[245]. “Grundelement dieser Dreieinheit,” Ibid., p. 78. Of course, he admits elsewhere similar functions of the dance, which was, after all, a kind of labour, even when not an imitation of labour. Hence Bücher gives priority to labour in its large sense. For primitive man the line between work and play was not too sharply drawn.
[246]. A strong support for this social foundation of song is found in observations such as Böckel has made among the peasants of Hesse. “Their song,” he says (work quoted, p. cv.), “is nearly all choral; the countryman, when sober, seldom sings alone. It is remarkable,” Böckel goes on to say, “how these people, who singly show little capacity for music, can make such an artistic effect in chorus.”
[247]. Several men, as a rule, trod the grapes with naked feet. Songs directly sprung from this labour survived for long ages. The material is indicated by Bücher, pp. 88 f. The later festal songs, of course, were symbolical and reminiscent.
[248]. The famous Greek song, preserved by Plutarch, is matched by recent songs of the Africans, as well as by those of European traditions.
[249]. “La sympathie pour les choses,” says M. de Vogüé, Histoire et Poésie, p. 190, is the “principe et raison de l’art d’écrire.”
[250]. Bastian, in his book Der Völkergedanke im Aufbau einer Wissenschaft vom Menschen, Berlin, 1881, pp. 8 f., notes that in a modern work of art one looks for traits of the genius that brought it forth, while in the beginnings of society, of institutions, one looks “for the unconscious stirrings, in the organism, of the average man who has realized himself in them.” And in an address (same book, p. 172) on the aims of ethnology, he declares that for this science man is not the individual anthropos, but the social being, the zoon politikon of Aristotle, which demands the social state as condition of his existence. “Das Primäre ist also der Völkergedanke.”
[251]. Œuvres, Paris, 1790, III. 165 ff., from the Mercure of January, 1678.
[252]. Nowhere better discussed and settled than in Goethe’s sonnet, “Natur und Kunst, sie scheinen sich zu fliehen,” with its concluding lines:—
In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister,
Und das Gesetz nur kann uns Freiheit geben.