[225]. Meumann’s remarks on this subject are good, though they apply no further than the narrow circle of his experiments. See Untersuchungen, pp. 26, 35, 77. Grant Allen, Physiological Æsthetics, London, 1887, pp. 114 f., 118, is quite wide of the mark; facts of physiology, in this case, need very careful testing by the facts of poetry.
[226]. Mind, N. S., IV. (1895), 28 ff., “On the Difference of Time and Rhythm in Music,” supplementing researches in his Primitive Music.
[227]. Psychology of the Emotions, p. 104.
[228]. See his Primitive Music, pp. 239, 236, note; and Grosse, Anfänge, p. 213.
[229]. The theory of breath-lengths, often noted, comes here into play. Under high excitement breathing grows abnormally loud, and the recurring pauses are regular. Play-excitement, festal shouting and leaping, would of course bring this about; but the individual must be studied. Strongly accented verses result from such a process, as any one can see who undertakes to recite poetry during violent but regular exercise,—say, in swinging Indian clubs. Here, too, one learns how rhythm preceded pitch and quantity; the jerked-out accents leave little room for measuring either height or length of tones. But the throng and its consent brought out this rhythm, not oratory; and one must keep in mind the remark of Hamann, after his famous phrase about poetry as the mother-tongue of man, “wie Gesang älter als Declamation.”
[230]. The ethnological evidence for this statement is given in Wallaschek’s Primitive Music on nearly every page. Many good things on the origin of rhythm could be quoted from older writers. A. W. Schlegel undertook a physiological and genetic study of rhythm, but, at Schiller’s prompting, offered more attractive metal to the Kantlings with “das Beharrliche im Wechsel.” One notes, however, the modern tone of passages in the Berlin Lectures; e.g. I. 242 ff. Now and then he almost anticipates Bücher’s Arbeit und Rhythmus. Sulzer’s article in the Allgemeine Theorie is very interesting. For early material, see Blankenburg’s invaluable Litterarische Zusätze, 3 vols., 1796-1798. A good recent discussion is found in the third book of Guyau’s Problèmes.
[231]. Unless it is a succession of inarticulate sounds. See Groos, Spiele der Menschen, Jena, 1899, p. 42.
[232]. Compare the “meaningless” words so common in savage poetry. The art of combining with exact rhythm a series of syntactic sentences which give a connected story, or express a logical series of thoughts, is no primitive process. Earliest poetry is repetition of sounds,—not meaningless, for they were connected with the occasion,—of words, of sentences, with a diminishing use of the refrain, a diminishing frequency of repetition.
[233]. In his “Art of the Future,” Gesammelte Schriften, III. 82 ff., he tells how dance, song, and poem were at first inseparable. Dance has as artistic material “the whole man from top to toe”; but it becomes an art only through rhythm, which is also the very skeleton of music: “without rhythm no dance, no song.” Rhythm is “the soul of dancing and the brain of music.” With the human voice comes poetry, all three being woven in one: out of this union of the three “is born the single art of lyric,” but they get their highest expression in the drama.
[234]. Primitive Music, pp. 174, 187.