[1088]. Work quoted, p. 28, speaking of Australian song and dance. See also p. 201.
[1089]. Sign-language of later date, as studied by Mallery among the American Indians, cannot be regarded as primitive in this genetic sense. It comes to be a highly developed art and calls for considerable skill in the making as well as acuteness in interpretation.
[1090]. As in dances of the Greeks, now felt to be a lost art. On this matter of gesture and signs, see an excellent book by Sittl, Die Gebärden der Griechen und Römer, Leipzig, 1890; his accounts of the attempt “die Völker durch die Zeichensprache zu verbrüdern,” with reference to Leibnitz and others; of orgiastic ecstasies; and, of course, the study of Greek gesture in art and poetry, are all instructive. For primitive relations, Darwin’s book On the Expressions of Emotions, etc., 1872, is still main authority. Gestures, like sounds, are either instinctive or called out by the will; and any study of progress in the dramatic art must concern itself with these fundamental elements of acting.
[1091]. It would be useless to attempt a bibliography of this subject. A. W. Schlegel’s historical account of the drama and its relations to epic and lyric is still useful. See especially Vorles., I. 124; II. 317, 321, 325. Eugen Wolff’s return to the priority of epic,—Prolegomena, etc., p. 10; “Vorstudien zur Poetik,” Zst. f. vgl. Litt., VI. 425,—fails to satisfy the student of ethnological evidence; like most writers from the æsthetic point of view, Wolff neglects to study the poetry of the throng, the choral, the dance. Barring this same fault, there is considerable truth in the view of Burdach (letter to Scherer, in the latter’s Poetik, pp. 296 f.), that epic and drama are wrongly taken as extreme antithesis in poetry, whereas lyric and drama are really “die beiden Urphänomene.” Little profit for the historical student of poetry is to be found in essays like Veit Valentin’s “Poetische Gattungen,” in Zst. f. vgl. Litt., N. F., V. 35 ff.
[1092]. See Blankenburg’s excellent article on the ballet in his Zusätze, I. 154 ff. La Motte, in his ballet of Europe Galante, 1697, made the ballet an object in itself and in its own action; here “entspringt Tanz und Gesang aus der eigenen Gemüthsstimmung der handelnden Personen.” This is communal revival.
[1093]. That is, ὄψις.
[1094]. “Daudet me dit ... ‘Je crois décidément avoir trouvé la formule; le livre c’est pour l’individu, le théâtre c’est pour la foule.’” Journal des Goncourt, VIII. (30 Jan., 1890), 129.
[1095]. Vorlesungen, Stuttgart, 1884, I. 329 ff., 342, 344 ff.
[1096]. Ibid., III. 110.
[1097]. See the present author’s article on “Mythology” in the new edition of Johnson’s Cyclopædia.