III
Thus song, then, was the chief agent of civilization to primitive man. All that is supplied in our lives by railroads, telegraph lines, telephones, newspapers, books, and libraries was supplied to primitive peoples by song. But this still represents only half the value of song. If it gave to primitive men all the practical service which specialized inventions are rendering to us, it also gave them the romance and beauty which we have largely lost from our lives. Every simple, primitive person, we have said, sings—either his own song or his neighbor’s. We have in great abundance the records of what their songs were about. The subjects cover nearly the whole range capable of artistic treatment, but chiefly the great human experiences—love, pity, nature, death, the supernatural.
Slowly, after much imitating and experimenting, men learned to sing their feelings. This achievement was so important that there is hardly another one to be compared with it. For the growth of civilization has been simply the growth in men of consciousness—consciousness of themselves and their surroundings. And every new song that men were able to make for themselves marked a new step in consciousness. To us it seems quite obvious that a deer, for instance, has four legs. But the fact is obvious only as everything else is obvious when it is really looked at. The great difficulty is to get people to look at things. And it was probably a real (and most important) discovery when the primitive huntsman realized that the deer he had been hunting had four legs, and not three or five. He simply hadn’t thought about the matter before. He hadn’t observed clearly. Now he had added one more fact about life to his mental treasure house. He had become one more degree clearly conscious.
Now, art has been the chief agent of this advancing consciousness through the centuries. Our huntsman perhaps never thought about the number of the deer’s legs until he tried to draw the deer with a bone knife on the wall of his cave. But when he had to create the deer in a work of art then he had to come to clear consciousness about the matter. And the same is true of every song that simple people have made. It necessitated true observation. It forced its author to see. It may seem childishly obvious to say in a song that the bluebells are blue, but most people pay little attention to the question. It is something to have thought the fact worth mentioning.
But it was much more. It was not only an increase in consciousness. It was an increase in experience. By singing over his little song about the bluebell the peasant enjoyed the bluebell a second time in his imagination. It is nothing against the song that the blueness of the bluebell is obvious. Most of the beautiful things in life are obvious but nevertheless go unrecognized. The important thing about the song is that somebody enjoyed the blueness of the bluebell so much that he had to sing about it.
The great use of these personal songs to people was that it helped them to feel at home in the world. ‘The first poet of human things,’ says the Countess Martinengo-Cæsaresco, ‘was perhaps one who stood in the presence of death. In the twilight that went before civilization the loves of men were prosaic and intellectual unrest was remote, but there was already Rachel weeping for her children and would not be comforted because they are not.’ Death as a mystery was a horror too great to be borne. But death made into a song could be looked at and in some degree known. The awful sense of helplessness as people stood beside a fresh grave was alleviated by their singing of their grief. When the mystery had become incarnated in a work of art they could face it and know who their enemy was.
Every man who feels emotions craves expression of them. The ability to express is perhaps what separates man from the animals. The man who cannot achieve the expression of what he feels sinks back into a spiritual numbness in which joy and sorrow are of less importance. But the man who is able to see the things that are within him and about him—to see them clearly enough to express them in songs—is able to take his place in life and go on to more consciousness and more power.
Something like this is the service songs have performed to men’s souls. But, most of all, of course, songs have taught men how to love. As men began to realize that love must be more than a mere blind craving they had to answer the question: ‘How much do I love her? How do I love her?’ And the question had to be answered in some kind of concrete terms. One old French lover says in his song that if King Henry gave to him the town of Paris on condition that he give up the love of his sweetheart, he would reply to Henry the King: ‘Take back your town of Paris; I love my sweetheart more, heigh-ho, I love my sweetheart more.’ And when we read the fine straightforward old French in which the song is sung we know that he meant it. It is evident that the whole estate of love and marriage has risen to a vastly higher level when the lover, instead of saying, ‘I want my sweetheart,’ can sing, ‘I want my sweetheart more than I want the town of Paris.’ So songs gave to life definite meanings and values.