993. Travels in Africa, reprinted in Pinkerton, XVI. 844.
994. Improvisation of labour songs by women, solitary or in bands, is very common. See Bücher, Arbeit u. Rhythmus, passim, especially, p. 78, and above, p. 269.
995. Improvisations at dance, funeral, wedding, and the like, among these Africans, are summed up by Spencer in his unfinished Descriptive Sociology, pp. 24 f.
997. Compendium, 4th ed., p. 641. Cf. Spencer, Princ. Social., II. 151, American ed.
998. Mental Evolution in Man, p. 358, American ed.
999. Færøiske Quæder om Sigurd, etc., Randers, 1822. P. E. Müller wrote the preface and made the extracts from Lyngbye’s journal; so that the evidence is at first hand and by an exact observer. The remoteness of the place is equivalent to centuries in point of time. See, too, V. U. Hammershaimb, Færøsk Anthologi, Copenhagen, I. xli ff.
1000. See the author’s Old English Ballads, p. xxxiv.
1001. Popular Tales of the West Highlands, 2d ed., IV. 164 f.
1002. Described at length by Möbius in the “Ergänzungsband” for Zacher’s Zeitschrift f. d. deutsche Philologie, 1874, p. 54. For the débat, tenso, sirventes, jeu-parti, conflictos, and all the rest on romance ground, see Jeanroy, pp. 48 f., and Greif, Zst. f. vgl. Lit., N. F., I. 289.
1003. For Portugal, see Dr. C. F. Bellermann, Portug. Volkslieder u. Romanzen, Leipzig, 1874, p. viii.
1004. On ease of improvisation among the Finns proper, see Comparetti, Kalewala, p. 17.
1005. Chambers, Popular Rhymes of Scotland, pp. 166 f.
1006. Coussemaker, p. 271.
1007. Wallace is thinking of music and song in the nobler sense when he denies them to primitive races; and Wallaschek’s answer is conclusive, for it is based on evidence that all goes one way, Primitive Music, pp. 277 f. Another absurd reaction against romantic ideas is to deny lyric propensity to primitive folk and substitute an acute sense of “business.” So Norden, work quoted, I. 156, says the prayer of early man was anything but a “lyrical outpouring”; it was “a contract with deity, give and take.” But emotional fear and emotional thanks precede any such shrewd rationalism as this, if psychology is to be regarded, let alone ethnological evidence.
1008. Schmid, 2d ed., p. 366.
1009. Romanisches und Keltisches, pp. 363 f. The four-line stanza, he says, is easy to compose, and one pennill suggests another; so that each is half tradition, half improvisation, belonging “to everybody and nobody.” This description approaches very closely the hypothetical description given by Ten Brink in his sketch of Old English poetry for Paul’s Grundriss, of the making of ballads in a more primitive day.
1010. Mr. Gregory Smith’s facile explanation, The Transition Period, pp. 182 f.
1011. Ep. II. i. 145 f. See Zell, Ferienschriften, II. 122 ff. Soldiers sang in pairs, or in two sections, these alternate mocking verses.
1012. Douglas Hyde, Love Songs of Connacht, 1895, pp. 88 ff. The prose translation has less artificial suggestion than the translation in verses.
1013. Athenæus and Diodorus are quoted as authorities for the Sicilian origin of such combats in verse; but Jeanroy disposes of this theory by an effective use of the argument from comparative literature. See his Origines, pp. 260 ff.
1014. On the meaning and relations of strambotto, stornello, rispetto, ritornello, and the other terms, see Count Nigra’s Canti Popolari del Piemonte, Torino, 1888, pp. xi ff. He corrects Schuchardt’s use of ritornell for stornello. This latter is really an amœbean form of verse, has but one stanza, and this of three lines; the strambotto is one stanza, too, but has four, six, ten, or even more lines. Still, the four-line stanza, as comparison shows, is clearly the primitive form. Southern Italy is, of course, far richer in these songs than Piedmont, the home of lyrical narrative or ballad.
1015. Found, too, in India; but here not in the really communal stage. See Gustav Meyer, Essays und Studien, pp. 293 f.
1016. Bayerisches Wörterbuch, III. 499, explaining them as Schnitterhüpflein, songs of the reapers.
1017. With references to the literature of these songs, work quoted, pp. 332 ff.
1018. On the form cf. O. Brenner, “Zum Versbau der Schnaderhüpfl,” in Festschrift zur 50 jähr. Doktorjubelfeier Karl Weinholds, Strassburg, 1896, who gives fresh references for the various subjects of discussion. He emphasizes the fact that these schnaderhüpfl are always sung.
1019. Dr. H. Dunger, Rundâs und Reimsprüche aus dem Vogtlande, Plauen, 1876. A rundâ is originally “a little song sung while drinking,” but is made to include the schnaderhüpfl; and in the author’s opinion all these forms go back to songs of reapers during harvest. That, however, is of no great moment here.
1020. “Ueber Poesie der Alpenländer,” in a reprint from a magazine whose title does not appear.
1021. Firmenich, Germaniens Völkerstimmen, II. 716. I have made these translations solely to reproduce, if possible, the spirit of the original, and have tried to keep the false “literary” note at arm’s length.
1022. Ibid., II. 715, 777.
1023. G. Meyer, p. 357, prints a number of such variations on the standing first verse:—
and so on.
1024. Firmenich, II. 779.
1025. Firmenich, II. 661.
1026. Of the dance,—the vorsinger.
1027. Variants of this are found in many places.
1028. Firmenich, III. 39.
1029. Ibid., II. 716.
1030. Ibid., II. 737.
1031. “Go from my window,” pp. 140 ff., with variations (as “Come up to my window”) and parodies.
1032. Firmenich, II. 715.
1033. Od., III. X.
1034. It is well to note here that development is one thing and imitation is another. The authorities agree that a schnaderhüpfl cannot be imitated. See Gustav Meyer, p. 351.
1035. Firmenich, II. 717.
1036. Firmenich, III. 396.
1037. Ibid., II. 280. This is widespread. See Meyer, p. 356.
1038. Meyer, p. 341. The rimes are identical in the original. Meyer gives seven versions.
1039. Child, III. 236.
1040. On this opening touch from nature in the ballads, exemplified in English by the beautiful beginning of Robin Hood and the Monk, much has been written; but this use of the same device in a schnaderhüpfl is very significant, and has aroused little comment. See Meyer, pp. 377 ff.
1041. Child, I. 399 ff.
1042. Essays, pp. 365 ff.
1043. On p. 358.
1044. When the Greek youth leaves his home, Fauriel says, his family sing songs of farewell, traditional and improvised, to which he often improvises a reply. Improvisation, too, and presumably once in the village throng, lies at the foundation of the German prentice songs of leave-taking, the eternal note of scheiden, das thut grämen, with culmination in that exquisite poem, probably not improvised, Innsprück, ich muss dich lassen. The ennobling process is interesting, and is of a piece with the process assumed by A. W. Schlegel for the ennobling of Greek epic out of rude improvisation.
1045. Uhland, Volkslieder, I. 78. In spite of the two melodies, I have put the refrain at the beginning, and slightly changed, as in Uhland’s B., at the end. The actual song is for the dance. See Böhme, Altd. Liederb., p. 268. Only two stanzas are given,—one for the happy girl and one for the lovelorn, one the vortanz, the other the nachtanz.
1047. Firmenich, II. 742.
1048. The translation fails to bring out the simplicity of these two stanzas; they run thus:—
1049. Essays, p. 370; and see also Kögel, Gesch. d. d. Lit., I. 7, who thinks that Scandinavian ljóð (plural) meant once a series of these strophes composed by dancers and so coming to be a lied. E. H. Meyer, Volkskunde, p. 317, notes the independent quatrains combined into an almlied.
1050. Also G. Meyer, Essays, pp. 370, 375.
1051. Ibid., pp. 377 ff.
1052. Norske Folkeviser, Christiania, 1853. See especially pp. 365 ff., 423 ff.
1053. Ibid., p. 366.
1054. Lundell, Paul’s Grundriss, II. i. 730, says that even now any adult in Iceland can make verses.
1055. Landstad, pp. 370 ff.
1056. Ibid., p. 376.
1057. The vocero is far less individual than this quatrain or stave just considered, because the former is an outburst rather of public grief than of private emotion.
1059. Definitions are notoriously unsatisfactory in poetics. Contrast Schleiermacher’s formula for lyric as poetry plus music, Aesthetik, p. 628, with the laborious definition in R. M. Werner’s Lyrik und Lyriker, Hamburg and Leipzig, 1890, p. 10, based mainly on the subjective element. Confusion of form and conditions, which makes lyric poetry one with music (see Döring, Kunstlehre d. Aristoteles, p. 88), with inner meaning and purpose, has caused most of the trouble. In one sense the old choral was the very foundation of lyric. The congregational psalm of the Hebrews is lyric, and so is the solitary cry of the modern poet.
1061. As Matthew Arnold reminds us:—
For the prevailing tone of lyric is sad, and Euterpe treats her poet as Genevieve treated Coleridge:—
1062. The claim of Usener may be noted (“Der Stoff des griechischen Epos,” Sitzungsber. d. Kais. Acad. d. Wiss. zu Wien, Bd. 137, pp. 18 ff.), where he puts the ceremonies at the hearthstone, primitive ancestor-worship, as the real beginning of epic song. The offering to an ancestor must have been made “with music, prayer, and song.” Hence the epos. It is true that a lyric of this sort is older than any epic,—the epic which Hegel pushed forward as earliest form of poetry, just as the renaissance had put it above the drama in dignity,—and may well have helped the later epic process. But the evidence of ethnology shows that rude songs at the tribal dance, which refer to tribal doings, must be far older than any ceremonies of the primitive hausvater at his family altar.
1063. A. W. Schlegel said that the Homeric poems were improvised; but he distinguished between rude communal improvisation and that of incipient art. Vorlesungen, II. 119 f., 243.
1064. Livy, VII. 2, gives an account of this change.
1065. See Maurice Drack, Le Théâtre de la Foire, la Comédie Italienne, et l’Opéra-comique, Paris, 1889. Vol. I. has a sketch of the movement—from 1678 on—indicated in the title. It began with the pièce à couplets, and passed gradually into modern comic opera. The great popular fair of St. Lawrence, at Paris, was the scene of part of this development.
1066. Garnett, Italian Literature, p. 306, traces this comedy back through Tuscan and Neapolitan peasants to the “Greek rustics who smeared their faces with wine-lees at the Dionysiac festivals, and from whose improvised songs and gestures Greek comedy was developed.”
1067. Burckhardt, Cultur der Ren., II. 40, thinks that such well-known characters as Pantalone, the Doctor, Arlecchino, may be in some fashion connected with masked figures in the old Roman plays.
1068. Ticknor, Spanish Literature, I. 232 f.
1069. Second Part, Chap. XX.
1070. Malone’s Shakspere, 1821, III. 131.
1071. Tarlton’s Jests ... ed. J. O. Halliwell, London, 1844, pp. xviii f. (Shakspere Society). “As Antipater Sidonius,” says the comparative Meres, “was famous for extemporall verse in Greeke ... so was our Tarleton.”
1072. See Bolte, Die Singspiele der englischen Komödianten und ihrer Nachfolger, Hamburg u. Leipzig, 1893, pp. 50 ff. He prints parallel copies of “Singing Simpkin” and the German “Pickelhering in der Kiste.”
1073. “Passages were often left for the extempore declamation of the actors. Sometimes the whole conduct of the piece depended on their powers of improvisation.” Symonds, Shakspere’s Predecessors, p. 66.
1074. Vorlesungen über Aesthetik, pp. 84 f.
1075. Ed. Grosart, V. 200.
1076. Hazlitt-Dodsley, V. 149, 151.
1077. As, for example, Schwab takes it: Das Schauspiel im Schauspiel, Wien u. Leipzig, 1896, p. 32.
1078. Bruchmann, Poetik, p. 17.
1079. The material has been set forth above in the section on the communal dance; for early dramatic dances of fight, hunting, and the like, see especially pp. 336 ff., and the passage on lâc, p. 340.
1080. On gesture as common and universally understood expression, see Darwin, Descent of Man, 2d ed., I. 276 f. “Men of all races” have a “mutual comprehension of gesture-language”; they all have “the same expression on their features,” and “the same inarticulate cries when excited by the same emotions.” See also Tylor, Early History of Mankind, chapters on Gesture-Language; and American Antiquarian, II. 219, G. Mallery on Indian Sign Language. This universal validity of gesture is highly significant for the beginnings of poetry, for the rude cries which precede language are probably of the same order as the gestures. See Chap. II., Wundt’s Völkerpsychologie.
1081. Bastian, “Masken und Maskereien,” Zst. f. Völkerpsych., XIV. 347.
1082. See Grosse on the two “roots” of the drama, Anf. d. Kunst, pp. 254 f. On the mimicry of different tribes in the communal dance, see Bruchmann, Poetik, pp. 208 ff.; Wallaschek, Prim. Music, Chap. VIII.
1083. The conspicuous performer,—the “entertainer” or soloist,—grows less and less prominent as one gets upon lower levels of culture. The earliest distinction of this sort was probably achieved by the priest, conjurer, medicine-man, shaman, or whatever his special function.
1084. As Wallaschek recedes from his proposition, the examples have more and more mention of words and song together with the action; for example, pp. 217 ff.
1085. This must always be taken into account. As Wallaschek says of an Australian “corrobberee,” however primitive it may seem, “it is a well-prepared and elaborated dance, which it takes both time and practice to excel in.”
1086. Wallaschek, pp. 223 f.
1087. From gesture back to facial expression and other signs now unknown because speech has taken their place, is an inviting path, but not to be trodden now. From the Kansas City Star, date unfortunately lost, may be quoted an interview with Hagenbeck, the lion-tamer. “We can’t see,” he said, “the expression of a lion’s face, except of rage, but his companions can.... Did you ever see one animal fail to understand another? I never saw such an instance.... I am inclined to think that what we call mind-reading is mere survival here and there of the lost sixth sense, which was probably common to primitive man, and which animals possess to this day.” Mr. Hagenbeck could furnish an interesting supplement to Darwin’s book On the Expression of Emotions.
1088. Work quoted, p. 28, speaking of Australian song and dance. See also p. 201.
1089. Sign-language of later date, as studied by Mallery among the American Indians, cannot be regarded as primitive in this genetic sense. It comes to be a highly developed art and calls for considerable skill in the making as well as acuteness in interpretation.
1090. As in dances of the Greeks, now felt to be a lost art. On this matter of gesture and signs, see an excellent book by Sittl, Die Gebärden der Griechen und Römer, Leipzig, 1890; his accounts of the attempt “die Völker durch die Zeichensprache zu verbrüdern,” with reference to Leibnitz and others; of orgiastic ecstasies; and, of course, the study of Greek gesture in art and poetry, are all instructive. For primitive relations, Darwin’s book On the Expressions of Emotions, etc., 1872, is still main authority. Gestures, like sounds, are either instinctive or called out by the will; and any study of progress in the dramatic art must concern itself with these fundamental elements of acting.
1091. It would be useless to attempt a bibliography of this subject. A. W. Schlegel’s historical account of the drama and its relations to epic and lyric is still useful. See especially Vorles., I. 124; II. 317, 321, 325. Eugen Wolff’s return to the priority of epic,—Prolegomena, etc., p. 10; “Vorstudien zur Poetik,” Zst. f. vgl. Litt., VI. 425,—fails to satisfy the student of ethnological evidence; like most writers from the æsthetic point of view, Wolff neglects to study the poetry of the throng, the choral, the dance. Barring this same fault, there is considerable truth in the view of Burdach (letter to Scherer, in the latter’s Poetik, pp. 296 f.), that epic and drama are wrongly taken as extreme antithesis in poetry, whereas lyric and drama are really “die beiden Urphänomene.” Little profit for the historical student of poetry is to be found in essays like Veit Valentin’s “Poetische Gattungen,” in Zst. f. vgl. Litt., N. F., V. 35 ff.
1092. See Blankenburg’s excellent article on the ballet in his Zusätze, I. 154 ff. La Motte, in his ballet of Europe Galante, 1697, made the ballet an object in itself and in its own action; here “entspringt Tanz und Gesang aus der eigenen Gemüthsstimmung der handelnden Personen.” This is communal revival.
1093. That is, ὄψις.
1094. “Daudet me dit ... ‘Je crois décidément avoir trouvé la formule; le livre c’est pour l’individu, le théâtre c’est pour la foule.’” Journal des Goncourt, VIII. (30 Jan., 1890), 129.
1095. Vorlesungen, Stuttgart, 1884, I. 329 ff., 342, 344 ff.
1096. Ibid., III. 110.
1097. See the present author’s article on “Mythology” in the new edition of Johnson’s Cyclopædia.
1098. A dozen years ago or more, a professor lecturing on this subject in a German university, after giving all the myths about a certain goddess, spoke somewhat as follows: “Gentlemen, this goddess is either a star or the early summer grass, I am not certain which. I am studying the matter carefully, and hope soon to reach a positive conclusion.”
1099. Compare Lucretius, dealing now lovingly with the Venus of myth—alma Venus, the beloved of Rome’s own god—and now, a few lines below, scornfully, passionately, with the cruel rites of the worship of Diana and the sacrifice of Iphigenia at her shrine: “illa Religio,” he says, with a touch almost of blasphemy.
1100. See the chapters on animism and mythology in Tylor’s Primitive Culture. A. W. Schlegel was on this trail, but let himself be befogged by Schelling’s philosophy. See the Vorlesungen, I. 329, 337.
1101. See his Germanische Mythen.
1102. Mythologische Forschungen (Quellen u. Forschungen, No. 51, Strassburg, 1884), Vorrede, p. xxv; the lesson came from Tylor’s book which Müllenhoff had set Mannhardt reading. This letter was written in 1876. See also Müllenhoff’s own definition of mythology in his Deutsche Alterthumskunde, V. 1, 157.
1103. Cultur d. Ren. in Ital., I. 288.
1104. Zeitschrift f. Gymnasialwesen, Berlin, Nov., 1861, p. 837.
1105. Mr. Tylor lets animism of this sort have too free a play among quite primitive men.
1106. Too much stress is laid by some writers on primitive studies of death, and of dreams about the dead, as productive of myth. Modern peasants, like savages, often show a heavy and stupid indifference in the presence of death; and its problem, though it doubtless suggested a cult of spirits, was far less insistent with early man than the problem of life. Before he thus worked out a world of dead spirits, he knew by instinctive, really unconscious inference, a world of living spirits, not of his own breed, but vaster, subtler, in those operations of nature which struck into his actual life, interfered with it, or conspicuously helped it.
1107. “It hurts me; it makes me cry,” says the child, pointing to the seat of affliction; this “it” corresponds with savage and primitive animism. It is not personification, as one is often told. Human beings do not crawl into other human beings and hurt them; not he or she, but “it” hurts. One remembers the remark of J. Grimm, that the neuter gender means not lack of sex, but the undeveloped, initial stage. Deutsche Grammatik, III. 315.
1108. Posnett, Comparative Literature, pp. 162 ff. The idea, however, is by no means as new as Posnett thinks it to be.
1110. Vignoli, in his Myth and Science, notes that a dog growls or bites at a stick thrust toward him, a kind of animism; although as Spencer said,—with quite unwarrantable inference in the denial of nature-myths among primitive men,—a dog takes no notice of ordinary natural doings, swaying boughs, sunrise, and all the rest.