Heard it on the Ægean.
For the prevailing tone of lyric is sad, and Euterpe treats her poet as Genevieve treated Coleridge:—
She loves me best whene’er I sing
The songs that make her grieve.
[1062]. The claim of Usener may be noted (“Der Stoff des griechischen Epos,” Sitzungsber. d. Kais. Acad. d. Wiss. zu Wien, Bd. 137, pp. 18 ff.), where he puts the ceremonies at the hearthstone, primitive ancestor-worship, as the real beginning of epic song. The offering to an ancestor must have been made “with music, prayer, and song.” Hence the epos. It is true that a lyric of this sort is older than any epic,—the epic which Hegel pushed forward as earliest form of poetry, just as the renaissance had put it above the drama in dignity,—and may well have helped the later epic process. But the evidence of ethnology shows that rude songs at the tribal dance, which refer to tribal doings, must be far older than any ceremonies of the primitive hausvater at his family altar.
[1063]. A. W. Schlegel said that the Homeric poems were improvised; but he distinguished between rude communal improvisation and that of incipient art. Vorlesungen, II. 119 f., 243.
[1064]. Livy, VII. 2, gives an account of this change.
[1065]. See Maurice Drack, Le Théâtre de la Foire, la Comédie Italienne, et l’Opéra-comique, Paris, 1889. Vol. I. has a sketch of the movement—from 1678 on—indicated in the title. It began with the pièce à couplets, and passed gradually into modern comic opera. The great popular fair of St. Lawrence, at Paris, was the scene of part of this development.
[1066]. Garnett, Italian Literature, p. 306, traces this comedy back through Tuscan and Neapolitan peasants to the “Greek rustics who smeared their faces with wine-lees at the Dionysiac festivals, and from whose improvised songs and gestures Greek comedy was developed.”
[1067]. Burckhardt, Cultur der Ren., II. 40, thinks that such well-known characters as Pantalone, the Doctor, Arlecchino, may be in some fashion connected with masked figures in the old Roman plays.