Vindication apart, there is the art of poetry, the technique, the Horatian view; and with this treatment of the subject the present work has as little to do as with defence and praise. From Vida even to Boileau writers on poetry were mainly concerned to teach the art, and seemed to assume that every bright boy ought to be trained as a poet. With this idea went the conception of poetry as sum and substance of right living and embodiment of all learning, sacred and profane,—witness not only the famous lines of Milton, but a part of the epitaph which Boccaccio composed for his own tomb: studium fuit alma poesis. J. C. Scaliger, when that early enthusiasm of the renaissance had begun to wane, turned from art to science; his son and Casaubon and the rest took up the work of research and let the art of poetry languish. On this scientific ground, where, in spite of the overthrow of Aristotelian authority, in spite of changes in method and a new range of material, one may still learn much from these pioneers, there are now three ways by which one can come to poetry from the outside, and regard it not technically but in the spirit of research: there is the theory of poetic impulses and processes in general; there is the criticism of poems and poetry as an objective study; and there are the recording, the classifying, and the comparing of the poetic product at large. The present work belongs to this third division, and in its method must keep mainly within historical and comparative bounds. It is not concerned in any way with the poetic impulse, or with the poem as object of critical study; it regards the whole poetic product as a result of human activity working in a definite field. This must be clearly understood. At the outset of an attempt to throw some light upon the beginnings of poetry, it is well to bear in mind that by poetry is meant, not the poetic impulse, but the product of that impulse, and that by beginnings are meant the earliest actual appearances of poetry as an element in the social life of man, and not the origins or ultimate causes, biologically or psychologically considered, of poetic expression. What the origin of poetry may have been, and to what causes, however remote, in the body and life of man must be attributed the earliest conceivable rhythmic utterance, are questions for a tribunal where metaphysics and psychology on the one hand, and biology on the other hand, have entered conflicting claims. As for biology, until one has found the source of life itself, it is useless to follow brain dissections in an effort to discover the ultimate origins of poetry. To be sure, psychology has a legitimate field of inquiry in discussing the source of æsthetic manifestations;[[7]] and going deeper into things, it would be pleasant if one could lay hold of what philosophers call “the germinal power of whatever comes to be,” the keimkraft des seienden; but times are hardly ripe for such a feat. Even Weismann[[8]] concedes a “soul,” a capacity not yet explainable, for appreciating music, and, by implication, poetry. It is better in the present state of things to assume poetry as an element in human life, and to come as close as possible to its primitive stages, its actual beginnings. What these beginnings of poetry were, in what form it first made a place for itself among human institutions, and over what paths it wandered during the processes of growth and differentiation even in prehistoric times, are questions belonging to the answerable part of that catechism about his own life which man has been making and unmaking and making again ever since he began to remember and to forecast. We have here no concern with the perplexing question why æsthetic activity was first evolved; it is quite another matter when we undertake to learn how æsthetic activity made itself seen and felt. In brief, to seek the origins of poetry would be to seek the cause of its existence as a phenomenon, to hunt that elusive keimkraft des seienden; to inquire into the beginnings of poetry is to seek conditions and not causes.
Nothing, however, is harder than to carry out this simple plan; from a work on poetry take away both theory and criticism, and what is left? It is true that since F. Schlegel, a hundred years ago, said[[9]] of art in general that its science is its history, historical and comparative treatment of poetry has come speedily to the fore; but that mystery which rightly enough clings to a poetic process, the traditions of sanctity which belong to genius, and the formidable literature of æsthetics, have all worked together to keep the study of poetry out of line with the study of other human institutions, and to give it an unchartered freedom from the control of facts which has done more harm than good. Consider that touch of futility which vexes the mind when it sets about discussion of a topic so far from the daily business of life; consider the great cloud of witnesses who can be summoned from any library to prove that of all printed silliness nothing reaches quite so silly a pitch as twaddle about the bards; add, too, that no process is so difficult to observe and analyze as the making of a poem; and it is easy to see why writers on poetry are always flying to cover in psychology and æsthetics or in criticism.[[10]] Facing the facts of poetry, a scholar can treat the poetic impulse and keep the facts at arm’s length, or even quite out of his range. Treating the poetic product, whether genetically or historically or comparatively, tracing the evolution of poetry as a whole, for its own laws of growth and decay, or regarding its place as an institution in human society, he must hold unbroken commerce with a bewildering mass of material. Hence the delight which animates to their task the numberless writers of “thoughts about poetry,” and the dismay with which the historian looks upon his rough and unwieldy subject. Books beyond the power of any modern reader to compass have been written on the poetic impulse; while all the books which treat the poetic product as an element of public life could be carried in one’s pocket,[[11]]—and one need be no Schaunard for the task. Yet the facts of poetry ought to precede the theory,—facts, moreover, that should be brought into true relations with the development of social man. A record of actual poetry; then a history of its beginnings and progress as an achievement of human society; then an account of it with regard to its origin and exercise as a function of the individual mind,—such is the process by which there could have been built up a clear and rational science of poetry, the true poetics. Dis aliter visum. There is a fairly good record of poetry, with gaps due to chance and neglect, many of which chance and energy may yet combine to fill. As an achievement of human society, poetry has had scant attention; and the present work is intended, in however modest and imperfect performance, to supply material and make an outline for such a study.
With such an object in view, and in such a spirit, what is the method by which one is to come at the beginnings of poetry, and what material is one to employ? Literature itself, and the comparative, historical method, are indicated by the very terms of the quest; but what of other aids? There is no doubt that science has opened mines of research unknown to a former generation of scholars in poetics; what have zoology, physiology, psychology, ethnology, anthropology, sociology, to say to the beginnings of rhythmic utterance? From the study of those animals which stand nearest to man in intelligence and social instincts there should come in course of time a better knowledge of the physical conditions under which primitive folk essayed their earliest poetry; but it is conceded that the present state of these studies, even in obvious cases like the singing of birds and the social dances and amusements of sundry animals, offers scant help to the student of poetry, and often leads him into absurdities. Darwin’s suggestion that the lyric poem might in some way go back to the call of the male homo to the female at mating time, induced Scherer to put the origins of poetry in general upon this purely biological basis;[[12]] but Scherer’s enthusiasm has met no hearty response and seems to fly in the face of certain important facts. The book of Groos, to which further reference will be made, gives a better series of analogies with the subject in hand, but is not to be used in any positive or conclusive way.
Help of a more substantial kind can be found in the researches of modern psychology; and indeed, when these shall have been put in available form, they will greatly increase the materials for a study of the poetic process. To what extent the study of the poetic product, however, may use such aids, is a quite different question. For example, there is one doctrine, which, if it were established upon an absolute and universal truth, could be applied to the problem of primitive verse with such success as to throw a bridge over the chasm between what is recorded and what is unrecorded, and so lead one cannily into the midst of the unknown. The theory was laid down by Haeckel[[13]] that “ontogenesis, or the development of the individual, is a short and quick repetition”—or recapitulation—“of phylogenesis, or the development of the tribe to which it belongs, determined by the laws of inheritance and adaptation.” Schultze, in his excellent book on fetishism,[[14]] uses this law, if law it be, in determining the mental state of primitive folk; “what is true of the child is true of the wild man, whose consciousness is in the childish embryonic stage,” and who has reached the fetishistic epoch of mental growth. A savage who gets a clock wants to wrap it in costly furs; so does a child. Professor Baldwin, too, accepts the principle as a guide in working out analogies between the development of the child and the development of the race, of society.[[15]] For example, the consciousness of the “I” in children seems analogous in point of development to the individual consciousness of primitive man; and it is evidently of value to the student of early poetry to find his conclusion that such poetry is mainly impersonal backed by testimony from those who have studied the inner life of infants and children to the effect that fear, anger, likes and dislikes, are emotions that precede perception of the subject’s own personality. A. W. Schlegel used this analogy a hundred years ago;[[16]] and, before him, Gottsched, who had far keener historic sense than one would suppose, explained early epic by the curiosity which children show in their demand for tales of every sort, adding that “primitive folk were exactly like these little creatures, who have no experience and such store of curiosity.”[[17]] In fact, as is so often the case with a new exact theory in science, the general idea has been a commonplace time out of mind. Shelley, declaring that “the savage is to ages what the child is to years,” is echoing eighteenth-century thought, with its idea of humanity passing from childhood to riper growth; and Turgot and Condorcet[[18]] only added the notion of human perfectibility and infinite development to an analogy which was first made, so it would seem, by the Italian Vico. The parallel is everywhere; Macaulay uses it in his theory of poetic degeneration, Peacock in his Four Ages, and Victor Hugo in the preface to Cromwell. Not as an idea, but as a formula, Mr. Spencer makes the biological doctrine of recapitulation a part of his sociological system. Professor Karl Pearson appeals to the same doctrine when he wishes to say a word for the matriarchate;[[19]] in the life of the child, he notes, “the mother and the woman play the largest part; and so it is in the religion and social institutions of primitive man.” Thus a child’s world reproduces the primitive world; and the märchen, where witches are still powerful though hated and malignant beings, show what is really the priestess of early matriarchal cult fallen into disfavour under patriarchal conditions. Or, finally, to choose an unexceptionable case, Professor Bücher,[[20]] noting that long-continued and laborious activity is easily kept up provided it pass as play and not as labour, takes the dances of savages, and the games of a civilized child, as analogous to the efforts of earliest man. It is true, too, that savages, and presumably early man, are like the child in quick alternations of mood, in the possibility of laughter and tears at once, in many traits of the kind; so far Letourneau[[21]] is perfectly right in his parallel. Now all these cases, in varying degree, are meant as arguments from analogy, and, as is usual when one deals with analogy, may be regarded as more or less desirable aids to evidence that is direct. By itself, however, analogy must not be conclusive; in the matter under consideration it cannot be regarded as proof; and alone this rule of ontogenesis and phylogenesis is not enough to bridge the chasm and allow one to describe prehistoric poetry.
Such, however, is precisely the task that some bold pioneers have essayed. Letourneau, indeed, is hardly to be placed in this category, although he upholds the doctrine and puts it to use;[[22]] for his conclusions are invariably fortified by facts from ethnology and literature. But the author of a book on primitive poetry, Jacobowski,[[23]] belongs here; freed from all obligations of research, all study of actual facts, he trips jauntily into the unknown, hand in hand with this omnipotent theory as guide. True, he affects the scientific habit of mind, and once refers the reader, for further light on some difficult problem, to “my little essay on the Psychology of a Kiss”; for he is by way of being a lyric poet, and seems of the tribe of him whom Heine described as “personal enemy of Jehovah, believing only in Hegel and in Canova’s Venus,” save that one must here make the easy substitution of Haeckel for Hegel. So, too, Jacobowski is a statistician, an observer, as witness that work on the kiss, evidently in no spirit of Johannes Secundus; and he gives incidental notes on the poetic process which have a very scientific ring. “I know a young poet,” he says in a burst of confidence, and perhaps remembering Goethe’s fifth Roman elegy, “who actually makes his best poems in the very ecstasy of wine and of love.” He draws a diagram, like those convincing charts in history and political economy, to illustrate the “hunger-curve” and the “thirst-curve,” and to answer the question why there is so much poetry that deals with drinking and so little that deals with eating. Here and there a savage tribe is named, a traveller is invoked; but Jacobowski’s main trust is in the human infant and in his own poetic self. That the book has been taken seriously is perhaps due to the only part of it worth considering, which traces the origin of poetry to cries of joy or of pain. This, of course, in great elaboration; by the ontogenetic method one may study poetry, that is, emotional expression, in the modern infant, and then by a simple phylogenetic process “transfer the result to humanity.” Rid of all friction from facts, literary and sociological, the pace of proof is breathless, and pampered jades of investigation are left far out of sight in the rear. What was the first poem?—A cry of fright. Why?—All observers agree that the first emotion noted in a child—as early, says Preyer, as the second day—is fear. Watch by the cradle, then, and note the infant’s gasps, cooings, gurglings, cryings, grimaces, gestures; these will give in due succession the stages and the history of literature. In this attitude, too, Jacobowski watches for the “primitive lyric.” He quotes Preyer’s account of a baby which, on the day of its birth, showed pleasure at the presence of light and displeasure at relative darkness. There follow more statistics of the same sort, “lyrical sounds of delight,” heard from another baby for the same reason. Now, says the author triumphantly, “precisely”—the word is to be noted—“precisely the same effect of light and darkness must have been experienced by primitive man.”[[24]] It is hardly worth while to argue against such an extreme of absurdity as this; the lyric expression of a new-born baby’s pleasure in light and fear of darkness is no parallel to the lyric and poetic expression of primitive man, not only for the reason that overwhelming evidence shows all primitive poetical expression of emotion to have been collective, but because this emotion was based on very keen physical perceptions. The analogy of infant growth in expression with the development of primitive man’s expression comes soon to wreck; who furnished for infant man the adult speech, gesture, manner, upon which the imitative, actual infant works in his progress through babyhood? Moreover, the infant individual of an adult race and the adult individual of an infant race still differ, qua infant and adult, as human beings. Think of the adult savage’s activity, his sight, his hearing, his powers of inference from what he sees; put him with his fellows even into primitive conditions; and then consider the claim that such a wild man’s earliest poem, a lyric, must be analogous to the first cry of pleasure or of pain uttered by the solitary infant on the first dull perception, say of light or of hunger! Even the biological analogy, pure and simple, will now and then break down. It has been asserted that the male voice was once far higher than now in point of pitch, phylogenetic inference from the ontogenetic fact of the boy’s voice before it deepens; but Wallaschek[[25]] examines the facts in regard to this claim, and finds not only adverse evidence, but a constant tendency to raise the pitch as one passes from oldest times to the present. There is another law of relativity than that to which the argument of child and race appeals,—not how primitive poetry compares with modern emotional expression, but how primitive poetry was related to the faculty and environment of primitive man. Looked at in this light, it might well appear that “simple expression of joy,” or what not, is a gross misrepresentation of the lyric in question, and that the relative childishness of savages, and, as one argues, of primitive men generally, is not a positive childishness with regard to the conditions of their life.[[26]] In fine, the analogy and the principle are in the present state of things useless for any direct inference about primitive poetry. When the sequence of emotions and of emotional expressions has been established for infant life, it will have an interest for the student of early literature, and may even give him substantial help by way of suggestion, corrective, test. But to set up a provisional account of the origins and growth of infant emotional expression, and then to transfer this scheme to primitive culture as the origins and growth of human poetry, is, on the face of it, absurd.
Closely akin to the error which makes unwarranted use of psychological theories is the abuse of ethnological facts. True, the value of ethnology to the study of primitive poetry is immense; until one hundred and fifty years ago,[[27]] the vital fault of writers on poetry lay in their neglect of what John Evelyn calls “plaine and prodigious barbarisme,” and even down to the present, this contempt for lower forms of poetry vitiates the work of writers in æsthetics; nevertheless, there is caution to be applied in arguments from the modern savage as in those from the modern infant. Briefly put, the notion is abroad that the lower one goes in the scale of culture among living savage tribes, the nearer one has come to actual primitive culture, to unaccommodated man, the thing itself, as it was in the very beginning of human life; but, unless great care be used, one will follow this path to the utter confusion of progress and retrogression. All would be easy work if one could accept the statement of Gumplowicz,[[28]] that “So long as one unitary homogeneous group is not influenced by or does not exert an influence upon another, it persists in the original primitive state. Hence, in distant quarters of the globe, shut off from the world, we find hordes in a state as primitive, probably, as that of their forefathers a million years ago.” Surely not as primitive; the very terms of the phrase deny it; and even in the stagnation of culture, through wastes of dull and unmeaning ages, man, like men, grows old: tacitisque senescimus annis. Neither individual nor tribal life can stand still. What one may properly do with ethnological evidence is to note how certain conditions of culture are related to the expression of human emotion, and to conclude that the same conditions, for these are a stable quantity, would affect the emotional expression of primitive man in a similar way, allowing, however,—and here is the important concession,—for the different state of the intellectual and emotional powers in an early and vigorous tribal life as compared with the stagnant or degenerate life of a belated culture.[[29]] Two pitfalls lurk under the analogy. It will not do to argue directly from a sunken race back to a mounting race found at the same level; again, it will not do to argue that because the mounting race, when arrived at its prime, has not a certain quality or function, that it therefore never had such a quality or function.[[30]] If one will but look at the thing honestly, what a brazen assumption it is that this makeshift human creature is always learning but never forgetting, always gaining but never losing, and that man of to-day holds fast the unimpaired x of man’s primitive powers along with all that change and growth and countless revolutions have brought him! It is a mistake of the first order to assume that a form of expression now unknown among men must have been unknown to those who made the first trials of expression as in words and song. One often hears about the lost arts; it is quite possible that there were arts or modes of expression used by primitive man for which one can find no analogy to-day either among men of culture or in savage tribes. There are rudimentary growths in literature, and these must be taken into account just as the man of science considers the nails or the hair or even the often-discussed vermiform appendix. The pineal gland, which Descartes finally chose as the scene of that mysterious passage between soul and matter demanded by his system of philosophy, has been recently explained to be all that is left of an eye in the top of the head. This may be a true account of the pineal gland, or a false account; but no competent naturalist will assert that civilized man has all the bodily functions which he had at that remote period in question. So, too, with certain possible distorted survivals in poetry of forms of emotional expression now unknown; it is wrong to deny them, and it is perilous to assert them unless cumulative evidence of many kinds can establish the probability. Again, for the first of these two warnings, it is unfair to set up the Australian black fellow or the Andaman islander,[[31]] with his “primitive” tools, dress, habits, and then, by a forcing of the adjective, bid us look at our primitive ancestor. No one denies the value of ethnological evidence; Thucydides himself declared that barbarous nations gave one a good idea of what civilized nations had been; accounts of savage life have the enormous advantage of coming close to the conditions of primitive life; but they do not give us the infallible description of primitive man himself, and it is an illicit process to transfer a quality from savage to ancestor, to say that man at the dawn of history was like this belated specimen, and that tribes from whose loins sprang dominant races, races which fought, and spoiled, and set up civilizations now vanished from almost every kind of record, can be reconstructed, in each feature of mind and body, by a study of peoples long ago shunted upon the bypaths of progress. Mr. Spencer was one of the first to protest against this abuse of ethnology.[[32]] Professor Grosse,[[33]] on the other hand, makes a strong and candid effort to meet and minimize the objections to an assumption upon which his whole study of primitive art depends. He asserts that arguments in opposition rest on the theory of degradation, and he denies that degradation has taken place, pointing to the remarkable uniformity of culture conditions in the various tribes which he regards as primitive. But it is clear that one does not need the theory of degradation to make good the point which has just been urged. Grant that these savage tribes have not degenerated; they have certainly failed, in every important particular, to progress; they are stunted; and they compare with that primitive being who held the destinies of culture in his hand, who pressed forward, wrought and fought, and sang the while of what he did, somewhat as a dwarf idiot of forty compares with a healthy child of four. More than this. Long stagnation, while it cannot push culture to new habits, may well complicate and stiffen the old habits to such an extent that the latter state of them comes quite out of analogy with the beginnings. For example, the festal dances of the savage are often intricate to a degree, requiring real erudition in the teacher, and infinite patience and skill in the disciple. Now it needs no advance in culture, no change in the form of production, which is Grosse’s test for culture, to make this dance progress from wild rhythmic leapings in a festal throng to the rigid form it has found under the care of certain experts. The earliest dancers and the latest dancers, communal and artistic, may have lived the same tribal life and got their food by the same kind of hunting, the same rude gathering of plants. In fact, startling as the assertion may seem, and however it may run counter to this convenient law that the degree of culture depends on the form of production, and that the work of art depends on the degree of culture, it is nevertheless highly probable that a certain combination of dance and song used among the Faroe islanders about a century ago, and recorded by a Danish clergyman who saw it, is of a far more primitive type than sundry laborious dances of savage tribes who are assumed to be quite primitive in their culture.
Granted the need to use the analogy with caution, it is well to note how wary one must be in dealing with the evidence itself. The warning may be brought home by an illustration somewhat out of the beaten track of ethnological material.[[34]] Nearly a century ago, Dr. Samuel L. Mitchill, United States senator from New York, was “a sort of permanent chairman of the committee on Indian affairs”; and he gives an account of a song “in the Osage tongue,” which was sung at his house in Washington, “translated into French by Mr. Choteau, the interpreter, and rendered into English immediately, January 1, 1806.” It is well to see what came of this process in the shape of the song “On War.”
Say, warriors, why, when arms are sung,
And dwell on every native tongue,
Do thoughts of Death intrude?