CHAPTER II

RHYTHM AS THE ESSENTIAL FACT OF POETRY

For the purposes of this book, poetry is rhythmic utterance, rhythmic speech, with mainly emotional origin. One must not write a book on poetry without essaying that _iter tenebricosum_ of a definition—a definition, too, that will define, and not land the reader in a mere maze of words. “Rhythmic speech” is a short journey, puts one on solid ground at the end, and brings about no doublings and evasions in the subsequent path of investigation. It says what Robert Browning says in his summary of his art:—

“What does it all mean, poet?—Well, Your brains beat into rhythm....”

By rhythmic must be understood a regular recurrence which clearly sets off such speech from the speech of prose; and by speech is meant chiefly the combination of articulate words, although inarticulate sounds may often express the emotion of the moment and so pass as poetry. The proportionate intellectual control of emotion in this utterance is a matter of human development, and largely conditions the course of poetry itself. We agree, then, to call by the name of poetry that form of art which uses rhythm to attain its ends, just as we call by the name of flying that motion which certain animals attain by the use of wings; that the feelings roused by poetry can be roused by unrhythmic order of words, and that rhythmic order of words is often deplorably bad art, or “unpoetic,” have as little to do with the case as the fact that a greyhound speeding over the grass gives the spectator quite the exhilaration and sense of lightness and grace which is roused by the flight of a bird, and the fact that an awkward fowl makes itself ridiculous in trying to fly, have to do with the general proposition that flying is a matter of wings. A vast amount of human utterance has been rhythmic; one undertakes to tell the story of its beginnings. With such a definition the task is plain though hard; let go this definition, and there is no firm ground under one’s feet. The patron and the critic of poetry, to be sure, must make deeper and wider demands; from the critical point of view one must find the standard qualities of excellence to serve as test in any given case, one must ascertain what is representative, best, highest; poetry for the critic has its strength measured by the strongest and not by the weakest link in the chain. From the æsthetical point of view, again, poetry must be defined in terms of the purely poetic impulse. On the other hand, any comparative and sociological study must find a definition wide enough for the whole poetic product, whether of high or of low quality, whether due to this or to that emotion. It needs a simple and obvious test for the material. Now as a matter of fact, all writers on poetry take rhythm for granted until some one asks why it is necessary; whereupon considerable discussion, and the protest signed by a respectable minority, but a minority after all, that rhythm is not an essential condition of the poetic art. This discussion, as every one knows, has been lively and at times bitter; a patient and comprehensive review of it in a fairly impartial spirit has led to the conclusion, first, that no test save rhythm has been proposed which can be put to real use, even in theory, not to mention the long reaches of a historical and comparative study; secondly, that all defenders of the poem in prose are more or less contradictory and inconsistent, making confusion between theory and practice; and thirdly, that advocates of a rhythmic test, even in abstract definition, seem to have the better of the argument. Indeed, one might simply point to the actual use of the word “poetry,” and be done. However the student and collector may proclaim the rights of prose to count as poetry, his history, his anthology, shows no prose at all, and he meekly follows in practice the definition against which, in theory, he was so fain to strive and cry. Of this, one example, but a very remarkable example. Baudelaire, in the preface to his _Poems in Prose_, speaks of one Bertrand[49] as his master in this art, and of a book, _Gaspard de la Nuit_, as its masterpiece. This book,[50] praised highly by Sainte-Beuve, this _fantaisie à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot_, as its subordinate title runs, makes occasion for a very bold assertion, and apparently for a great innovation, by one of the editors of a collection of French poetry.[51] “To admit a prose writer,” he says, “into a poetic anthology needs to be explained. It is certain there are poets in prose just as there are prosers in verse,”—the dear old cry, the dear old half-truth! Now Bertrand is “poet not only by his sentiment, not only by the pomp and sublimity of his thought, ... but by the very art itself” which he lavishes upon this poetic prose. True, he wrote verses also in his _Gaspard_; but his main work is an artistic marvel of prose. “Louis Bertrand prosodie la prose....” Well, a fine defence for the prose-poet; and one turns to the selections for an example of the poetic prose, not only “main work,” but very rare work of the writer, whose book is most difficult to obtain. And what are the selections from the prose-poet? Two poems in the most incorrigible verse! A sonnet, a _ballade_:—

“O Dijon, la fille Des glorieux ducs, Qui portes bequille Dans tes ans caducs,”—

a kind of refrain, and with the rime in -_ille_ running through all the eight stanzas; and there is no prose at all! _Wozu der Lärm?_ Why this thunder in the index? Why “admit a prose-writer into a poetic anthology,” with all this ceremony, only to ignore his prose and to print his verse?[52]

It is to be noted, first of all, that in ignoring the test of rhythm, so as to admit great men of letters like Plato and Bacon to the poets’ guild, the advocates of prose fail to set up any other satisfactory test. Sidney and Shelley, Arcadians both who said noble things about their calling, are reckoned as defenders of the poem in prose. As to the younger, all men must feel more deeply and more lovingly about poetry, for the reading of his essay on that art which “redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man,” memorable words indeed; but his more exact definition declares poetry to be “the expression of the imagination.” Nothing is said here of rhythm, for the good reason that while rhythm can be praised in its own place, it must not be a bar to claims which Shelley and his fellows deem important. Yet how tender and how inconsistent is his rejection of the rhythmic test! Rhythm is “created by that imperial faculty whose throne is curtained within the invisible nature of man”; and “the language of poets has ever affected a sort of uniform and harmonious recurrence of sound, _without which it were not poetry_.”[53] Well, is this not to set up rhythm as a test? No, for Bacon, as well as Plato, is to be counted with the bards; and how shall this be done save by condemning “the distinction between poets and prose writers as a vulgar error,” and by a widening of rhythm, so that it shall have no bounds, no necessary “traditional forms”? Thus Plato and Bacon come in, and all hope of a definite, working test of poetry goes out. Sidney, again, had in his day this mingled tenderness and contempt for rhythm. “Rhyming and versing” no more make a poet than a long gown maketh an advocate; but the “senate of poets _hath chosen verse as their fittest raiment_.” Presently, however, the exquisite reason for prose in poetry is clear, when Sidney calls Xenophon’s _Cyropædia_ “an absolute heroical poem.” So, too, there is a saving clause, which, by the way, nobody denies in its simple form, in Ben Jonson’s well-known deliverance; a poet “expresses the life of man in fit measures, number, and harmony,” yet “not he that writeth in measures only, but that feigneth and formeth a fable and writes things like the truth.” Now the test of rhythm, which Ben does not really deny, will work in practice; the test of imagination will not work. Shelley, putting Plato with the poetic sheep, thrusts Cicero, disciple of Plato, among the goats of prose. Sound criticism, perhaps; but what is the formula? And when one is asking, not whom one shall regard as a poet,—that is, a great poet,—but what one shall regard as poetry, as material to include in a survey of the rise and progress of poetry at large, then the test of imagination fails utterly. Sidney was defending his art; “we are not mere rimers,” so he seems to say, “the root of the matter is in us, and we are kin with the gods.” J. C. Scaliger, who insisted on the test of rhythm, and was called many a pretty name for his pains, had a science of poetry in mind, a survey of it, and cast about for a test that would work on earth without reference to celestial origins. The Abbé Dubos[54] was not willing to think so nobly of verse, and laid main stress on style,[55]—always granting, to be sure, the conventional test of “genius.” Only genius can unite in lofty degree within the limits of one verse that “poetry of style” and that “mechanics of poetry” which go to make up the ideal poem; however, it is this style that serves as practical test. In short, put genius, or even imagination, to the practical trial, and confusion reigns at once. Shelley and many more make a poet of Plato; Sidney brings in Xenophon. Coleridge,[56] insisting that all the parts of a poem must support “the purposes and known influences of metrical arrangement,” thus making rhythm a test, promptly says it is not a test, after all, for along with Plato, both Bishop Taylor and Burnet must be counted as of the bards. Beattie[57] calls _Tom Jones_ and the _Merry Wives of Windsor_ “the two finest comic poems, the one epic, the other dramatical, now in the world.” Emerson[58] thinks Thomas Taylor the Platonist “a better poet, or, perhaps I should say, a better feeder to a poet, than any man between Milton and Wordsworth,”—excellent second thought. Sir Thomas Browne he regards as a poet. Brought face to face with rhythm, Emerson hedges; as, indeed, all these good folk do. Goldsmith,[59] for example, in an unacknowledged essay, calls versification “one of the criteria that distinguish poetry from prose, yet it is not the sole means of distinction.” The Psalms of David, and certain Celtic fragments in prose, “lay claim to the title of poetry.” Hazlitt,[60] speaking of “poetry in general,” seems favourable to rhythm as a test. Poetry “combines the ordinary use of language with musical expression”; and “there is a near connection between music and deep-rooted passion. Mad people sing.” Then the fear of simplicity gets hold upon him, of postman’s rimes and the posy in a ring; “all is not poetry that passes for such,” verse is not absolutely the test; and he stops short of the inconsistency by saying there are three works “which _come as near to poetry as possible without absolutely being so_; namely, the _Pilgrim’s Progress_, _Robinson Crusoe_,[61] and the _Tales of Boccaccio_.” Such works are “poetry in kind, and _generally fit to become so in name by being ‘married to immortal verse.’_” Bagehot[62] is quite as cautious; “the exact line,” he says, “which separates grave novels in verse like _Aylmer’s Field_ or _Enoch Arden_ from grave novels not in verse like _Silas Marner_ and _Adam Bede_, we own we cannot draw with any confidence.” This is to be deplored, perhaps, from Bagehot’s point of view; but _Adam Bede_ remains prose, and _Enoch Arden_ is commonly set down as poetry, and there an end. Why, too, should Boccaccio’s Tales, or the _Pilgrim’s Progress_, be married to immortal verse? Jeremy Taylor’s beautiful bit of prose about the lark is as satisfying in its own way as Shelley’s verses are; they are different ways, and one wishes as little to turn one into verse as to turn the other into prose. Dr. Johnson, who recognizes no poet till “he has ... distinguished all the delicacies of phrase and all the colours of words and has learned to adjust their different sounds to all the varieties of metrical modulation,” yet concedes that “perhaps of poetry as a mental operation metre or music is no necessary adjunct,” brings out, with his sturdy common sense, the clash of theory and practice. _As a mental operation_, that is, as the poetic impulse and as a matter of theory, poetry is not tested by rhythm; “it is, however, by the music of metre,” he goes on to say, “that poetry has been discriminated in all languages,”—in other words, metre will serve as a practical test. Now this hedging, this confusion of ideas, this facing one way in theory and another way in practice, is due partly to a shame and partly to a tradition. Where is the dignity of the art, if any Bavius can pin this facile badge of rhythm to his coat and strut about a bard in good standing? Ronsard had this scruple on his mind; so had Sidney, so even comfortable Opitz, so, in spite of his own definition, the elder Casaubon. Tradition of the humanists, of days when poetry held in fee all science, all the gorgeous east of wisdom itself, rules to this day, and keeps men groping for a subtle and esoteric definition. Hence, too, a series of futilities and contradictions in dealing with rhythm as a component part of poetry.

So one comes to the second argument for rhythm as the test of poetry. Not only does the test of imagination fail to work, but all the defenders of prose poems fall into contradiction and confusion so soon as they abandon the other test, so soon as they undertake to put their ideas into any but a protestant and academic form; moreover, this protest nearly always rises from the wish to count as poetry some masterpiece of prose. Take a few typical writers on the theme. Baumgarten, the founder of æsthetics, wrote[63] an essay in which he undertook an exact definition of poetry, and finally summed it up as _oratio sensitiva perfecta_, speech that is both concrete,—calling up in the mind a distinct picture,—and perfect. A few years later, in his _Aletheophilus_, he returns to the quest, and asks what a poem really is. A poem, he answers, is speech so charged with energy that it demands metrical expression. Yet the more he ponders over the quality of rhythm, which in the actual definition seemed imperative, the less he feels inclined to insist upon such a test; at last comes the inevitable concession of theory, and a piece of prose—here it is _Télémaque_—is suffered to pass as a poem. After all this conjuring and throwing about of Latin, one looks for results and finds instead confusion. But Baumgarten was a dull pedant; set genius to work; call up Friedrich Schlegel, who is said to have been the first critic to study the “poem in prose” as it deserved, and whose own performances in _Lucinde_ made more than one of the judicious grieve. Poetry, he says in one place,[64] demands rhythm; for only that uniformity which lies in the corresponding succession of tones can express the uniformity needed in all true art; yet again,[65] wishing to put Tacitus as well as Plato among the poets, he makes his wise Lothario say that “_any art or science_” which uses speech as its expression, works for its own sake, and is at its best, must be counted as poetry. But let this, too, pass as eccentricity of genius; call upon some one who has both genius and method,—say Schleiermacher, who lectured on æsthetics in 1819,[66] and undertook to reduce to system and clarity this matter of poetry in prose. To help matters, the subject is halved; drama and epic are “plastic,” and can dispense with rhythm, while lyric is “musical” from the start. How came rhythm, then, into drama and epic? Chorus explains the drama, but epic rhythm cannot rest on any such original union of music and words; there must be an “inward” reason. Why does “free” productivity in speech seek after musical form? So one comes back to the difference between poetry and prose, explained by the nature of human speech; one draws a long breath and sets upon another exhilarating run round the circle. Two extremes of speech are possible,—when no syllable is accented at all, and when all syllables are accented alike; this, of course, will not differentiate poetry from prose. But speech alternates accent and no-accent, arsis and thesis; done for logical reasons this alternation makes prose, for musical reasons, verse. In languages like the classical, where rhythmical accent utterly neglects logical accent, there can be little interference of prose with poetry; while in tongues like the Germanic, where verse-accent and word-accent tend to agree, it is easy for poetry to pass into prose. Doubtless this is keen thinking; it explains in some degree why imaginative prose is absent from the classics as compared with modern drama and romance. But it will not do for a definition, and Schleiermacher begins a subtle but ineffectual analysis of poetry old and new. In a Greek drama there was mingling of measures, now more and now less musical; in modern drama this difference appears as a mingling of verse and prose. But if one thinks of the greater musical element in classical verse, then the modern difference between poetry and prose[67] “_is not much greater than the difference in classical poetry between epic and dramatic measures_.” Now what has Schleiermacher really done for the matter in hand? For comparative literature he has done a distinctly brilliant piece of work; but, even apart from the fact that no really clear idea of poetry in itself has been gained, the difference between poetry and prose, and the function of rhythm, have not been elucidated. It has not been shown, after all, whether rhythm is or is not a necessary part of poetry. So one turns to the modern scholar, to the student of poetry as an element in human life, to one who studies it in the light of psychology; but here is the same contradiction. Guyau, who thinks this distinction of poetry and prose a problem of high importance, is in one place[68] quite confident that “poets” like Michelet, like Flaubert,[69]—he who first of Frenchmen[70] tried to give to his words an echo of the sensations described, a vague onomatopœia, and the wider hint of a general situation,—and like Renan, “have been able to dispense with rhythm.” But verse, he thinks, is permanent; it will be “the natural language of all great and lasting emotions”; while in another book,[71] this excellent and lamented writer not only assigns to rhythm an _importance capitale_, but calls it “the very mainstay of poetic speech.” And here again is intolerable confusion.

Into this pit of contradiction have fallen even sane and capable critics like A. W. Schlegel, and sober philologists like Wilhelm von Humboldt.[72] Nobody could be more distinctly an advocate of the test of rhythm than the elder Schlegel was in certain Letters, widely read in their day, on Poetry, Metre, and Speech;[73] if it be objected, he says, that outpourings of a full heart ought not to be hemmed by rule, it is answer enough to say that they always have been under this control, and that, whatever the possibilities of the case, poetry is and has been governed by rhythm. Rhythm is born with poetry, and “whether by Ontario or by the Ganges,” where poetry is, there too is rhythm. As for “the so-called poetic prose,” Schlegel is very bitter; it “springs from poetic impotence,” and it “tries to unite the prerogatives of prose and poetry, missing the perfection of both.” Elsewhere,[74] in an amusing little dialogue, he sets Grammar and Poetry talking after this wise: “You speak so simply!” says Grammar. “I must,” answers Poetry, “in order to distinguish myself from Poetic Prose!” And again,[75] he likens prose-poetry to the ostrich, which has a gait half flying, half running, and wholly awkward. Even the dialogue of the drama needs rhythm; for, thinks Schlegel, its style demands measured and regular movement of verse. Master of translation, like Herder before him, he is against the translation of verse save by verse itself; and the context shows that he is looking upon verse as an indispensable condition of poetry.

When, however, in the lectures at Berlin Schlegel begins to define poetry and to theorize about it, holding as he does a brief for the romantic school, for those doctrines of freedom which could not away with any sovereignty of measured speech over the play of fancy and would have no set paths through the “moon-flooded night of enchantment,” he turns squarely upon the test of rhythm.[76] It is a crude notion of the philistine, he declares, _eine bürgerliche meynung_, that whatever is in verses is a poem. Nor is much mended by saying only that can be called poetry which ought to be and has to be composed in verse; of late a kind of poetry has come to the fore which rejects verse entirely,—the romance, the novel. And where is yesterday’s scorn for the poem in prose?[77]

This study of contradictions could be carried into many another field; but it is time to consider a third point,—that in actual argument defenders of the test of rhythm seem really to come off better than their foes. These opponents start in a fog, and fog besets them all their way. The main authority to which they appeal is Aristotle; but over certain passages[78] in the _Poetics_, their point of departure, hangs a haze of uncertainty if not of contradiction. It is doubtful whether Aristotle really meant to say what champions of poetry in prose declare him to have said; moreover, these brave texts must be taken along with a brief but pregnant passage in which he looks at origins and beginnings of poetry, a passage which lends itself less readily to the purposes of those who would sweep rhythm from the field. Indeed, sundry say that this is not Aristotle’s meaning in the brave text itself. “Language without metre,” observes Whately,[79] is a bad translation; it should be “metre without music.” Twining,[80] one of the best commentators, refers to that other passage, where one is told that “imitation being natural to us, and ... melody and rhythm being also natural, ... those persons in whom, originally, these propensities were the strongest, were naturally led to rude and extemporaneous attempts, which, gradually improved, gave birth to poetry.” Twining makes a judicious comment. “In this deduction of the art from the mimetic and musical instincts, Aristotle _includes verse in his idea of poetry_, which he at least _considered as imperfect without it_. All that he drops, elsewhere, to the disparagement of metre, must be understood only comparatively: it goes no further than to say that imitation, that is, fiction and invention, deserves the title of poetry, or making, better than verse without imitation.” Elsewhere, too, as Twining shows, Aristotle puts verse among the requisites of poetry.[81] A good Aristotelian, J. C. Scaliger, a greater man, by the way, than modern criticism concedes, who first in his time undertook a science of poetry and not a mere guide to the art, who broke new ground, and who had at least the instincts of historical and comparative method, is squarely for the test of verse.[82] Poetry is imitation in verse. In the opening sections of his work[83] he calls the poet not so much a maker of fiction as of verses,[84] defends rhythm almost in Hamann’s phrase as the mother-tongue of man, derives poetry from singing, and, with a touch of psychological method, makes appeal to the child who must go to sleep with song.[85] In the later sections,[86] he vigorously attacks the idea of poetry in prose. He is followed by another pioneer of the historic treatment of dogma, G. J. Vossius, who, tossing to the winds any notion that verse itself makes the poet, declares that verse is nevertheless condition of the poetic work.[87] For poetry was meant to be sung—the genetic consideration has a strong and wholesome influence upon these men—and how can that be sung which has no rhythm? Or take the rhythm from the Iliads; they turn to mere “fabulous stories.” Briefly, while metres without the aid of diction and genius can make no poem, fiction—Aristotelian imitation—is powerless without the help of verse. To the same purpose and earlier, Isaac Casaubon; the test of poetry is rhythm, and any utterance which comes under metrical laws is so far a poem.[88] Scaliger, Vossius, and Casaubon are “good”; and their credit comes down to them from their betters. Petrarch, with Latin so at his heart, could never confuse poetry and prose. Dante’s definition[89] is cold comfort for the heretic about a rhythmic test. Of the smaller fry, Ronsard certainly cleaves to this test of rhythm in poetry.[90] Gascoigne, as the title of his little treatise shows, assumes with his teacher Ronsard that verse is the condition if not the essence of the art; and Puttenham, Webbe, Campion, Daniel, Harvey, even Spenser,[91] lean the same way. Sidney, it was shown above, is no real opponent. Bacon himself, quoted so often to sustain the cause of poetry in prose, should be read more carefully;[92] he really tosses to the winds all question of form, and turns to poetry as “one of the principal portions of learning.”

So the great age thought of poetry; and so the balance inclines as one comes nearer to our own days. Isaac Vossius, in a curious work[93] published without his name, holds to his father’s view of the case. Shaftesbury[94] is peremptory for “metred prose,” but, as both a lord and a wit, disdains to give his reasons; while another person of quality, Sir William Temple[95] indeed, regards metred prose as a monstrosity. Trapp, in his Oxford lectures,[96] is squarely for the rhythmic test, and will hold it in the teeth of all Aristotelians; so will another professor of poetry, Polycarp Leyser,[97] of Helmstadt, a rationalist in his day, who thinks it high time to have a modern system of poetics not drawn altogether from the ancients.

Across the channel, meanwhile, relations of poetry and prose had been discussed, now as an eddy in the maelstrom of argument about ancients or moderns, now as a question for itself. The _Télémaque_ of Fénelon was defended as a great poem in prose; to the objection that it was not written in verse, came answers in abundance. One of them, for example, calls upon the ancients;[98] Aristotle, Dionysius, Strabo, said that verse is not essential to epic poetry. “One may write it in prose, as one writes tragedies without rime.” And the old saw—“one can make verses without poetry, and be quite poetic without making verse”—is followed by a definition of the whole matter; what constitutes a poem is “the lively plot, the bold figures, the beauty and variety of the images; it is the fire, the enthusiasm, the impetuosity, the force, a _je ne sais quoi_ in the words and in the thoughts which only nature can give.” So run a dozen other elaborate pleas for prose in poetry; but the arguments usually end in contradiction, and nothing is brought forward that really sets aside the feeling long ago expressed by Tom Dekker[99] in his sputtering, pamphleteer style, that “poetrie, like honestie and olde souldiers, goes upon lame feete unlesse there be musicke in her,” and that both poets and musicians are children of Phœbus: “the one creates the ditty and gives it the life or number, the other lends it voyce and makes it speake musicke.”

Even those great changes which the second half of the eighteenth century brought about in the making and in the judging of poetry, left this matter of prose and verse in its old estate. Whenever the critic has a writer to set up, a writer to pull down, this test of verse will be thrust aside; and it is no surprise to find men who belong to the same literary creed—say Warton and Lowth—failing to see eye to eye in this one article of faith. Joseph Warton,[100] in his guarded attack upon Pope, is working slowly to the inference that it is not genius, but a vast talent, shiftiness of phrase and smoothness of verse, that must explain Pope’s overwhelming success. Hence Warton, in a reaction from this polished and accurate rhythm,[101] is sure that real poetry does not depend on verse. The sublime and the pathetic “are the two chief nerves of genuine poetry.” Lowth,[102] on the other hand, though quite in line with the new critical movement, setting about his great work, and undertaking to make his audience feel and know the Hebrew scriptures to be poetry, puts metrical questions in the forefront of his study and will prove that these poems are in verse. He would fain shun this path, thorny as it is and full of snares; but it is a necessary part of his journey, for he is sure that poetry is not to be considered apart from metrical form, and it ceases to be poetry when it is reduced to prose.[103] Here Lowth and Warton clash not only on the main point, but on this subsidiary matter of translation. Warton said that by no “process of critical chymistry,” such as dropping the measure and transposing the words, can one disguise the _Iliad_, say, or the _Paradise Lost_, and “reduce them to the tameness of prose.” Reduced to prose, says Lowth, poetry does cease to be poetry. It is strange to see how both sides of the controversy in this matter of verse and prose appeal to translation, and it is mournful to note the unstable character of what ought to be firm and fundamental facts. A. W. Schlegel, one remembers, stood for translations in verse. So Whately, following Lowth’s opinion, appeals to translation for proof that to break the verse is to shatter the poem;[104] Racine,[105] on the other hand, appealed to a translation of Isaiah to fortify exactly the opposite opinion. Or will it be said that Goethe has settled this question in favour of Warton’s view? Every critic knows the oracle from Weimar which declared the best part of a poem to be whatever remains when it is translated into prose; every critic, however, is not at pains to quote the entire passage, with its important concession to verse and its reason for the statement as a whole. “I honour,” says Goethe,[106] “rhythm as well as rime, _by which poetry really comes to be poetry_;[107] but the thorough and permanent effect, what develops one and helps one on one’s way, is that which is left of the poet when he is translated into prose. Here is nothing but the contents pure and simple,—otherwise often concealed, or, if absent, replaced by a fine exterior form. _For this reason I think prose translations better than poetical in the early stages of education._” He goes on to recommend a prose version of Homer, to praise Luther’s Bible; but it is clear that the whole extract is no argument against the test of rhythm. Not to insist on Goethe’s concession that it is rhythm which makes poetry to be poetry, one may note how little prose translation does for a lyric, which, after all, is the poet’s poem. What would be left in prose, any prose, of Goethe’s own _Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh’_? The heart of poetry is another matter, its spirit, its informing life;[108] the historian meets it in terms of its bodily appearance, and must have a concrete test. There is no valid test for the historian save this test of rhythm. Particularly as sociological and historical responsibility begins to weigh upon the critic, he finds that such a test is demanded by his work. Adam Smith[109]—Blair[110] is almost with him, but slips in a plea for Ossian—is distinctly on the side of verse. So is Monboddo,[111] a pioneer in anthropology, keen, observant, who did his thinking for himself, and condemned “all that has been written of late in the rhapsody style, or measured prose,” declaring that “poetry is nothing more than measured rhythm.” Sensible things, too, were said on this matter by men who have left no traces in criticism; one of these sayings seems to be a pretty conclusion and summary of the whole debate. Dr. Thomas Barnes, a Unitarian clergyman now forgotten, but one of the founders of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester, an interesting group of men, read, in December, 1781, a paper[112] “On the Nature and Essential Character of Poetry as Distinguished from Prose.” He turns to origins, and refers to “the common remark that the original language of mankind was poetical”; he turns to ethnological hints, and, following Dr. John Brown, speaks of “Indian orators at this day”; then, summing up the case, he charges for rhythm. “To finished and perfect poetry, or rather to the highest order of poetic compositions, are necessary, elevation of sentiment, fire of imagination, and regularity of metre. This is the summit of Parnassus. But from this sublimest point there are gradual declinations till you come to the reign of prose. _The last line of separation is that of regular metre._” Dr. Thomas Barnes is forgotten; but his statement of the case is memorable above a host of admired and often quoted deliverances on poetic art.

As one steps into the modern world, one finds the controversy in its old estate, getting no help from new methods and ridiculous enough, by this expense of motion without progress, in contrast with the gain made by sciences of every other sort. Does Coleridge,[113] master of rhythm, reject rhythm as a test, Poe[114] comes forward to declare it an essential condition, and to announce “the certainty that music, in its various modes of metre, rhythm, and rime, is of so vast a moment in poetry as never to be wisely rejected.” Carlyle himself, reckoned by sundry critics as a poet in prose, names the “vulgar” definition of verse only to approve it. Germans, he says,[115] have spoken of “infinitude” as differencing true poetry from true speech not poetical; “if well meditated, some meaning will gradually be found in it. For my own part, I find considerable meaning in the old vulgar distinction of poetry being metrical, having music in it, being a song.” And he really adopts the test,—of course, with characteristic riders. “Observe,” he says, “how all passionate language does of itself become musical ... all deep things are song.... Poetry, therefore, we will call _musical thought_.” So, again, the vague and passionate protests of Stuart Mill beat in vain against such a temperate statement as Whately made in his _Rhetoric_.[116] “Any composition in verse (and none that is not) is always called, whether good or bad, a Poem, by all who have no favourite hypothesis to maintain.... The title of Poetry does not necessarily imply the requisite beauties of Poetry.” Such a test, cried Mill,[117] is vulgarest of all definitions, and “one with which no person possessed of the faculties to which poetry addresses itself can ever have been satisfied.” This “wretched mockery of a definition” is more than inadequate; for poetry may exist in prose as well as in verse, may even do without words, and can speak through musical sounds, through sculpture, painting, and architecture. It is strange to hear Mill making a serious formula out of phrases to which one is indulgent enough when they come in half playful guise.[118] Apart from the uselessness of such a formula,—fancy the historian of poetry opening a new chapter with “We will now consider the Parthenon!”—it has no theoretical value, as is easy to see when Mill begins to run his division lines. Two definitions of poetry please him, one, by Ebenezer Elliott, that it is “impassioned truth,” the other, by a writer in _Blackwood_, that it is “man’s thought tinged by his feelings.” But these “fail to distinguish poetry from eloquence,” and Mill goes on to say that eloquence is “something heard,” while poetry is “something overheard.” Something overheard? I mean, he explains, that “all poetry is in the nature of a soliloquy,” is “the natural fruit of solitude and meditation.” Now this is sheer nonsense, although more than one critic has hailed it as an oracle; of that which comes down to us as poetry, a good part is anything but soliloquy or the fruit of solitude. “Read Homer,” cried out Herder, perhaps at the other extreme, but certainly with better reason than Mill, “as if he were singing in the streets!” It will be shown how vast a proportion of poetry, too, that belongs to the higher class, was made and sung in throngs of men. Poetry is a social fact. Mill’s own words defeat him. “Whosoever writes out truly any human feeling, writes poetry”; and “what is poetry but the thoughts and words _in which emotion spontaneously embodies itself_?” A few pages before, it was “the fruit of solitude and meditation,” a test that would make poetry of Kant’s categorical imperative, refusing the title to Luther’s outburst at the diet, although this at once becomes poetry if one accepts the later definition in terms of emotional spontaneity. And that wrath at the “vulgarity” of a rhythmic test is nothing more than the old mistake; because, forsooth, colours and lines fail to account in themselves for the grandeur of painting, one jumps to the assertion that paintings need not have colours and lines. Let us cling to vulgarity, if leaving it means to assert that the Parthenon is a poem, and, by implication, that a sigh is a statue.

One of the most consistent expositions of poetry is that given by Hegel.[119] Here is a careful abstract of propositions as carefully formulated and proved. He has ruled out the “poetic sentence.” Specimens of the sublime, like that _Let there be light, and there was light_ which Longinus[120] admired, are not poetry. History, too, is excluded, Herodotus, Tacitus, and the rest,[121] as well as eloquence, and not as Shelley rejects Cicero, on personal grounds, but because of the law in the case. Yet this summary is still inadequate as a practical test, and with it the historian is in a plight no better than when with Sidney or Coleridge he was including whatever piece of writing seemed certainly though indefinitely poetic. In the latter case he steered by a compass which was at the mercy of unnumbered hidden magnets; in the former case the signs on the card are blurred.[122] But Hegel does not leave the matter here; purposely or not, he gives a clear test for the historian when, twenty pages later, he comes to speak of versification. Professors Gayley and Scott[123] point out that the present writer has made too much of this concession; instead of saying that verse is “the only condition absolutely demanded by poetry,” one should say that Hegel makes verse indispensable. But this is quite enough for the purpose. The passage in question runs thus: “To be sure, prose put into verse is not poetry, but simply verse, just as mere poetic expression in what is otherwise prosaic treatment results only in a poetic prose; _but nevertheless, metre or rime, being the one and only sensuous aroma,[124] is absolutely demanded for poetry, and indeed is even more necessary than store of imagery, the so-called beautiful diction_.” And now for Hegel’s reason, which quite agrees with the historian’s demand for an available test. He goes on to say that the fact of verse in any piece of literature shows at once, as poetry indeed demands there should be shown, that one is in another realm from the realm of prose, of daily life; this constraint, if one likes to call it constraint, forces the poet outside the bounds of common speech into a province wholly submitted to the laws of art. That poetry has to be something more than this, that there are other canons, nobody denies; but the first step for a poet is into this realm of verse where he must prove in sterner tests and by other achievements whether he is citizen or trespasser.

Hegel, it might be said, is in the clouds; he is out of touch with science, and with that logic of facts which rules investigations of the present day. But the same way of thinking holds with a practical Englishman like Mr. Edmund Gurney,[125] whose feet are planted very firmly on solid ground, who is distinctly hostile to the poem in prose, that “pestilent heresy,” as Professor Saintsbury has called it, and whose idea of art, which always includes an appeal to the sense of form, demands in poetry a definite metre or rhythm. And the same way of thinking holds with a student of modern psychology, M. Souriau,[126] who undertakes to define poetry in terms of science. Poetry itself derives from music and prose,—presumably he means by prose the speech of daily life, and not what Walter Pater means in his essay on Style when he makes “music and prose literature ... the opposite terms of art”; poetry might therefore be called musical speech.[127] To show how much depends on the music, M. Souriau turns to translations from foreign poetry into prose vernacular. “The more poetical this original text, the more it loses in the change.... This depreciation is due to the change of process, and not to the change of tongue, for the translation of a piece of prose would not show these faults.” On the other hand, now, take an irreproachable piece of verse, with this superiority just shown to be due to its rhythm, and look at it with regard to logical worth. How unsatisfying, how “thin,” is the thought in it! Change again the point of view, and study poetry for its music; one will be no better pleased than when one hunted for its thought. The rhythm would be intolerably monotonous in a piece of music. The sonorous words, taken as sound, are not really pleasing to the ear. Rime, if one will look at it this way, is a _procédé enfantin_. In sum, poetry is logically inferior to prose, and musically inferior to pure melody,—and what, then, is its own charm? It pleases us, not by either one of these elements, but by their combination; it is harmony, but in a peculiar sense. “It is not the harmony of thought, logical system, and order, not the harmony of sounds or musical system, but the harmony between sounds and thoughts. _One loves to feel the idea bending and adjusting itself to the rules of verse, and the verse yielding to the demands of the idea._”[128]

It is time to close the poll. For poetry in prose no one has spoken in such a temperate and yet forcible fashion as Mr. Frederic Harrison,[129] though his arguments are by no means new. Nothing but “poetry,” he asserts, can serve as the word to express what one finds in Malory’s _Death of Arthur_, in chapters of Job and Isaiah. But arguments such as he makes with energy and eloquence lose their force when confronted with the cool reasoning of Mr. Bosanquet,[130] who shows clearly that poetry, whatever else it may be, must be rhythmic utterance. Even in the clash of opinion between these modern writers, one finds what is to be found throughout the entire controversy, down from the days of the early renaissance, that the advocates of a rhythmic test for poetry have the better of the argument. It has been shown that there is no other test for the historian of poetry as a social institution; and whenever another test has been set up, its own advocates have not only abandoned it in practice, but even in theory have obscured it with a mass of contradictions.[131]

There remains, of course, the _ambulando_ argument; the champion of poetry in prose points to the work which passes under this name. A book could be written on the long series of concessions in matter of territory which verse has made to prose; but no sensible critic will allow these transfers to prove that poetry has ceased to be rhythmic utterance. The most obvious transfer, of course, is translation; is not the English Bible as noble poetry, one asks, as can be found in any time or clime? Mr. Theodore Watts[132] is sure of the rhythmic test until he faces the claims of this noblest prose. Yet surely what appeals to us here is not poetry, but the genius of the English tongue at its greatest and best,[133] flinging its full strength upon a task which at the time lay close to the heart of the English people. The Bible is not the masterpiece of our poetry, but of our prose; it beats not only with the divine pulse of its original, but also with that immense vitality and energy of English religious life in days when to many Englishmen life and religion were identical. That does not make it poetry. One must not open the gates of poetry to this or that passage of prose, and shut them, through whim or shame, upon a thousand other passages.[134] Let in that great chapter of Job, and anon _Werther_ is there, _Silas Marner_, _Tom Jones_,—we have marshalled this rout already. No, if the Bible be poetry, it is because it is rhythmic utterance, not because it is sublime. That tremendous reach of emotion borne on the cadence of a style majestic and clear, the voice of a solitary desolation crying to the desolation of all mankind, the wail of an eternal and unanswered question—

Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery, And life unto the bitter in soul?

—is not this a poem? It is almost certainly a poem in the original; it might be a poem in English, provided the rhythm of the lines, printed as they now are, with parallelism and cadence properly brought out, seemed to the reader to have a recurrent regularity which could take it into the sphere of rhythmic law; otherwise it is prose, the prose of great literature, indeed, but prose. It must be granted, too, that the latter view is preferable. As great literature, the book of Job belongs with Dante, and Milton, and with a few passages, where Goethe touches the higher levels, in _Faust_; but it is not poetry in the sense that Dante and Milton and Goethe impress upon one when one reads their great passages. Longinus writes on the sublime in literature, and he is within his rights when he puts Thucydides and Homer and Moses upon one plane; but it is the plane of sublimity in thought and phrase, and it is not the plane of poetry. Poetry has no monopoly of the emotions; a line that stirs the heart is poetry when it belongs in a rhythmic whole, and is prose when it does not. _Tendentesque manus ripae ulterioris amore_ is Vergil’s verse; “the future balances and the hieroglyphic meanings of human suffering” is De Quincey’s prose. Carlyle says of his murdered Princess de Lamballe, “She was beautiful; she was good; she had known no happiness,”—anvil-strokes as strong as the strongest in English speech. Webster, over his murdered Duchess of Malfi, makes the brother cry out, “Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young.” What have phrases like “poetic prose” to do with great literature of this sort, and how will one distinguish between these two isolated passages, both throbbing with an intensity of expression which breaks out in the three short clauses? Well, the rhythm of one comes to its rights in the full poetic period where Webster, rough as his verses are, infused a noble harmony; while the cadence of the other falls naturally into the sweep of Carlyle’s prose. Dryden, indeed, with his wonted critical felicity, gives the key of the whole matter. “Thoughts,” he says in his preface to the _Fables_, “thoughts come crowding in so fast upon me, that my only difficulty is to choose or to reject, to run them into verse, _or to give them the other harmony of prose_.”

Since Turgot[135] told France and the world that a new kind of poetry had come in the guise of Gessner’s prose idylls the poem in prose has made many claims for Parnassian recognition. At Bertrand we have glanced already; his scholar Baudelaire[136] made as bold essay; and so, in quite recent times, the Swede Ola Hansson;[137] all these are Werther with a difference, and in the last case with a dash of Nietzsche. He, too, wrote a dithyrambic prose for his hysterical but noteworthy Zarathustra; yet who does not feel the passage, as into another realm of art, when one suddenly comes upon that powerful lyric in verse,[138] _O Mensch, gieb Acht?_ Nietzsche, to be sure, had something to say; but with the little men these dithyrambic phrases threaten to turn into mere raving, and often carry out the threat. What saves a poet from this danger, and the great poets know it, is the dignity, the self-restraint, and the communal human sympathy of rhythm, which binds one, as in that old consent of voice and step, to one’s fellows, and checks all individual centrifugal follies; there are no bounds, no laws, there is no decorum, in such whirling words, until they whirl in ordered motion and until cosmos is where chaos was. “Slaves by their own compulsion,” these sensual and dark things rebel in vain against the laws of poetic form; pastels and whatever else, they have not even the dignity of truly great prose. They are out of their sphere; to adapt a line from the _Dunciad_, prose on stilts is several degrees worse than poetry fallen lame.

Poetry, then, is still rhythmic utterance, though it has lost great stretches of territory to prose. Prose, to be sure, makes a tempting proposition to her impoverished friend. “Let us call ourselves by one name,” she says, “unite all our power, and so make front against science.” Such a union has long appealed to the French. Fénelon, one knows, sought thus to revive the epic; and many pens were set scratching for or against the _Télémacomanie_. Chateaubriand[139] tried a cadenced prose in his _Martyrs_, by way of putting new life into sacred poetry. Flaubert[140] and sundry of his school, above all, the Italian D’Annunzio, annex poetry to the prose romance, and not poetry as an informing spirit simply, but the cadences, the colour, the very refrain.[141] Maeterlinck uses the poetic device of repetition—say in the _Princesse Maleine_—to the verge of regular rhythm. Rime itself is not excluded; witness this from D’Annunzio’s novel:[142] “rideva, gemeva, pregava, cantava, accarezzava, singhiozzava, miniaciava; ilare, flebile, umile, ironica, lusinghevole, disperata, crudele.”[143] Is poetry, then, fallen by the wayside, and has prose spoiled her of her raiment, so as to stand hereafter in her stead? No. Whatever Walter Pater may have done for English or these men for Italian and French, they have at best set up a new euphemism[144] of no real promise and permanence. When the final balance is struck, these writers will perhaps take a place in prose analogous, even if in a contrary spirit, to the place of Swift in verse. Swift’s “unpoetic verse” is remorselessly clear, remorselessly direct; one must read his poetry, and in great measure admire, even like it, for its compelling energy and lucidity of style. Yet, after all, one feels that these are alien virtues, imported from the realm of prose; and one reads Swift’s poems much as one listens to a foreigner conversing correctly, admirably, in one’s own tongue. And as with Swift’s prose excellence in poetry, so with this poetic excellence in prose; in the long account, _laudatur et alget_. It makes the vain attempt to move landmarks set up, not by men, but by man, by human nature itself.

So much for the theories; but it must now be proved beyond question that rhythm is the vital and essential quality in the beginnings of poetic art. Where to draw the line between prose and verse, between the recurrence which is regular and which is called for our purposes rhythm, and the recurrence that is not regular, is hard indeed; but perhaps a satisfactory rule may be given in the words of Professor Budde, a distinguished student of that Hebrew poetry to which so many advocates of the prose poem have made appeal. “The fundamental law of form in all poetry,” he says,[145] “by which in every race and at all times verse is distinguished from prose, is that while in prose the unchecked current of speech flows consistently as far as the thought carries it, the range of thought and the length of the sentence changing often and in many ways, verse, on the other hand, divides its store of thought into relatively short lines which appeal to the ear as distinct not only by this shortness, but also by relations determined by laws definite, indeed, but varying with different races and languages. Whenever the formal factors of poetry are enriched, these smallest units, the verses or lines, tend to join, by a new bond, in a higher unit of form.”[146] This formal factor may be now alliteration, now rime; with the Hebrews, says Budde, it was the thought, which made a higher unit of the short and separated units of line or verse. Lowth’s _parallelismus membrorum_ does not quite cover the rhythmical structure of Hebrew verse; no matter if a fixed metre has not yet been found, the rhythm is evident, and its law is essentially equal length of the verses within the group.[147] For a test, one must fall back upon that original organ of poetry, the human voice. Slave to the eye, one often reads as prose what one could read, or what could be read to one, as poetry.[148] In any case, there will be debatable ground, perhaps neutral ground; but it is safe to say from theory, from the practical trial, from arguments of the learned, that so far the effort to obliterate verse or rhythm as the real boundary line of poetic territory, has proved a failure, and is likely to prove a failure as often as it shall be tried. The case must be taken to the court of human history and human progress; brought hither, all the arguments for poems in prose lose their power. If, as Bücher says, one is unwilling nowadays to let rhythmic speech pass, merely in so far as it is rhythmic speech, for poetry, that is because ages of culture, with increasing æsthetic demands, have quite naturally added new conditions; but the beginning of poetry as an æsthetic fact was in the sense of rhythm. The poem now laboriously wrought at the desk goes back to the rhythm of work or play or dance in the life of primitive man, and the element of rhythm is the one tie that binds beginning and end; if poetry denies rhythm, it denies itself.

This statement itself, however, certain of the learned now vehemently oppose, and bring reasons for their attitude quite different from such arguments as we have been considering for the prose poem. Rhythm itself, they maintain, is the outcome of prose. It is the child, says one bold German, of grammatical inflections and the stress of oratory. Here is fine revolution, indeed, if they have the trick to show it. Strabo, in a classic sentence,[149] laid down the law which writer after writer has taken without question as undisputed and indisputable authority; poetry came before prose. “Flowery prose,” he said, “is nothing but an imitation of poetry,” which is the “origin of all rhetorical language,” and was at first always sung; “the very term _prose_,” he concludes, “which is applied to language not clothed in metre, seems to indicate ... its descent from an elevation, or chariot, to the ground.” Hence the _sermo pedestris_ of Latin writers. Against this, now, come sundry scattered hints and at least two elaborate arguments. Vigfusson and Powell,[150] after a consideration of old Scandinavian poetry, are fain to think that Germanic rhythm was at the start simply “excited and emphatic prose,” and make rhythm in general not an essential so much as an accomplishment and aftergrowth of poetry. Finding no metre in this same Norse poetry, none in Hebrew, Gottsched,[151] while he allowed that songs were the earliest poetic form, thought them to have been simple unmetrical chants, as if a child should sing the Lord’s prayer. Many ballads, even English and Scottish, seem to show with other supposed primitive traits a rough and faulty structure of verse, so that certain critics, in their haste, make the lack of smooth metres a test of age,—an idea which long prevailed in regard to Chaucer’s versification. It is said[152] that until the beginning of the seventeenth century Hungarian poetry was “quite without system, without rhythm, full of bad rimes, and mainly made up of verses joined in long, monotonous rows”; this, however, as in India, may have been the case not with lyric, but only with epic. Comparetti thinks that the _Kalevala_ was founded upon earlier poetic or roughly rhythmic prose,—again a matter of epic; and earliest Japanese poetry, so far as it has been preserved, “is not far removed from prose.”[153] Now and then, but not often, one is told that savage songs have no regular rhythm and no settled order in the verse. If it be true that mere counting of syllables was the earliest form of common Aryan versification, it is at first sight not so unreasonable to assume some sort of excited prose as a common basis for this system as well as for the systems of quantitative and of accentual rhythm. Moreover, as will be shown in later pages, there is a feeling abroad which runs counter to any notion of spontaneity, and insists upon a process of invention and imitation; this, too, would make against a natural rhythm,[154] would throw out rhythm as an essential and primitive part of poetry.[155] So much for scattered hints and observations; there are more elaborate attacks.

In a treatise by Norden[156] on ancient artistic prose, one has under one’s hand all the evidence which can be gathered from the classics, particularly the Greek, for this view of the relations between prose and verse; here, too, are ranged certain arguments against that old notion of the precedence of poetry.[157] Musical sense, rhythm, was given to man with the spoken word itself, as in historical times to the Hellenic folk, whose melodious sentence is as inaudible as the music of the spheres to an ear dependent upon modern speech. Now before poetry was developed, Norden assumes, there was a rhythmic prose distinguished by some kind of emphasis from the speech of daily life; thence sprang on one hand the rhythm of regular poetry, and on the other hand a rhythm of impassioned, oratorical prose. The oratory of Greece was a kind of chanting, and the gestures that went with it were a species of dance; but these in no way could be called identical with the singing or recitation of poetry. Then came confusion. Gorgias began a new era when he imported certain elements of poetry into his prose; even the rimed prose of the Middle Ages Norden[158] calls “the result of a thousand years of development from the time of Gorgias.” The early results, however, were destructive. Tragedy, thinks our author, was ruined in Hellas because all barriers were broken down between poetry and prose, and rhetoric overwhelmed the drama; great epos yielded to great history; gnomic poetry vanished; epigram supplanted elegy; dithyramb made room for lofty prose at large.[159] But this is nothing more than a process in civilized Greece analogous to the process in our own day described a few pages above. Even the tradition of the classical writers pointed back to an age of poetry which preceded prose; for while Strabo, in the passage already considered, and Varro,[160] speak of actual literature which they had in hand, Plutarch, writing on the Pythian oracle, made poetry the product of primitive times and prose the outcome of prehistorical decadence. Against this tradition, which he makes a mere glorification of the golden age, Norden argues with learning and acuteness, and from material furnished by Greek literature itself. But Greek literature is surely no criterion for primitive song; persistent as this prejudice is,[161] Norden sees that ethnology has better points of view, and in one or two places he calls upon it for aid.[162] The distinction between poetry and prose is, for him, “secondary, not essential,” for the reason that he cannot find this distinction in the earliest expression of formal or solemn language known to the various races of man, whether on highest or lowest planes of culture. His summary may be quoted, temperate and reasonable as it is; it appeals to ethnological arguments, which would be close upon convincement if they did not utterly neglect, as nearly all writers on poetry have neglected, the communal basis of the art, and the fundamental consideration that earliest poetry is more a social than an individual expression. Norden’s eye is fixed upon the priest, the poet, the medicine man, the lawgiver; he forgets the throng, and he forgets that the throng was mainly active and rarely passive in the primitive stages of poetry. But let his own summary be heard.[163] The line now drawn between poetry and prose, he maintains, was unknown to primitive races. Forms of magic, the language of the laws, ceremonial religious rites, were everywhere made in prose; not, however, in the prose of daily conversation, but in a prose removed from common conditions by two factors: first, it was spoken in measured, solemn tones, and so became rhythmical,—not the regular rhythm of song, but a sort of chant or recitation,[164] so that one may figure the early priest like his modern brother, the snowy-banded, delicate-handed one, at his intoning; and, secondly, it was furnished, for emphasis and for the help of memory, with certain vocal expedients, such as alliteration and rime, which are inborn alike in the most civilized and in the wildest races. This kind of prose existed before there was any artistic poetry. Norden would like to see more work done in the field of early legal and religious forms; old Latin prayers, old Germanic laws, for example, have been coaxed or bullied into some metrical scheme, and made to pass as poetry. Elsewhere he takes the case of that prayer to Mars which Westphal and Allen called Saturnian verse; by Norden’s reckoning, this is mainly alliterative, rhythmic prose; only the second half can be called metrical; and he is convinced that Saturnian verse itself is nothing but the later metrical equipment of what was once rhythmic prose solemnly spoken with two sections to the line. _Carmen_, he goes on to say, is originally any solemn formula whether spoken or sung, whether rhythmic prose, even simple prose, or verse;[165] that is “settled.” It is a clever suggestion, too, that rhythmic prose belongs with what one now calls the loose sentence, while artistic prose, contemporary with artistic and metrical poetry, came into prominence with the periodic structure;[166] so the tale, like Grimm’s familiar “There was once a king’s son, and he was very beautiful ...,” in its uninvolved, consecutive phrases, would give one an idea of the early rhythmic prose.

All this is useful and suggestive; but it by no means does away with the fact of regular rhythmic utterance for primitive times. Who, for example, is going to believe that rime and alliteration were developed before regular rhythm,—regular rhythm, as will presently be shown, standing out as the one fact about savage poetry to which nearly all evidence of ethnology gives assent? Who will deny that quite as early as any priest recited his prayer or buzzed his magic in solemn prose, there was a throng of folk dancing and singing with a rhythm as exact as may be? Did the priests, even, recite in “irregular rhythmic prose” that repeated _enos Lases juvate_ of the Arval rites, sung as they beat the ground in concerted measure of the dance? “So long,” says Usener[167] in his book on old Greek verse, “so long as human societies turned in solemn and festal manner to the divinities, so long they made petition, thanks, laud, in measured and rhythmic verse, and the words were inseparable from singing and the steps of the march.” For purposes of this kind, and such purposes are the very soul of primitive social life, chanted prose is out of the question. An excellent authority in musical matters, Dr. Jacobsthal,[168] points out that the rhythm, if one may so call it, of the chant stands to real rhythm as prose stands to verse, and that the song to which a throng must dance, as in primitive times, _can “in no case” lack the regular rhythm_. Who, moreover, that has read Bücher’s essay can overlook the fact that primitive labour must have begotten an exact rhythm, and very early must have given meaning to this rhythm by more or less connected words? The proof, offered not only by Norden but in those scattered hints already noted, breaks down when confronted with hard facts. Ballad metres are often rough in the copies which have come down to us, but a hundred considerations show this to have been the fault of the copy itself, not of the makers and singers,[169] and to have been due to the transfer from oral to written conditions. There seems to be no reason why a letter should not be quoted which the late Professor Child wrote in 1885 to the author of the present book; “any _volkslied_,” he said, “shows as good an ear as any Pindaric ode by Gray or whomever else.” It is the sense of complicated metres which is due to culture and intellectual development, and not the sense of exact and simple rhythm. As regards that protoplasmic prose of the popular tale, which Norden calls “the essential test of primitive speech,” how can he prove that it is the essential test of primitive song? How different Bruchmann, who admits early prose narrative, but says distinctly that early poetry, lyric outpouring of emotion, was song; “the earliest of all poetry” for him is communal song, _gesang in gemeinschaft_, golden words indeed! Grosse is to the same effect. Who denies the tale, the loose prose style in short sentences verging on rhythmic effects? Of course the entertainer told his tale betimes; but earlier than this tale, the dance of the throng, as well as the labour of daily life, had from the very beginning mated sounds and words with rhythm, precise rhythm, as a festal and consenting act. A mass of evidence, soon to be considered, is overwhelmingly for this state of things. Norden appeals for the form of the tale to Radloff, a great authority; let us do the same for the form of the song. In an article on poetic forms among the Altaic Tartars,[170] Radloff remarks that in these isolated tribes popular literature, without even the faintest influence from the lettered world, has been developed in a quite natural way. Especially worthy of note, he says, is the strictness of metrical form in their poetry. He notes, moreover, the inseparable character, under such conditions, of poetry and song. The specimens which he gives are anything but rhythmic prose, and the rhythmic law is anything but loose. The tales on the other hand are quite different; “these are not sung,” he says, “but recited,” although now and then the reciter sings a verse or so. Which came first, the entertainer and his audience, or the festal, singing throng? Evidence of ethnology and conclusions of sociology certainly put the singing, dancing throng as a primary social fact, and the relation of audience to entertainer as a secondary social fact. Mr. Joseph Jacobs[171] has hailed the _cante-fable_ as protoplasm alike of the metrical ballad and of the prose tale, one omitting prose, the other omitting verse; and while this does not really help Norden’s claim, it is worth the while to note how it assumes a development which is counter to all the facts. Even on its chosen ground of Celtic tales, this theory meets indications that the verse is original and the prose of later date.[172] The _cante-fable_ seems like a late form, a device of the entertainer; the scraps of verse are survivals, just as the chorus in a Greek drama is the survival of a drama in which all took part, with no division into actors and spectators. In the Chinese drama[173] an Occidental ear is offended by a remarkable confusion of speaking and singing; even a single sentence in the dialogue is so divided that part is spoken and part is sung. This is no primitive and protoplasmic state; it is rather the confusion of contraries, than the germ of related and naturally developed forms of art. Poetry and prose in historic times have been approaching each other, not diverging, and the curve of evolution would indicate a wide distinction at the start. Mixture of prose, as Professor Sievers sees it, is a sign of decay in the _Muspilli_, in the Hildebrand Lay.[174] On the other hand, in vigorous poetry like the Roumanian ballad there is no mixture of prose, while the Roumanian popular tale is sprinkled with verses; yet here is precisely where the protoplasmic state ought to be found for both arts, since the poetical style is “simple as possible,” has often no relative clauses for whole pages, and is full of repetition.[175] Under simple conditions, poetry often breaks up into prose, but prose is not found in its transition to poetry; for proof it is enough to quote a recent writer on German ballads.[176] “More and more,” he says, “the ballads disintegrate into prose, a process which has been noted for Spain, Sweden, Scotland, Portugal, and is also known in Germany.”[177] He gives quotations and references to support his assertion, going on to name several well-known ballads which began as such and then, in the guise of prose tales, won as wide and as great a vogue as the originals had enjoyed before. Perhaps in the case of poetic composition at a time when intellect has mastered emotion, prose may be the basis of poetry, but this case has no bearing on primitive conditions. Whether a poet nowadays conceives his work in prose, as Goethe did in the _Iphigenie_, or begins with the “brains beat into rhythm,” is an individual matter. “When Gautier wished to do a good piece of work, he always began in verse,” say the Goncourts.[178] Tradition makes Vergil write out his _Æneid_ in prose and then turn it into verse; Vida[179] commends this method for the prentice in poetry. There is a curious passage in Goethe’s letter to Schiller of 5 March, 1798, about renewed work on _Faust_. “Some tragic scenes were done in prose; by reason of their naturalness and strength they are quite intolerable in relation to the other scenes. I am, therefore, now trying to put them into rime, for there the idea is seen as if under a veil, and the immediate effect of this tremendous material is softened.” This, however, has nothing to do with primitive conditions of poetry; the simplicity of modern prose is an effort of art, and belongs with the intellectual empire, while rhythm, particularly in its early form of repetition, is the immediate and spontaneous expression of emotion, and likely to be more pronounced and dominant the nearer one is to the primitive state of things.

What Norden really does is to scour away accretions of silliness, romantic and sentimental phrases, which are too often held as part and parcel of a sensible belief about poetry in its early stage. Granted, as it is to be hoped the reader will ultimately grant, that singing and dancing wax in importance as one traces back the path of the arts, granted that verse and song covered a far greater field of activity in the beginning than they cover now, the notion that men with language in a fluent state, and on intellectual topics, sang instead of talking, that primitive life was like an Italian opera-stage, that the better part of man’s utterance was given over to lyrical wonder at the sunset and the stars,—these ideas, even when hallowed by great names, must be tossed to oblivion. But such a jettison by no means involves the sinking of the ship itself; to change the figure, gentlemen who have overthrown a minor idol or so must not loudly proclaim that they have razed the temple and rooted out the faith. For example, Grimm of old and Kögel of late[180] were too fond of poetic laws; the former confounded quaintness with beauty, and the latter discovered too much rhythm. The Frisian code, Kögel seems to have thought, was composed and recited as poetry, as alliterative verse. Well, this is perhaps Frisiomania of a dangerous kind, and Dr. Siebs[181] is within his rights in preaching another sermon on the old but dubious text of _Frisia non cantat_. The laws, he says, were indeed alliterative; but they were neither rhythmic nor poetical. So far, so good; the advantage seems to be on the side of Siebs; the idol totters and possibly falls. But now to pull down the temple! Whence came this alliteration? Like rime, it is a product of prose, declares the iconoclast, “having, in the first place, nothing to do with poetry,” and probably rising in answer to a demand of the language of trade, which needed to lay stress on the emphatic parts of one’s plea for a good bargain. That is, the mainstay of all Germanic rhythm is a “drummer’s” device, and begins in the shifty phrases of the early Germanic _hausierer_. This is a world of broken hopes. Norden for rime,[182] and Siebs for alliteration, which is only rime of another sort, have entered a terrific _caveat_ against the historian of primitive song. Is rime, then, the fine flower and outgrowth of a stump-speech, and is alliteration, poor changeling, unmasked in these latter days as an intruder and an alien in poetic halls, a by-blow of the primitive bagman? No, the temple is not pulled down. The rhythmical or unrhythmical character of Frisian laws is one thing; the origin of rime, the functions and progress of it, cannot be even guessed on the basis of such studies.

Two attempts, however, to prove the priority of prose, not by the classics, not by folklore alone, not by alliterative laws, but by ethnological facts and by comparative methods, may now be considered. Poetry as a whole, says Professor Biedermann,[183] and regarded in the genetic way, was not originally bound up with song, not even with rhythm. Song, he says, does not make poetry, but breaks it, disturbs and corrupts it. Maori and Malay, he points out, simply recite their legends and poems; in the old Persian, as in the old Japanese poetry, there is no rhythm to be found; and he assures his reader “that attempts to prove the original unity of poetry, music, and rhythm have come to wrack,”—a statement which needs great store of assurance when one considers it after reading the book under review. Biedermann’s own theory is offered in a nutshell. Poetry began as mere repetition, without music or rhythm, a parlous and naked state indeed; the taste for music is simply a chastened love of noise;[184] while rhythm is the result of concerted labour. That in after ages the three wanderers now and then met and passed the time of day, Biedermann is generous enough not to deny.

More weighty objections are to be found in an article by R. de la Grasserie.[185] Spoken words, he says, fall into prose as expression of thought, and into poetry as expression of sentiment; prose is fundamental, while poetry gets its material from prose, and follows it in point of time, although it is conceded that the full development of poetry precedes the full development of prose. At first it would seem that the author regarded verse as essential to poetry; the poet and the verse-maker, he says, must be united as a single productive power. But at once he goes on to ask whether verse be the sole poetic expression, and answers in the negative. Poetry is creation, “subjective discovery” of any sort, as opposed to the objective discoveries of science, where nothing is created. Didactic, mnemonic verse is not poetry, for it is merely the verse that is mnemonic; and the reason why poetry has come to be confounded with versification is simply that verse was needed for the recording or memorizing of poetry.[186] This teleological explanation of rhythm is a very weak joint in De la Grasserie’s armour; it shows how easily common sense can make itself ridiculous in its excess, a tendency commonly ascribed to sentimental and enthusiastic ideas alone. Facing the splendours of rhythm, knowing how it has held itself abreast of the lordliest doings of poetry, one laughs at the notion that its only credentials on Olympus should be its mnemonic convenience; and De la Grasserie thrusts his explanation handily away among the mists of primitive song. Then he turns to his theory of poetic growth. Poetry passed through three stages of expression,—first, prose; next, rhythmic prose; last, verse. How did poetry begin in prose? Well, it was “prose à courte haleine,”[187] prose with thought-pauses as frequent as rhythmic pauses, so that there was no distinction between prose and verse,—and no good reason, the reader is tempted to add, why this same prose should not be called verse outright. Exactly what thought-pauses have to do with a period when poetry consisted in the indefinite repetition of a very short phrase or even of a single word, and when, by all evidence, the pause is rhythmic entirely, the author does not say; he is dealing with a theory and not with facts, and so he assumes a majestic periodic prose as primitive utterance. Next after “prose” came “rhythmic prose,” and then verse; but the evolutionary process goes on, and from verse, as in these latter days, one turns back to prose in rhythm, and yet again to prose outright. If one asks for a bill of particulars, if one asks how verse came out of rhythmic prose, one is told that two propositions may have had the same number of words, just as in Arabic, just as in the _Avesta_,[188]—that the “two propositions” were once mere repetition, and sung in perfect time is, of course, not noted,—so that the psychic pause grows to be one with the rhythmic pause. But, accepting the impossible terms of the case, what proof is offered that word-counting and syllable-counting are of higher date than actual rhythm? Granting this, to be sure, the next step is easy; interior symmetry now comes into play, the measure of feet, the perfect rhythm of Greek and Latin verse. What cause, then, was at work thus to develop verse out of prose? Music and singing, answers the ingenious essayist; but the ingenious essayist has calmly shut out all facts save such as suit his case, and one is curious to know what he would do with ethnological evidence in regard to the priority and primacy of dance and song. Did man come to this fine mastery of metres and this subtle sense of quantities before he had begun to dance to his own singing?

If M. de la Grasserie were right, if Professor Norden were right, in this plea for prose as the parent of verse, a work on the beginnings of poetry could have nothing to do with verse, and only a little to do with rhythmic prose. Barring the way to their conclusions stand two facts. Rhythm is the prime characteristic, the essential condition, of the dance, and oldest poetry is by common consent found in close alliance with dance and song. Secondly, as the brilliant essay of Bücher has made more than probable, backed as it is by evidence of a really primitive character, and not by theories based upon a highly developed literature, poetry in some of its oldest forms, older indeed than that supposed period of earliest prose which M. de la Grasserie assumes for the start, was not only the companion but the offspring of labour. In postponing rhythmic utterance to the third great period of the development of poetry, the champion of prose origins is running counter to tradition, counter to the consent of science, counter to a formidable array of facts. It is quite wrong, too, to say[189] that rhythm nowadays depends upon music to keep it sound and alive; the rhythm of Tennyson’s _Bugle Song_, of Kipling’s _Recessional_, of any haunting and subtle lyric, may stir the composer to set it to music, but in no way depends upon music for its charm. It is quite as wrong to say that rhythm is less effective now than it has been; a century that knew Goethe, Heine, Shelley, Tennyson, not to leave Germanic bounds, has no concessions to make in this respect. Moreover, the account which the essayist gives of Arabic verse, as developed from prose, is good until another account turns up,—say that of M. Hartmann,[190] where rhythm is beginning and end of the matter; and it happens that this account is by an Arabic scholar of repute.

Considered in all fairness, these attacks have not shaken the belief in rhythm as something that lies at the heart of poetry. They may well brush aside some absurdity of romantic origin, but they fail to make probable or even possible a theory which would overthrow a settled literary tradition touching all quarters of the globe. It cannot be said that Norden has proved the growth of poetry out of prose even in the rhetorical clauses of oratory. From Longinus[191] one learns that an oration among the Greeks had rhythm, although it was not metrical, and in its delivery stopped just short of singing; so that one may concede that the speech of an orator carried to an extreme would give song, while his harmonious gestures, an art now as good as lost, needed but little more action and detail to become what the Greeks knew as a dance. But does any one pretend to say that singing and dancing spring from individual oratory? Orators now and then still sing or chant in their speeches. One would like to know more about the sermons which Dr. Fell preached “in blank verse”;[192] and one is in doubt whether this phrase, along with Selden’s sneer[193] at those who “preach in verse,” meant a distinct metrical order of words or only a sing-song of the voice—literally “cant,” as in the Puritan sermons and in the chant common not long ago with preachers of the Society of Friends. Any one who has heard this “singing” of hortatory speech knows that the rhythms of regular verse, of song and dance, could not possibly be derived from it. Each form of development must be studied for itself under the control of ethnological and sociological facts; and the written oration, with its cadences, goes back to the orator and his listening crowd, just as the written poem goes back to the improvising poet, and through him to the dancing communal throng. The attempt to derive exact rhythms of poetry from loose rhythms of oratorical speech has failed; it remains to show how these exact rhythms spring from primitive song, dance, and labour, mainly under communal conditions, and that exact rhythm lies at the heart of poetry. There are two social situations to be taken for granted. It is natural for one person to speak or even to sing, and for ninety-nine persons to listen. It is also natural for a hundred persons, under strong emotion, to shout, sing, dance, in concert and as a throng, not as a matter of active and passive, of give and take, but in common consent of expression. The second situation, still familiar now and then, is discouraged by civilized conditions, although, as foundation of social consent, it must have preceded the other situation and must have been of far greater frequency and importance in the beginnings of social life. It is this state of things which writers like Norden fail to take into account; and it is this state of things, with its communal consent resting on the vital and unifying fact of rhythm, which is now to be positively proved by the evidence of ethnology, the conclusions of sociology, and the controlling sense of evolution in poetical as in social progress.

In treating the positive side of such a subject, one turns instinctively to the latest word of science; and it would seem that the method which combines physical facts with psychological processes ought to be an adequate court of appeal. Dr. Ernst Meumann has undertaken a study of this sort with regard to rhythm;[194] but his investigations do little for the historical and genetic side of the case. From his essay, to be sure, one learns much that is of value, and one is made to see that certain views of rhythm heretofore in vogue must be considerably modified; for the main question of primitive rhythm, however, and for historical purposes at large, one can here learn nothing, since Meumann uses in his research only that declamatory style of reciting poetry by which the rhythm is always disguised and usually suppressed.[195] He denies Paul’s assertion that rhythmic measures in a verse are of equal duration,—a traditional statement,—because Brücke’s famous experiments, to which Paul appeals, were made upon folk who “scanned” their verses and did not recite them. But, for the purposes just named, it is begging the question when Meumann rejects the scanning of verse as something “counter to the nature of poetic material.” What is the nature of poetic material,—essentially rhythmic, or essentially free from rhythm? All reports of primitive singing, that is, of singing among races on a low plane of culture, make rhythm a wholly insistent element of the verse; and when a logical explanation which fits modern facts is at odds with the chronological course of things, then the danger signal is up for any wary student. It is easy to see that Meumann could make experiments on nothing but a modern reading of poetry, and it was natural that he should choose the sort of reciting most in vogue; his results in such a case, however, can be valid only for modern conditions. Poetry, for purposes of public entertainment, is mainly read in the free, declamatory style. This, to be sure, is not the way in which Tennyson, a master of poetic form, recited his verses; it is not the way in which one reads, or ought to read, lyric poems generally, where even the most ruthless and resolute Herod of “elocution” finds it impossible to slay all the measures of three syllables and under; and, by overwhelming evidence, it is not the way of quite savage folk, who dance and sing their verses. It is not even the way of races in more advanced stages of culture,[196] who recited their verses with strong rhythmical accents, using a harp, or some instrument of the sort, for additional emphasis. Rhythm is obscured or hidden by declamation only in times when the eye has usurped the functions of the ear, and when a highly developed prose makes the accented rhythm of poetry seem either old-fashioned or a sign of childhood. Not that one wishes to restore a sing-song reading, but rather a recognition of metrical structure, of those subtle effects in rhythm which mean so much in the poet’s art; verse, in a word, particularly lyric verse, must not be read as if it were prose. Dramatic verse is a difficult problem. French and German actors mainly ignore the rhythm; on the Parisian stage, competent critics say, whole pages of comedy or tragedy may be recited with exquisite feeling, and yet without letting one know whether it is verse or prose that one hears. For in drama one wishes nowadays to hear not rhythm, but the thought, the story, the point; imagine Sheridan’s comedies in verse! Even in tragedy dull emotions are now to be roused, not keen emotions soothed; or rather it is thought, penetrated by emotion, to be sure, but thought, and not the cadence which once soothed and carried off the emotion,—thought, indeed, as the comment and gloss on emotion,—in which a modern world wishes to find its consolations and its æsthetic pleasure. As thought recedes, as one comes nearer to those primitive emotions which were untroubled by thought, they get expression more and more in cadenced tones. And, again, this cadenced emotional expression, as it grows stronger, grows wider; the barriers of irony and reserve which keep a modern theatre tearless in the face of Lear’s most pathetic utterance, break down; first, as one recedes from modern conditions, comes the sympathetic emotion of the spectators expressed in sighs and tears,—one thinks of those performances in Germany a century and a half ago, and the prodigious weeping that went on,—so that the emotional expression is echoed; then comes the partial activity of the spectators by their deputed chorus; and at last the throng of primitive times, common emotion in common expression, with no spectators, no audience, no reserve or comment of thought,—for thought is absorbed in the perception and action of communal consent;[197] and here, by all evidence, rhythm rules supreme. Go back to these conditions, and what have the tricks of individual accent, the emphasis of logic, the artistic contrasts, the complicated process of interpretation, to do with social or gregarious poetry, with primitive song, with the rhythmic consent of that swaying, dancing multitude uttering a common emotion as much by the cadence of step and cry as by articulate words? Ethnology will be heard in abundance; a word or two may be in place from comparative literature and philology, and a controlling idea, a curve of evolution, may be found in this way if one takes a long stretch of poetic development in some race just forging to the front of civilized life. Song, one may assert, passes naturally into a sort of chant, especially as the epic form of poetry takes shape, into a saying rather than a singing, and then into an even easier movement. There seems to be little doubt that the recitation of classical poetry was a matter of scanning, an utterance which brought out the metre of the verse; even advocates of prose as the forerunner of poetry grant that the ancient writers made a careful distinction between the two, and always recited metre as metre. Emphasis, moreover, due to the regular steps of the original dance, is still heard in that popular verse of four measures which long held its place in Greek, Latin, Germanic, and other languages; once it accompanied the dancing throng, and by Westphal’s reckoning[198] consisted of eight steps forward and as many backward, so that the companion sounds of the voice made two verses with four pairs of syllables in each verse, right and left in step, with one syllable bearing the emphasis. Bergk in 1854 assumed that the hexameter is a combination of two such verses; Usener, correcting Bergk’s details, added the Nibelungen verse as made in the same way from two “popular” verses, that is, from the common Aryan metre, and called this a “mark of the oldest European verse”[199] wherever found, still lingering in the folksongs of many peoples. Bruchmann, noting its occurrence with Malays, Esthonians, Tartars, concludes that the verse is thus prevalent because of its convenience for the breath; it is neither too short nor too long. If, now, the curve of evolution in Aryan verse begins with an absolutely strict rhythm and alternate emphasis of syllables, often, as in Iranian,[200] to the neglect of logical considerations; if the course of poetry is to admit logical considerations more and more, forcing in at least one case the abandoning of movable accent and the agreement of verse-emphasis with syllabic emphasis, an undisputed fact; if poetry, too, first shakes off the steps of dancing, then the notes of song, finally the strict scanning of the verse, until now recited poetry is triumphantly logical, with rhythm as a subconscious element; if, finally, this process exactly agrees with the gradual increase of thought over emotion, with the analogous increase of solitary poetry over gregarious poetry,—then, surely, one has but to trace back this curve of evolution, and to project it into prehistoric conditions, in order to infer with something very close to certitude that rhythm is the primal fact in the beginnings of the poetic art. Such a curve is assumed as true by two Germanic scholars who differ absolutely with regard to certain questions of chronology. When did the rhythmic, measured chant of Germanic poetry pass into free recited verse? Before the date of such oldest Germanic poetry as is preserved, answers Professor Sievers; not until later, answers Professor Möller. Sievers, it is well known, declares the Germanic alliterative verse, as it lies before us, to have been spoken and not chanted; Möller insists on strophes and a rhythmical chant. To maintain his view, Möller[201] brings forward certain facts. Germanic poetry was at first mainly choral and communal song, poetry of masses of men, the _concentus_, mentioned by Tacitus, of warriors moving into battle, or of a tribe dancing at their religious rites. A _concentus_ of warriors in chorus of battle, he notes quite happily, is meant not so much to terrify the foe as to strengthen and order their own emotions, precisely, one may add, as the communal songs which led to the Hellenic chorus, and so to tragedy, were at first a matter of social expression altogether, and not an artistic effort made by a few active persons for the entertainment of a great passive throng. So, too, Möller goes on to remark, song in mass is song in movement; and here a regular cadence or rhythm must be the first, the absolute condition. “To say that primitive Aryans had neither poetry nor song—and nobody says it—would be like saying that they had no speech; to say that their poetry—and poetry is poetry only when marked by regular rhythm—had no regular rhythm, is almost as much as to say that their speech did not go, even unconsciously, by grammatical rules.” So far Möller.

What has Sievers to say against this? Does he prove his _sprechvortrag_, the declamatory recitation of verse, by assuming with Wilmanns[202] that Germanic verse is not developed from any common Aryan rhythm, but rather springs, as Norden asserted that all verse springs, from the corresponding parts of balanced sentences in prose? By no means. Wilmanns argues that this “common Aryan inheritance,” the verse of four accents, has not been proved as a fact, and has been simply set up as a theory; moreover, if it is proved, then one must assume that the Germanic lost it, “for the four accents appear only in later development.” Because the alliterative verse follows forms and tones of ordinary speech, Wilmanns makes it a modification of that speech, an outgrowth of prose. But that such a development is unnatural and contrary to facts as well as to common sense, that song of the masses is the earliest song, that it must be strictly rhythmic, that it passes later into rhythmic recitation, and then into free, declamatory recitation,—all this is so clear to Sievers, however it may seem to work against his own theory, as in Möller’s argument, that he casts about for a true explanation of alliterative verse with two accents as the outcome of that assumed Aryan verse of four accents. On a hint from Saran,[203] Sievers assumes that Germanic poetry had already made the step from strophes, which were chanted or sung in half-verses with four accents, and with a regular rhythm, to continuous or stichic verses with halves of two accents, and with free rhythmic structure fitted for saying rather than for singing. So it might well have gone with the hexameter; two verses with four accents each became one verse of six accents, and this had the swing and freedom of spoken poetry. Now whether Sievers is right or wrong in all this is apart from the question in hand; it is simply a matter of evolution on the lines already indicated, and of the stage in that evolution to which Germanic verse had come. On the priority of strictly rhythmic verse[204] sung by masses of men, both Sievers and Möller are agreed.

Modern individual recitation, then, by this evidence of philology and by the sense of evolution in poetic form, can be no criterion for primitive poetry; hence the inadequate character of such investigations into the nature of poetic rhythm as neglect the facts offered by ethnology and by comparative literature. One must not neglect choral and communal conditions when one deals with primitive verse. For a study of modern epic and dramatic verse as it is read aloud or declaimed, for a study even of verse on the Shaksperian stage, Meumann’s essay is useful in many respects; it is useless for the study of rhythm in that larger sweep of poetic origins and growth.

We must turn, then, to scientific material which deals with primitive stages of human life. A very primitive, perhaps a pre-primitive stage of human life is involved in Darwin’s theory, stated in his _Descent of Man_, reaffirmed briefly in his book on the expression of emotions, and adopted by Scherer for the explanation of poetic origins, that a study of sexual calls from male to female among animals might unlock the secret of primitive rhythm. This, as has been said, will lead to no good. Love songs, the supposed development of such calls, actually diminish and disappear as one retraces the path of verse and comes to low stages of human progress, to savage poetry at large;[205] the curve of evolution is against recourse to facts such as Darwin would find convincing; and those “long past ages when ... our early progenitors courted each other by the aid of vocal tones,” are less helpful to the understanding of rhythm and poetry, when restored in such furtive and amiable moments, than when they present the primitive horde in festal dance and song, finding by increased ease of movement and economy of force, by keener sense of kind, by delight of repetition, the possibilities of that social consent which is born of rhythmic motion. Scherer, indeed, saw how much more this social consent and this festal excitement have to do with the matter, and undertook to fix the origin of poetry in an erotic and pantomimic choral, such as one still finds in certain obscene Australian dances;[206] but the erotic impulse is not social, save in some questionable exceptions; and social consent, as Donovan has shown, began rather on public and frankly social occasions, like the dance of a horde after victory in war.[207]

Sociological considerations, again, have weight with Mr. Herbert Spencer[208] when he finds, like Norden, but for different reasons, that rhythm, as used in poetry and in music, is developed out of highly emotional and passionate speech. This doctrine of Mr. Spencer has been denied on musical grounds, and must be denied still more strongly on ethnological grounds. The objections on musical grounds brought forward by Mr. Gurney,[209] are difficult to answer, and one is bound to admit that Mr. Spencer has not answered them convincingly in the essay of 1890; moreover, in making recitative a step between speech and song, he is not only ignoring communal singing, but is reversing the facts of an evolutionary process. To develop song out of an impassioned speech is plausible enough until one fronts this primitive horde dancing, singing, shouting in cadence, with a rhythm which the analogy of ethnological evidence and the facts of comparative literature prove to have been exact.[210] In Mr. Spencer’s essay of 1857, the “connate” character of dancing, poetry, and music is emphasized; but the choral, communal element is unnoticed. Precisely such social conditions, however, controlled the beginning of poetry, and the main factor in them seems to have been the exact rhythm of communal consent. Against the evidence for communal rhythm little can be urged; and the few cases brought forward for this purpose by Biedermann not only rest on imperfect observation but often prove to be contradictory in the form of the statement. So, too, with other evidence. Burchell, for example, said that the Bushmen in singing and dancing showed an exact sense of rhythm; while Daumas said that they never danced except after heavy meals, and then in wild, disordered fashion, with no rhythm at all. Grosse[211] throws out this negative evidence as counter to overwhelming evidence on the other side. Again, one often finds a statement which denies rhythm to savage poetry, nevertheless affirming most exact rhythm in the songs or cries to which the savages dance. Here is evidently a confusion of the communal “poem” or song, and the individual tale or what not chanted in a kind of recitative. It may be concluded from a careful study of ethnological evidence that all savage tribes have the communal song, and most of them have the recitative. Silent folk who do nothing of the sort, tribes that neither sing nor dance, must not be brought into the argument; if they do occur, and the negative fact is always hard to establish, they are clearly too abnormal to count. Human intelligence is not measured by the idiot. These are decadent groups, extreme degenerates, links severed from the chain; and no one will summon as witnesses for the primitive stage of poetry those Charruas of Uruguay, who are said to have no dance, no song, no social amusements, who speak only in a whisper, “are covered with vermin,” and know neither religion nor laws,—in a word, no social existence, and almost no humanity. So one comes back to the normal folk. East Africans[212] are reported to have “no metrical songs,” and they sing in recitative; but at once it is added that they dance in crowds to the rhythm of their own voices, as well as to the drum, moving in cadence with the songs which they sing: and here can be no recitative.[213] Moreover, when cleaning rice, they work to the rhythm of songs, to foot-stamping and hand-clapping of the bystanders,—in other words, choral dance, choral song, exact time, rhythm absolute; although, by culling a bit here and there, the theorist could have presented fine evidence from Bushmen and East Africans that savages in low levels of culture have no rhythm in their songs, and dance without consent or time. True, there is the recitative, and that, as a thing interesting to Europeans, is pushed into the foreground of the traveller’s account. Yet this recitative of the singer who does a turn for the missionary or other visitor is not the main fact in the case, although it is often the only fact of the sort that is set down. It may be cheerfully conceded that the recitative occurs among savage tribes throughout the world; but the manner of its occurrence must be considered. Along with choral singing, in intervals of the dance, some person chants a sentence or two in a fashion usually described as recitative. One would like to know more of this chanting; but sometimes it is without exact rhythm or measure, and will not “scan” in any regular way. So, too, with music itself; most of the ruder tribes, as Wallaschek points out,[214] know both systems of music, the rhythmic and the “free.” On the Friendly Islands natives have two kinds of song, “those similar to our recitative, and others in regular measure.” African singers tell a tale of their wanderings “in an emphatic recitative”; but the choral songs are always sung in exact rhythm to the dance. Not only, too, with savages; hasty generalizations and inexact statements due to this double character of singing have robbed more advanced peoples of the rhythmical sense. A Swedish writer[215] telling about the Lapps and what seemed to him their lack of any idea of melody, quotes one Blom, who “denies that the Lapps have any sense for rhythm.” Why? They cannot keep harmony; of six or eight, no two agree, and each is a bit above or below the rest,—not a question of rhythm, then, and alien to the case. Scarcely any savages have the sense of melody and harmony, although their sense of exact rhythm is universal and profound.

It is not hard to follow so plain a hint as one finds in the ethnological evidence; and it is clear that recitative is a matter of the individual singer, while to choral singing it is unknown and from the nature of the case impossible. As the savage laureate slips from the singing, dancing crowd, which turns audience for the nonce, and gives his short improvisation, only to yield to the refrain of the chorus, so the actual habit of individual composition and performance has sprung from the choral composition and performance. The improvisations and the recitative are short deviations from the main road, beginnings of artistry, which will one day become journeys of the solitary singer over pathless hills of song, those “wanderings of thought” which Sophocles has noted; and the curve of evolution in the artist’s course can show how rapidly and how far this progress has been made. But the relation must not be reversed; and if any fact seems established for primitive life, it is the precedence of choral song and dance. An entertainer and an audience, an artist and a public, take for granted preceding social conditions; and it is generally admitted that social conditions begin with the festal dance as well as with communal labour. Indeed, as Professor Grosse points out, rhythm was the chief factor in social “unification”; but this was never the rhythm of Norden’s rhythmical prose, or the irregular measures of a recitative. Where and when the individual recitative became a thing of prominence, as it undoubtedly did, is a matter to be studied in the individual and centrifugal impulse, in the progress of the poet; here it is enough to show that rhythmic verse came directly from the choral song, and that neither the choral song, nor any regular song, could have come from the recitative. The latter, as Jacobsthal assures us, will not go with dancing; and earliest singing, as is still the case in Africa,[216] must not be sundered from the dance. Baker,[217] who made a careful study of music among our Indians, sums up the matter by saying that “the characteristic feature of primitive song was the collectiveness of amusement,” and that “recitatives have a flow of words and a clearness of expression which are both incompatible with primitive song.” They need, that is, a developed stage of speech when the logical sentence has shaken itself free, to some extent, of mere emotional cadence and of almost meaningless repetitions. Here, indeed, begin the orator, the teller of tales, the artistic poet; but dance, song, and poetry itself begin with a communal consent, which is expressed by the most exact rhythm. Emotional speech is an ambiguous phrase. In one sense it is an individual, broken, irregularly regular sequence of phrases and words; oratory and oratorical cadences came out of such a chaos, but never the ordered rhythm of dancing throngs. The emotional speech in which exact rhythm began was the loud and repeated crying of a throng, regulated and brought into consent by movements of the body, and getting significance from the significance of the festal occasion.[218]

Evidence is everywhere for the asking in this matter of communal consent and choral rhythm; but instead of taking detached and random facts from many different sources, it will be well to select three groups of facts which can offer in each case compact and consistent testimony. For the present purpose one may look at the case of the Botocudos of South America, a tribe very low in the social scale, as studied by Dr. Ehrenreich; at the case of the Eskimos as studied by Dr. Boas; and finally at the case of African negroes in this country, studied by Colonel Higginson thirty-five years ago, under most favourable circumstances, and with particular reference to their communal singing. With all respect for the zeal and truthfulness of missionaries, one will thus do well to leave them out of the account, and to take evidence which comes in two cases from a professed ethnologist and in the third case from an impartial observer.

The Botocudos[219] are little better than a leaderless horde, and pay scant heed to their chieftain; they live only for their immediate bodily needs, and take small thought for the morrow, still less thought for the past. No traditions, no legends, are abroad to tell them of their forbears. They still use gestures to express feeling and ideas; while the number of words which imitate a given sound “is extraordinarily great.” An action or an object is named by imitating the sound peculiar to it; and sounds are doubled to express greater intensity or a repetition. To speak is _aõ_; to speak loudly, or to sing, is _aõ-aõ_. And now for their æsthetic life, their song, dance, poetry, as described by this accurate observer. “On festal occasions the whole horde meets by night round the camp fire for a dance. Men and women alternating ... form a circle; each dancer lays his arms about the necks of his two neighbours, and the entire ring begins to turn to the right or to the left, while all the dancers stamp strongly and in rhythm the foot that is advanced, and drag after it the other foot. Now with drooping heads they press closer and closer together; now they widen the circle. Throughout the dance resounds a monotonous song to the time of which they stamp their feet. Often one can hear nothing but a continually repeated _kalauī ahā!_ ... again, however, short improvised songs in which are told the doings of the day, the reasons for rejoicing, what not, as ‘Good hunting,’ or ‘Now we have something to eat,’ or ‘Brandy is good.’[220] Now and then, too, an individual begins a song, and is answered by the rest in chorus.... _They never sing_ _without dancing, never dance without singing, and have but one word to express both song and dance._”

As the unprejudiced reader sees, this clear and admirable account confirms the doctrine of early days, revived with fresh ethnological evidence in the writings of Dr. Brown and of Adam Smith, that dance, poetry, and song were once a single and inseparable function; and is in itself fatal to the idea of rhythmic prose, of solitary recitation, as foundation of poetry. The circle, the close clasp, the rhythmic consent of steps and voices; here are the social foundation and the communal beginnings of the art. Then comes the improvised song, springing, however, from these communal and choral conditions, and still referring absolutely to present interests of the horde as a whole. There are no traditions, no legends, no epic, no lyrics of love, no hymns to star and sunset. All poetry is communal, holding fast to the rhythm of consent as to the one sure fact.

The Eskimo,[221] despite his surroundings, is in better social case than the Botocudo; while the sense of kind is as great, individual growth has gone further, and song is not limited to festal and communal promptings. The “entertainer” has arrived, although, when he begins to divert his little audience in the snow-hut, he must always turn his face to the wall. Still more, there is no monopoly; as with peasants at the Bavarian dance, where each must and can sing his own improvised quatrain, so here each member of the party has his tale to tell, his song, dance, or trick. The women hum incessantly while at work; but the words are mainly that monotonous air, the repeated _amna aya_ of the popular chorus. Individuals have their “own” tunes and songs, which easily become traditional; but the solitary song is not so much an Eskimo characteristic as the communal song, for they are a sociable folk, and never spend their evenings alone. They sing, as so often was the case in mediæval Europe, while playing ball; but the combination of choral song and dance is a favourite form, and both singing and dancing have in this case one name, with features common to the festivity all over the world,—exact rhythm, repetition of word and phrase, endless chorus, a fixed refrain,—the _amna aya_,—short and intermittent improvisation by solitary singers and reciters. The art of these singers and reciters is in an advanced stage; for they perform alone as well as under support of the chorus. Three phases of their art may be mentioned. First, there is the prose tale with songs or recitatives interspersed, a sort of _cante-fable_. Then there is the tale chanted in a kind of recitative, which Dr. Boas calls poetic prose. Thirdly, there are “real poems of a very marked rhythm, which are not sung but recited,” and the reciter “jumps up and down and to right and left” as he speaks his piece. That is, here are tales which have come to such a pitch of art that choral and refrain and repetition of words are a hindrance to the flow of the story. Still, even here the solitary performances stand out against the background of choral singing in which they once formed such a modest part, and on every provocation they slip into it again and are lost in the old rhythm of emotional repetition and communal consent.

The negro slaves of the South, finally, with their traditional dance and song, strangely influenced by one of the few elements of civilization which really came into their life, the religious element, offer another interesting bit of evidence to show how emotional speech, a rude poetry, is born of rhythm by consent of a throng. In those so-called “spirituals” of the negro is the recitative or the chorus to be looked upon as original? Perhaps Colonel Higginson had as good a chance to study this communal song as any one could have; in an article[222] written soon after the war he described the singing of the “spirituals” by men of his regiment, now in camp, now on the march, now to the fall of the oars. He speaks of the trait so prominent in all primitive song, exact and inevitable rhythm, however harsh the voices and however uncouth the words. “Often ... I have ... silently approached some glimmering fire, round which the dusky figures moved in the rhythmical barbaric dance the negroes call a ‘shout,’ chanting, often harshly, but always in the most perfect time, some monotonous refrain.” What was the favourite of all these spirituals, “sung perhaps twice as often as any other”? A song called _Hold Your Light_, “sung with no accompaniment but the measured clapping of hands and the clatter of many feet;” it “properly consisted of a chorus alone with which the verses of other songs might be combined at random.”

Hold your light, Brudder Robert,— Hold your light, Hold your light on Canaan’s shore....

For Robert, another name would be given,[223] then another, and so on for half an hour. This seemed to Colonel Higginson “the simplest primitive type of ‘spiritual.’” Next in favour was:—

Jordan River, I’m bound to go, Bound to go, bound to go, Jordan River, I’m bound to go, And bid ’em fare ye well,

then with Brudder Robert, Sister Lucy, and so on, the well-known cumulative refrain. Now if one had only the text of many of these songs, and knew nothing of the singing and dancing, one would call them rhythmical prose, recitative; for example, a part of _The Coming Day_. One is told, however, that this “was a boat-song and timed well with the tug of the oar.” The fact is that here, as in savage and presumably in primitive song, movement of body and rhythm of voice are the main consideration, while the words, on which civilized man imposes individual and syntactic correctness, are of very subordinate value. Syllables may be dropped or added at will, but the rhythm must be exact; and the simplest way to avoid verbal distress is the primitive device of repetition.[224] When the words, and the thought in them, begin to be of overmastering importance in poetry, “scanning” acts as deputy of exact rhythm and song, until at last declamation pushes scanning aside, and rhythm is reduced to the same ancillary function once assigned to thought and words.

Here, then, are the vital elements in the discussion. Rhythm is an affair of instinctive perception transformed into a social act as the expression of social consent. It has been said that beginnings and not origins are the object of our quest; how rhythm in poetry may stand to rhythm in nature, to the breath or the pulse of man, to periodic movements of tide, of star, and so in vaster and vaster cosmic relation, or, again, to infinitesimal rhythms in the cell, in the cell of the cell,—are queries apart from the present purpose. Important, however, is the doctrine held by modern scholars that poetic rhythm is objectively an outcome of human activity, and subjectively a process of human perception.[225] Perhaps the best short study of the wider question has been made by Wallaschek.[226] Insisting that “rhythm is the form of the objective movement, time-sense (_mesure_, _takt_) the form of the perceiving subject-mind,” noting that “the evenness of time-groups in music arises from the original organic union of dance and music,” he goes on to point out a fact which seems to be fundamental for any study of beginnings in poetry as well as in the sister art, although it is music of which he speaks. Vocal utterance merely as result of “corporal stimulus,” song like that of birds, is not yet music,—nor, one may add, is the cry of the solitary infant, individual or racial, to be counted as poetry. “The peculiar germ which has alone been found capable of the enormous development actually accomplished in music”—and in poetry—“is the _chorus_, with its framework, the dance.” A bird’s song or a man’s cry is merely vent for emotion; but when several persons sing together, there is more than emotion, there is consent, and consent means that they must observe, group, and order the tones. “They could not keep together if they did not mark periods ... for there is no concert possible without bars. What they perform is rhythm, what they think is _takt_, and what they feel is surplus of vigour.” There may be some error in the details of this analysis. Wallaschek has not done justice to the “genesis of emotion,” as Ribot[227] calls it, through unaided rhythm; he may not concede enough to the song of birds, and may be wrong in saying that no one ever heard animals sing in concert;[228] hysteric cries, which tend to be rhythmic and show a maximum of emotion with a minimum of purpose, have doubtless more to say in early rhythm—one thinks of the songs of lament, the _voceri_—than he admits;[229] but his main point about choral beginnings is of immense importance. Poetry, like music, is social; like its main factor, rhythm, it is the outcome of communal consent, a _faculté d’ensemble_; and this should be writ large over every treatise on poetry, in order to draw the mind of the reader from that warped and baffling habit which looks upon all poetry as a solitary performance. The modern reader is passive; even hearing poetry is mainly foreign to him; active poetry, such as abounded in primitive life, is to him the vagary of a football mob, the pleasure of school children; and to such a reader the words of Wallaschek are salutary indeed, insisting that not the sense of hearing alone is to be studied when one takes up the psychology of music, but the muscular sense as well, and that the muscular sense has precedence. “‘Making music’ means in the primitive world performing, not listening,” a statement which applies as well to poetry. And what sort of rhythm, under leave of Norden and the rest, is one to assume for the primitive consent whether in music or in poetry? Well, earliest music shows “an unsettled melody, an uncertain and constantly varying intonation, a perpetual fluctuation of pitch,” but, contrasted with all this, “the strict and ever prevailing rhythm,” “the precision and marvellously exact performance of numberless performers.”[230] For two facts, then, of great moment in the study of poetry, there is universal testimony from savage tribes all over the earth. Singing is mainly choral and timed to the dance; and the rhythm, no matter how large the throng, is amazingly correct.

So much for the savages. Arguments from the study of children, as was said in foregoing remarks on method, should be applied with great caution to the history of literary forms. It may be noted, however, that nothing brought out thus far by such studies has worked against the assumption of extremely accurate rhythm as the fundamental fact in primitive poetry. Of course, one must not set a child to tasks that belong in mature stages of poetry. The early efforts of children to make a metrical composition[231] are generally rough and only approximately rhythmic. Repeat a few verses, and ask the child to make verses like them, giving him paper, pencil, solitude, encouragement, and the promise of cake, all the known aids by which an adult poet wins his peerage or the abbey; the child will probably hit a rime or so, more or less accurate, but the verse will halt. This, however, is easily explained. Solitary composition, the process of following a set form of sounds by making sentences of his own to fit the scheme, the combination of thought with rhythm, is a task beyond his powers, and for an excellent reason; it was also beyond the powers of primitive man. But let the same child, with a dozen other children, in an extemporized game, fall to crying out some simple phrase in choral repetition; the rhythm is almost painful in its exactness. Repeat to this child rimes of the nursery; he is sworn foe to defective metre, and boggles at it; indeed, such defects are hard to find in all the amiable nonsense. The child’s ear for rhythm is acute; his execution of it in choral, or in verse learned from the hearing, is precise; his demands upon it are of the strictest; but in solitary composition, a mental effort, he loses his rhythmic way, and grows bewildered in those new paths of thought. A teacher of considerable experience recently made the statement that children in school will turn loose or defective metre, once the idea of rhythm is given them, into accurately measured verse. Indeed, it is probable that the halting verses of an indifferent poet, such as one finds in newspapers, begin in the maker’s constructive process as correct rhythm, but lose this cadence in the course of composition.[232] Be that as it may be, however, the rhythmical sense of children is remarkably exact for purposes of choral singing and recital.

It is evident that one is not likely to be embarrassed by a lack of rhythm in early poetry, but rather by a lack of anything else. There is the danger, when one has made so much of rhythm, that this early art will be called nothing more than vocal music, and will vainly claim the title of poetry. Here are dance and music, one is told, and that is all. Wagner[233] believed in the original union of the three arts; but Wallaschek[234] separates poetry from music and dance. Unfortunately, he does not say what primitive poetry could have been; recitative he rejects utterly; it is clear, however, that he is thinking of a poetry which no one is disposed to father upon earliest man, that poetry of thought and syntactic statement familiar to later days. Poetry, he says, always depends upon the intellect. Far better, because clearer and in closer accord with ethnological facts, are the brief statement of Ribot and the elaborate theory of Donovan. Ribot,[235] considering as a matter of fact how spontaneous movements pass into creative and æsthetic activity, finds by all evidence at hand that dancing in pantomime was the “primordial” and universal art, and that it was composite, “including the rudimentary form of two acts destined later on to separate in the course of their evolution,—music and poetry. Poor music, indeed, ... but remarkable for the strictness of rhythm and measure, and poor poetry, consisting in a short sentence incessantly repeated, or even in monosyllables without precise signification.” That is a clear statement; but it takes for granted, in some measure, what Donovan tries to prove,—the festal origin of speech.[236] Whether Donovan does prove this or not, he makes it perfectly clear that the vocal music, which Wallaschek separated from poetry without giving an idea what poetry was and how it began, was itself poetry, and had functions which expressed the human emotions of that time as well as the most finished poem expresses modern emotion and thought. With the philological arguments we are not concerned, and, indeed, theories about the origin of language have always been kittle cattle to shoe; we are concerned, however, with these four elements of a primitive festal gathering: bodily play-movements, rhythmical beating, some approach to song, and some degree of communal interest. Of these, the first and the fourth are fused in dancing, which begins as a celebration of victory, and is found later in the harvesting of a crop and in the vintage. “Communal elation following success in a common enterprise” is the earliest occasion for social consent of the festal type; and it finds expression in imitating that successful act, along with “rhythmic beating,”[237] and with excited individual cries which are brought into rhythm with the steps, the gestures and the “beating” itself. Hence speech and song. In his second article, Donovan tries to trace the process by which meaning got into these cries, and how they led to grammatical forms of speech; what interests us here is the exactness, the prevalence, the dominant force of rhythm as foundation of consent, and so of social act, dance, song, word. As with savages now, so with primitive man, however wild and confused the social mass may be, rhythm is at the heart of their social life. Here is the point of order in the chaos; and one may safely assume that such order and precision of mere sounds would be the obvious stay for all efforts to give them meaning and connection. Language, after all, is communication. This is probably what Donovan means when he makes rhythm the prime social factor, the bridge from merely animal to human; rhythmic forms, he says, are “witnesses of a lower stage of progress than any yet known to anthropological records,”—the “stage of the passage between brute and man”; and he gives modern philology food for thought when he declares that many facts and considerations “run counter to the notion that song, or rhythmical and poetical forms, must be supervening embellishments of speech which imply a certain height of civilization.” A chapter in his earlier book[238] goes more into the details of communal poetry under primitive conditions, and answers objections which might be made to this poetical function of the throng. A happily chosen verse from Horace enforces the deprecation of that habit which now makes a poet’s muse the poet himself or else an amiable fiction. The earliest “muse” was simply that “music” or rhythm of the throng which held up the singer’s tottering personality in his first steps over the burning marle of individual expression before the throng itself—still a nervous matter!—and prompted or sustained his improvisations; for primitive man this muse was the cadence of falling feet, rhythmic cries, social consent. And how came those “higher artistic interests connected with speech out of the pantomimic and choral dance?” Direct evidence, Donovan remarks, is meagre; but of indirect evidence there is a “mighty mass.” Hindu words for the drama go back to the word which means to dance. Hellenic drama has an even more definite development of the same sort. European lyric poetry grew out of the choral dance; and folksongs which sprang directly from “the spontaneous elation of the crowd,” though rare, still occur even now in Greece, Italy, Russia, Hungary.[239] Accentual verse is “the natural inheritance of poetry which grew from the fusion of rhythms and tones and words. The words uttered by a rude people spontaneously, and during the elation produced through following the movements of the dance and listening to the accompanying tones, were obliged to assume the natural impulsive element of rhythm.” Horace, in a familiar passage, tells how the artist began his work with this choral and communal material[240] now unknown except in survivals like the refrain of harvest songs:—

per audaces nova dithyrambos verba devolvit,

new words, that is, instead of the old choral repetitions. That these communal songs, however, were poetry in themselves seems sufficiently proved. The objection urged by Wallaschek, that rhythmic sounds were inadequate to the demands of poetry, falls flat for the negative reason that nowhere else can poetry be found under primitive conditions, and for the positive reason that these rhythmic sounds were unquestionably full of communal significance and may well have served as the raw material of speech itself.

So far the theory of social consent as the basis of rhythm and the foundation of poetry has been supported mainly by the dance. This play-theory, this festal origin, may be accepted as probable; but it must leave room and verge enough for the part played by labour. Human society was organized in the spirit of a grim struggle for life; and human labour under social conditions is a main part of the struggle. Professor Karl Bücher’s essay on Labour and Rhythm[241] is meant in part as a sociological study of the beginnings of poetry; it has been greeted everywhere as an important contribution to our positive knowledge of the case; and a summary of it is unavoidable for the matter now in hand.[242] His argument is clear. Fatigue, which besets all work felt as work by reason of its continued application of purpose, vanished for primitive man as it vanishes now for children, if the work was once freed from this stress of application and so turned to a kind of play. The dance itself is really hard work, exacting and violent; what makes it the favourite it is with savages as with children? Simply its automatic, regular, rhythmic character, the due repetition of a familiar movement which allows the mind to relax its attitude of constant purpose. The purpose and plan of work involve external sources and external ends; rhythm is instinctive, and springs from the organic nature of man; it is no invention.[243] The song that one sings while at work is not something fitted to the work, but comes from movements of the body in the specific acts of labour; and this applies not only to the rhythm, but even to the words.[244] So it was in the festal dance. That primitive man was less impeded in bodily movements than is now the case, and that these movements were more marked; that the rigorously exact movement begat a rigorously exact rhythm, to which at first half meaningless sounds and then words were joined, often lingering in later days as a refrain of field or spinning-room—witness the pantomimic action which goes with the words of that New Zealand planting-song, and a host of similar survivals; that poetry and music were always combined by early man, and, along with labour, made up the primitive three-in-one, an organic whole, labour being the basal fact, with rhythm as element common to the three;[245] and that not harmony or pitch, but this overmastering and pervasive rhythm, exact, definite, was the main factor of early song,—these are conclusions for which Bücher offers ample and convincing evidence. In particular we may look, first, at his conclusion against unrhythmic poetry, then at his theory of rhythmic origins, and finally at his study of individual and social labour. For the first, he remarks, as all students of ethnology have remarked, that primitive folk care little for melody; the main, the only musical element in their songs is rhythm. Rhythm is not bound up with speech as speech, and must come to it from without; for mere observation and development of the rhythmical tendencies inherent in language could not have led to the fact of rhythm as known to primitive man. The main external source of rhythm, then, is the habit of accompanying bodily movements with sounds of the voice, and these bodily movements were primarily movements in man’s work. Taking such songs of labour as still remain, Bücher finds that the more primitive these are, the closer relation they have with the labour itself. The rhythm, too, is fixed by the movement; words change at will and are mostly improvised. Briefly, Bücher adds one more answer to that old question about the origins of poetry, and finds them chiefly in the labour of primitive man, where energetic and continual movements of an instinctively rhythmic nature begat “not only the form but the material” of poetry. The same rhythmic succession of rise and fall is common to labour and to verse; and as for the words, these came not from bodily exertion, but from the sounds produced by the work itself, sounds like the noise of the feet in treading, like the blows of a primitive implement, which irresistibly provoked accompaniment by the voice. That these sounds had a meaning vague at first, then sharper, clearer, and connected with the cause, conditions, and purpose of the work, is lawful inference. Words that so took their places in the regular and inexorable rhythm of work or dance must share in that regularity; recitative, or the rhythm of easy prose, has no place under such conditions, and Bücher rejects it utterly. Again, all human work began with movements of arms and legs “which instinctively move in rhythm.” With Bücher’s further development of this theory, that beating and stamping, earliest forms of work, plus the human voice which followed the rise and fall of the labour, are the basis of metrical “feet”; that iamb and trochee are stamping measures, spondee a measure of striking or beating, still easy to note where two hands strike in rhythm; that dactyl and anapæst can be heard at the forge of any blacksmith whose main blow on the iron is either followed or preceded by two shorter, lighter blows,—with these attractive but minor considerations one may agree or disagree, but the vital fact of rhythm as the pulse of earliest human labour and play, of earliest poetry, of earliest music, is vastly strengthened by the evidence and the arguments set forth in this admirable essay.

For the matter of individual and social[246] labour, Bücher has inference and hints, but hardly a developed theory. It is easy, however, to infer that stress is to be laid on the social rather than on individual conditions. In play and the dance this is everywhere conceded. To tread the winepress alone, however the instinctively and unavoidably rhythmic movement might provoke one to song, was a small factor in rhythmic development when compared with the consent of many feet treading in joy of the vintage.[247] For individual labour, songs of women grinding at the mill, once a most wearisome task, are the best example; and hints of these, even scraps of actual song, are found in plenty.[248] But two women and more were often to be found grinding together, and the social consent of such songs must have been at least as frequent as the lonely voice. Bücher points out, moreover, how the solitary act of labour, particularly with heavy tools, tends to be uncertain and unrhythmic, and how the addition of a second workman, say at the forge, or in threshing or in ramming stones, at once induces an exact rhythm, the rhythm born of consent. This is a primitive process and most important. The idea of savages as capricious, and therefore not acting in concert, is a hasty inference, true only to a certain point; for it is civilized folk who work independently, and it is the uncivilized who must cling to rhythm both in work and in play, since nowhere else are men found so dependent on concerted automatic work as in savage life. A man of advanced culture thinks out his own labour, and does it in his own way; his concert of work with other men is a higher synthesis of individual performances which is unknown to the savage. All this opens to our eyes the spectacle of a long evolution, at one end of which, the uncertain, tentative beginnings of social life, we see human beings acting, alike in the tasks and in the pleasures of their time, with a minimum of thought and a maximum of rhythm; while at the hither end is a highly developed society, where the monotonous whir of machinery has thrust out the old cadence and rhythm of man’s labour, where strenuous and solitary wanderings replace the communal dance, and where every brow is marked with the burden of incessant thought.

The threads of evidence, then, all end in one point close to that blackness of thick darkness which veils the life of earliest man; at this point, the point of social consent, work is not far from play, and art is still in solution with practical life. The arts of movement, of music, dance, poetry, are in evidence only along with the arts of subsistence and tribal life, with the labour, actual or reminiscent, of primitive social conditions; while the arts that take permanent form, such as sculpture and painting, appear only in the results of this labour as rude forms of ornament. What holds together these heterogeneous elements is rhythm, “the ordered grouping of movements, as they occur in temporal succession,” so Bücher defines it; and it is rhythm which must count, by his reckoning, as one of the greatest factors in social development, a function, too, not out of date even under existing conditions of life.

So much by way of proof, and it seems conclusive, for rhythm as the fundamental fact of poetry. True, it is not the fundamental fact for modern consideration, which goes below the surface and seeks a deeper meaning, asking for the nobly imaginative and for that mingling of the emotional and the intellectual which submits “the shows of things to the desires of the mind”; it is not even the overwhelming element in modern poetic form. Naked limbs no longer move unimpeded in the dance, no longer stand out free and bold as they tread the winepress; naked and insistent rhythm, too, is, for the most part, so hidden by draperies of verbal expression, that one is fain to call it no essential factor in a poetic process. Modern art, deliberate and intellectual, turns in scorn upon that helpless poetry of the horde, as Prospero upon Caliban:—

I pitied thee, Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour One thing or other: when thou didst not, savage, Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like A thing most brutish, I endow’d thy purposes With words that made them known.

Imperious thought is ashamed of this mere regularity, this recurrence, this common gift; where is the art in it? Art, said Schiller, must have something in its work that is voluntary, fresh, surprising; the voice, he said, may be beautiful, but there is no beauty in mere breathing. Has not poetry, then, it may be asked, gained in meaning for mankind, in nobility and dignity, precisely as it has loosed the bands of rhythm, forsworn this ignoble and slavish regularity, receded from the throng, spurned the chorus, turned to solitary places, and cherished the individual, the artist, the poet? Granting the throng, the dance, the rhythm, the shouts, is not all this but poetry in the nebular state, and does not real poetry begin where Aristotle makes it begin, when an individual singer detaches himself from the choral mass, improvises and recites his verses, and so sets out upon that “mindward” way which leads to Sophocles and Dante and Shakspere? We do not dance Shakspere’s poetry, we do not sing it, we hardly even scan it; why then this long pother about a lapsing and traditional form?

Well, in the first place, rhythm is there in Sophocles, Dante, Shakspere; it was sung to large extent in the drama of Sophocles, and even with Dante and Shakspere it is subconsciously present in the mind of every sympathetic reader who accepts the verses by those poor deputies of aural perception, the eyes. Not the least of artistic triumphs in poetry are concerned directly with rhythm. Those lines of _Hamlet_,—

Absent thee from felicity awhile, And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,—

are poetry through their harmony of rhythmic adjustment, and if divorced from rhythm cease to be poetry. Every good lyric, even in modern times, fairly trembles and prays to be sung, at least to be taken in its full rhythmic force; the “pastel in prose” only serves to send us back to genuine lyric with a new love of rhythmic regularity. In modern dramatic, epic, and incidental poetry, the case is different; but this difference brings no loss to the cause of rhythm. One does not wish to read _Under the Greenwood Tree_ in verse any more than one wishes to read _As You Like It_ in prose. Meredith’s _Egoist_, an epic prose comedy of modern life, is as satisfactory in its way, barring the comparisons of genius, as _Twelfth Night_ or _Much Ado_, the dramatic comedy in verse. It is our keen thinking, fastened upon a character like Sir Willoughby, like Malvolio, that is in question; and those soothing cadences which appeal to the consciousness of kind and set the solitary in sympathetic throngs, as in a lyric, we do not need. Satire of emotional traits, to be sure, may require the exaggeration of verse as in _Jump-to-Glory Jane_; but verse is not degraded by this, any more than it is degraded in helping one to remember the number of days in a month. The hold of rhythm upon modern poetry, even under conditions of analytic and intellectual development which have unquestionably worked for the increased importance of prose, is a hold not to be relaxed, and for good reason. The reason is this. In rhythm, in sounds of the human voice, timed to movements of the human body, mankind first discovered that social consent which brought the great joys and the great pains of life into a common utterance. The mountain, so runs a Basque proverb, is not necessary to the mountain, but man is necessary to man. Individual thinking, a vast fermentation, centrifugal tendencies of every sort, have played upon this simple and primitive impulse; but the poet is still essentially emotional, and just so far as he is to utter the great joys and the great pains of life, just so far he must go back to communal emotions, to the sense of kind, to the social foundation.[249] The mere fact of utterance is social; however solitary his thought, a poet’s utterance must voice this consent of man with man, and his emotion must fall into rhythm, the one and eternal expression of consent. This, then, is why rhythm will not be banished from poetry so long as poetry shall remain emotional utterance; for rhythm is not only sign and warrant of a social contract stronger, deeper, vaster, than any fancied by Rousseau, but it is the expression of a human sense more keen even than the fear of devils and the love of gods,—the sense and sympathy of kind.