[215]. Gustaf von Düben, Om Lappland och Lapparne, ... Stockholm, 1873 (colophon), p. 319.
[216]. As impossible, says one authority, quoted by Wallaschek, Primitive Music, p. 187, “as to separate the colour from the skin.”
[217]. Ibid., p. 186.
[218]. It is the neglect of choral conditions and communal consent which takes away the value for general purposes from Dr. Otto Hoffman’s otherwise praiseworthy study of the Reimformeln im Westgermanischen (Leipzig, 1886, pp. 9 ff.). Man, he says, naturally speaks in breath-lengths, in periods which tend to be of equal duration. “Whoever could give to these periods, with their tendency to equal quantities, the most symmetrical and equal portions of actual speech, passed for an artist.” To this symmetry in duration was added similarity of sound; so came the short riming phrases, as well as the verse-lengths themselves. But poetry did not wait until clever artists furbished up into verse-lengths and attractive harmonies these breath-lengths of a spoken sentence. Language itself, as one will presently see, had more a festal than an individual origin; and long before the artist was practising his breath-lengths for a connected story, the rhythm of verse was fixed by the muscular rhythm of steps in a communal dance accompanied by words, often by one sound, repeated indefinitely, but in exact cadence with the steps.
[219]. Dr. Paul Ehrenrcich, “über die Botocuden,” in the Zeitschr. f. Ethnologie, XIX. 30 ff.
[220]. The gnomic verses preserved in Anglo-Saxon, especially the shorter sentences in the Exeter Ms. (see Grein-Wülker, Biblioth., I. 345 f.) are a curious instance of the survival of quasi-Botocudan maxims on a higher plane of culture. As to the æsthetic value of the South American utterance, how far is it inferior to the sonorous commonplaces of our own verse,—say The Psalm of Life?
[221]. “The Central Eskimo,” by Dr. F. Boas, Sixth Annual Report, Bureau of Ethnology, 1884-1885, Washington, 1888, pp. 409 ff.
[222]. Atlantic Monthly, XIX. (1867), 685 ff.
[223]. See below, on Cumulative Songs.
[224]. See the marching song, p. 690, Go in the Wilderness. Thanks to the repetitions, it “scans” correctly enough, even when it is read.