To create the communal elements, poetry had to pass through ages of preparation. Dreary ages they seem now, and rudest preparation, in contrast with present verse; but it may be said that the poetry was not insipid for its makers and hearers, and the art was not crude for the primitive artists. One must ignore with equal mind the romantic notion of a paradise of poetry at the prime, as well as a too fondly cherished idea of ethnology that belated if not degraded wanderers on the bypaths of human culture are to stand as models for the earliest makers of song. Let one think of that poetry of the beginnings as rude to a degree, but nobly rude, seeing that it was big with promise of future achievement, and not a thing born of mere stagnation. Circling in the common dance, moving and singing in the consent of common labour, the makers of earliest poetry put into it those elements without which it cannot thrive now. They put into it, for the formal side, the consent of rhythm, outward sign of the social sense; and, for the nobler mood, they gave it that power by which it will always make the last appeal to man, the power of human sympathy, whether in love or in hate, in joy or in sorrow, the power that links this group of sensations, passions, hopes, fears, which one calls self, to all the host of kindred selves dead, living, or to be born. No poetry worthy of the name has failed to owe its most diverse triumphs to that abiding power. It is in such a sense that prehistoric art must have been one and the same with modern art. Conditions of production as well as of record have changed; the solitary poet has taken the place of a choral throng, and solitary readers represent the listening group; but the fact of poetry itself reaches below all these mutations, and is founded on human sympathy as on a rock. More than this. It is clear from the study of poetic beginnings that poetry in its larger sense is not a natural impulse of man simply as man. His rhythmic and kindred instincts, latent in the solitary state, found free play only under communal conditions, and as powerful factors in the making of society.

INDEX

FOOTNOTES

[1]. Twining, Aristotle, 2d ed., I. 183, thinks the original treatise was written as a defence against the “cavils of prosaic philosophers” and the objections of Plato.

[2]. In his curious book, La Philosophie du Bon-Sens, 1737, p. 15, D’Argens speaks of Aristotle “dont les Ouvrages sur la Poëtique sont aussi bons, que ceux dans lesquels il traite de la Philosophie sont peu utiles.”

[3]. De Futilitate Poetices auctore Tanaquillo Fabro Tanaquilli filio Verbi Divini Ministro..., Amstel., 1697. It was answered by the Abbé Massieu in a Defense de la Poésie (in Hist. d. l. Poés. Françoise, Paris, 1739), a pious but heavy performance.

[4]. Table Talk, ed. Arber, pp. 85 f.