, of collective European, poetry. Morhof gives a historic account of rime, compares German verse with verse of other nations, and is the first writer in Germany to name Shakspere.

270.  “De la Poésie Naturelle ou de la Langue Poétique” and “De la Poésie Artificielle,” in Mém. Acad. Inscript., XV. 192 ff., 207 ff. (1739). The only interest lies in the titles, the text is all verbal quibbling. In Mém., XXIII. 85 ff., is a plan for a general history of poetry. But Racine Junior is negligible.

271.  Ibid., IX. 320 f. (1731-1733), in a paper on the songs of ancient Greece. He repeats the idea that art comes out of nature, but lays stress on a development of special singers, a sort of guild, as contrasted with earlier universality of song. This is the contrast made afterward by Wilhelm Grimm (Heldensage, 2d ed., pp. 382 f.) between “free” and professional song.

272.  Augustini Calmet dissertatio de poesi veterum Hebraeorum, ... Helmstadii, 1723. A French version is in the Dissertationes qui peuvent servir de Prologomenes de l’Ecriture Sainte, ... Paris, 1720, 3 vols., I. 128 ff. See particularly 15 ff. of the Latin: “Duo habentur Poeseos genera: naturale et artificiale,” etc.

273.  “Non incommode ergo dicimus, Poesin methodicam artem esse, accurate et studiose exprimendi passiones, naturalem vero, quae sine arte, sine meditatione praevia, eas sistit. Omnis populus, omnis terra, omne temperamentum, omnis affectus sua non destituitur rhetorica aut poesi naturali.... Natura semper producit rudius aliquid, quod ars perficere conatur.”

274.  See Barth, Die Philosophie der Geschichte als Sociologie, Leipzig, 1897, I. 202.

275.  “Sur les progrès successifs de l’esprit humain,” Œuvres, II. 597 ff.

276.  On this change in poetic criticism, see Von Stein, Entstehung der neueren Aesthetik, p. 97. It must be remembered, however, that while Turgot clung to the individual in this sense, his search for laws of progress, movements, tendencies, was really preparing ruin for individualism, and making Condorcet’s and Herder’s task more easy.

277.  Characteristics, 5th ed., Birmingham, 1765, I. 22.

278.  Stimmen der Völker, Dedication: Euch weih’ ich die Stimme des Volks der zerstreueten Menschheit.

279.  Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, II. Chap. XII. § vii., divides the general course of thought into sentimental, romantic, and rationalistic tendencies.

280.  Essais, I. liv., near the end: “La poësie populere et purement naturelle a des naifvetez et graces par où elle se compare à la principale beauté de la poësie parfaicte selon l’art: comme il se voit ès villanelles de Gascoigne, et aus Chançons qu’on nous raporte des nations qui n’ont conoissance d’aucun sciance ny mesmes d’escriture. La poësie mediocre qui s’arrete entre deus est desdeignée, sans honur et sans pris.”

281.  On Cannibals, I. xxx. “Ce premier couplet, c’est le refrain de la chanson.... Toute la journée se passe à dancer.”

282.  Fresenius, Deutsche Litteraturzeitung, 1892, col. 769 ff.

283.  Or whoever wrote the book. See Arber’s ed., pp. 26, 53.

284.  So says Ferdinand Wolf in his famous essay on Spanish ballads.

285.  Stimmen der Völker and Volkslieder. Volkslied is original with Herder. See note, p. xxvi., of the author’s Old English Ballads.

286.  “Nicht jeder versteht Poesie zu wittern,” is a remark of his still in some need of emphasis, Lectures (Neudruck), III. 141.

287.  “We shall treat first the poetry of nature, and then the poetry of art. We shall follow this development historically.”... Lectures (Neudruck, etc.), I. 25 f.

288.  Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues, a part of the introduction to his researches on the Kawi language, § 20, Werke, VI. 249.

289.  See the introduction to the author’s Old English Ballads.

290.  A. W. Schlegel, Werke, ed. Böcking, VIII. 64 ff., written in 1800. See particularly pp. 79 f.

291.  “Deren Dichter gewissermassen das Volk im ganzen war.”

292.  Reprinted, Werke, XII. 383 ff., from the Heidelberger Jahrbücher of 1815.

293.  Oral and communal literature, it is almost superfluous to point out, are not one and the same thing. See Max Müller on “Literature before Letters,” Nineteenth Century, November, 1899, pp. 798 f.

294.  Such an assumption takes most of the value from Berger’s detailed account of the controversy over popular song, “Volksdichtung und Kunstdichtung,” Nord and Süd, LXVIII. (1894), 76 ff., an account which is often inaccurate and quite incomplete. Berger’s conclusion that there is no essential difference between poetry of the people and poetry of art confuses, as is usual in this school of Germans, the poetic impulse with the poetic product.

295.  As direct, unqualified fact. One is dealing here with no phrases, no illustrations, such as the editor of Brantôme employs when he says (preface to the Vie des Dames Galantes, p. x), “dans un siècle, il y a deux choses, l’histoire et la comédie: l’histoire, c’est le peuple, la comédie, c’est l’homme.”

296.  La Vie Littéraire, II. 173.

297.  Work quoted, p. 340.

298.  For the psychological study of individuality in art and letters, see Dilthey, “Beiträge zum Studium der Individualität,” Sitzungsberichte, Berlin Academy, 1896, I. 295 ff. For a historical study, with sociological leanings, see the admirable work of Burckhardt, Cultur der Renaissance in Italien, ed. 1898, I. 143 ff. (“der Mensch wird geistiges Individuum”), 154 f., 178; II. 29 f., 48; and Brunetière, Évolution des Genres, pp. 39, 167 (Rousseau and individualism), and Nouveaux Essais, pp. 66, 150, 194.

299.  If one had the materials, a similar emancipation of the poet could be noted in Latin, beginning, perhaps, with Ennius—volito vivus per ora virum—and Naevius, down to Horace, his fountain made famous me dicente, and the non omnis moriar.

300.  Vossler, Poetische Theorien in der italienischen Frührenaissance, Berlin, 1900, p. 3: “Im Mittelalter hatte jede Gesellschaftsklasse ihren eigenen zünftigen Sänger (rimatore oder dicitore per rima), der nur von ihr verstanden und anerkannt wurde.”

301.  Lounsbury, Chaucer, III. 14.

302.  Nyrop, Den oldfranske Heltedigtning, p. 288.

303.  On the individual poet as mouthpiece of the clan, see Posnett, Comp. Lit., pp. 130 ff., and Letourneau, Évolution Littéraire, p. 78.

304.  Purgat., xxiv. 52 ff.:—

But it must be read with what precedes and what follows.

305.  It is almost impertinent to remind the reader of Dante’s famous verses, Purgat., viii. 1 ff. Perhaps Hugo remembers his Dante here. Compare Section iv. of this same Chant.

306.  The emancipation of woman as an individual begins here in Italy. See M. de Vogüé’s study of the Sforza (in Histoire et Poésie), and the general statement of Burckhardt, Cult. Ital. Ren., I. 144, note 3.

307.  “Ego velut in confinio duorum populorum constitutus simul ante retroque prospicio,” a saying of Petrarch, would apply better to Dante. The Vita Nuova has psychological analysis enough for ten moderns; but the mediæval in it all conquers the modern, as one feels the moment one turns to Petrarch’s correspondence. Perhaps Norden, Antike Kunstprosa, II. 732, lays too much stress on Petrarch’s backward gaze; he did look backward to the classics, but he was not mediæval. See the charming extracts given in Robinson and Rolfe’s Petrarca.

308.  Hardly borrowed from the classics, as Gautier hints in general, and asserts for Old French epic. See Benezé, Das Traummotiv in der mhd. Dichtung bis 1250, und in alten deutschen Volksliedern, Halle, 1897, pp. 53 ff.

309.  Development of English Thought, pp. 81 f.

310.  Déor’s song, first in point of time of English lyrics, is a vox clamantis in deserto. The breezy personality of it, the individual confidence, the appeal to great names and great things to prop Master Déor’s own hope that something good will turn up,—all this is discouragement to the critic who likes to go about pasting labels on various epochs of literature. But there is Déor’s rival, Wîdsîð, the typical singer lost in the guild, or rather a dozen singers rolled into one,—communal triumph.

311.  Causeries du Lundi, XIV. 296 f. Learned research on the ubi sunt formula is noted by Professor Bright, Modern Language Notes, 1893, Col. 187.

312.  Classical parallels go for little here; changes rung upon the memento mori, like Horace’s quo pater Æneas, a statement, are not in line with these mediæval queries.

313.  Chaucer, Troilus, V. 1174 ff.:—

Boccaccio has instead an allusion to the “wind of Etna.” Chaucer’s phrase is “a reference to some popular song or saying,” in Skeat’s opinion.

314.  Printed by Morris, Old English Miscellany, pp. 90 ff.

315.  Not, of course, merely in this ballade. Among other examples of the quality, see stanzas 28, 29, 38 ff. of the Grand Testament. See other ballades; passages in the Petit Testament:—

and of course the Regrets de la Belle Heaulmiere.

316.  About 1300; modernized, of course. Compare the sweep and firm individual control of Wordsworth’s Loud is the Vale,—lines on the expected death of Fox.

317.  M. Gaston Paris, Poésie du Moyen Age, II. 232, contrasts Villon with Charles of Orleans, the “dernier chanteur du moyen age,” while the other is “premier poète moderne,” and that “par le libre essor de l’individualisme.” See the rest of this admirable summary.

318.  The Lorelei legend would once have been given for its own sake; now it is merely a reason, which the poet imparts to his reader, “dass ich so traurig bin.”

319.  Lament for the Makaris (dead poets for dead ladies), quhen he wes Seik,—a significant situation, like Tom Nash—again with dead lords and ladies—and his “I am sick, I must die: Lord have mercy on us!” For the imitation of Villon by Dunbar, see the notes by Dr. Gregor in Small’s edition of Dunbar’s Works.

320.  Mr. Sidney Lee has surely gone too far in divorcing sentiment from Elizabethan sonnets; as in the case of dance and ballad, literary bookkeeping can be overdone, and borrowing may too easily obscure production.

321.  See Ribot, Psychol. Emot., p. 267, on arrested development of emotion. He allows, by the way, p. vi., not only a physiological basis of emotion, but, pp. 7, 12, gives autonomy to the emotional states, and allows them to exist independently of intellectual conditions.

322.  The tyranny of terms mars some of the conclusions in Professor Francke’s valuable book on Social Forces in German Literature, and the “individualism” to which he often refers has divers meanings.

323.  See next chapter.

324.  Becker, Ursprung der romanischen Versmasse, Strassburg, 1890, pp. 6 f., notes that a mediæval hymn by no means expressed mediæval life; it was an individual affair, as was proved at length by Wolf, Lais, pp. 86 ff., who calls the hymns “kunstmässige Gedichte (carmina)” by known and named churchmen. These often had classical models in mind. Later the hymns were suited to congregational purposes.

325.  See p. 172; and cf. the passage about the solitary way of the poet, p. 175: “Les animaux lâches vont en troupes. Le lion marche seul dans le désert. Qu’ainsi marche toujours le poëte.”

326.  Gervinus thinks that the individual came to his rights in the crusades, when Christian ideals were substituted for ancient ideals. But the classical traditions of authorship, if not of wider issues, were one with the individual spirit of Christianity. The struggle was against communal conditions of life in general.

327.  “To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow....”

328.  A pretty study in communal feeling, as compared with artistic and individual sentiment, could treat the use of a supernatural element in the ballad Clerk Saunders and in Keats’s La Belle Dame sans Merci.

329.  See Texte, Rousseau, pp. 330 ff.

330.  Cult. Ren. in Ital., II. 72.

331.  Even Icelandic sagas, which show considerable artistic skill, make the diction of their heroes anything but pathetic, whatever the situation. See Heinzel, “Beschreibung d. isländ. Saga,” Sitzungsberichte Wiener Akad., XCVII. 119.

332.  Work quoted, I. 167.

333.  Northall, English Folk-Rhymes, prints a number of these; for example, p. 34, in Lancashire, Gorton lads sing:—

One thinks, too, of the Scottish feuds, and a favourite tune like that of Liddesdale:—

See Chambers’s Book of Days, I. 200.

334.  Vilmar, in his little Handbüchlein, p. 5, is full of righteous enthusiasm for an old cutthroat ballad, and full of righteous scorn for Heine’s cynical lines, “Spitzbübin war sie, er war ein Dieb;” the modern reader, for his sins, prefers Heine and chances the moral turpitude involved in his choice.

335.  Interest even in the great tragedies has come to be duty rather than inclination. In the Abbé Dubos’s day tragedy was still preferred; but he says that whereas he read Racine with keenest delight at thirty (“lorsqu’il etoit occupé des passions que ces pièces nous dépeignent”), at sixty it was Molière.

336.  Der Scheidende. Sentiment naturally turns to the cadence of rhythm, while humour feels at home in prose; hence it is easy to see that humour in verse, as with Heine, is ancillary to sentiment, while sentiment in prose, as with Sterne and even Lamb, is ancillary to humour.

337.  See below, Chap. VII.

338.  See the author’s Old English Ballads, p. xxx, and reference to Wordsworth’s famous preface. See also Gray’s letter to R. West, April, 1742, “The language of the age is never the language of poetry,” and what follows.

339.  See the author’s Old English Ballads, Boston, 1894, Introduction (on terminology, origins, criticism), and Appendix I. (The Ballads of Europe). For collections, see, of course, the material in the tenth volume of Child’s great work. On the relations of this communal ballad to the other kind of ballads, see Holtzhausen, Ballade und Romanze, Halle, 1882, and Chevalier, Zur Poetik der Ballade, Programme of the Prague Obergymnasium, in four parts, Prague, 1891-1895.