The controlling idea, the sense of evolution, should be an object for the scholar in more limited fields than heretofore have been chosen for his work. It will be found wise, henceforth, to select a narrower path but a more distant goal, a smaller subject and a larger method, to run down a single clew, and to run it, if possible, to the end. Works on the History of Human Thought, on the History of Literature, of Religion, of Civilization, on Primitive Culture, were great in their day,—and probably no one book, apart from Darwin’s, has had such a wide and wholesome influence as that masterpiece of Dr. E. B. Tylor; they initiated, fixed the general direction, were the doing of genius. But the day of discoveries has gone by, and colonization, a slower process, is rather an affair of hard if intelligent work. Histories, if the term will pass, are needed for the different functions of human expression and human emotion itself. The whimsical Nietzsche[[45]] has called for histories “of Love, of Avarice, of Envy, of Conscience, of Piety, of Cruelty”; but apart from his notions, and for sober purposes of literary study, there is need for such work as a history of sentiment, and this, of course, should be followed back on its different lines of expression. Two striking passages in Mr. Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native may be cited here as bearing on possibilities of investigation which need not be regarded as fantastic or absurd. In describing the face of his hero, as one that bore traces of a mental struggle, a half-formed query in regard to the value of existence, Mr. Hardy contrasts this face, so common now in every walk of life, with the countenance preserved by sculpture from an age when no such questions haunted the brain, and when, to use his phrase, man “could still revel in the general situation.” Even more suggestive is the other passage, which treats the change of sentiment in regard to what are called “the beauties of nature.” Much has been said and investigated of late on this attitude, ancient and modern, toward nature;[[46]] but there is metal more attractive in Mr. Hardy’s introduction of Egdon Heath as a sort of tragic character in his story, and in his remark that with the saddening of life men have turned more and more from mere gardens and green meadows, and have sought wild, rugged scenes; in days to come, indeed, they may turn even from the barren coasts of the sea, from bleak mountains, and seek stretches of absolute desolation, forbidding, featureless, dead, to suit their mood and give them rest from the stress of life. These are hints, false or true, only hints; but if they can so stir one to look into the seeds of time for the sake of mere prediction, is there not sober gain in a reversal of this process and in a study of the conditions and expressions of sentiment as far back as one can follow them? It is said that the absence and the presence of personal sentiment respectively condition the poetry of France that precedes Villon and the poetry that comes after him; what of the larger field, poetry itself, with regard to this important quality in emotional expression? Can one do for poetry what a recent writer[[47]] has done for civic life? Speaking of altruism, and noting the original absence of sentiment, he constructs a curve, or, as he calls it, a gradation, “the first word of which is selfishness and the last public sentiment.” What curves, now, can be constructed in poetry which shall prove of value as showing a controlling idea and warranting a sense of evolution? Clearly, these controlling ideas in a history of literature must stand chiefly upon the facts of literature, and the sense of evolution must be based upon a study of literary changes and growth, the play and result of such elements as have just now been described. The sense of evolution in literature is akin to the genealogical point of view lately urged upon critics by M. Brunetière,[[48]] but it is not the same thing; with him the doctrine of evolution is applied to literature or to art as a safe guide through its chronology, as a clew to its progress and retrogressions, as a discovery of the relations which a genius bears to those who went before him and to those who follow, and as a test of the valid and the permanent in art. The application of the sense of evolution now to be considered has a far wider range and must lead in time to wider conquests. For example, if one will choose some particular characteristic of human nature and will essay, by the aid of literature and the arts, to follow back the manifestations of it to a point where all records and traces of it cease, one will have a history of this characteristic,—and one will have something more. There will be not only the actual record made up from a series of observations which form a dotted line from furthest historical past to present, but the dots of this line, the line itself, will often form a curve which points either to a general gain or to a general loss of the characteristic in question. Or, if it is a case where one cannot speak with exactness of a loss or a gain in the characteristic itself, the curve will show loss or gain in any given form by which this characteristic has made itself known. Here, in other words, is a curve of relative tendencies; and the knowledge of such a curve not only gives us that sense of evolution to which reference has been made, but justifies us, after careful study and testing of these dotted facts, in a bold leap from the known to the unknown. If the characteristic in question, from the point where it comes into view at the beginning of records, shows a constant curve of increase or of decrease, one is justified in making a fairly definite statement about it in prehistoric times. Now this is not the evolutionary doctrine championed by M. Brunetière in literary research, for the reason that it is not dealing with poets and poems, but with poetry, or rather with the elements of poetry. To give a practical illustration, it is found that ethnological evidence puts in strong relief the almost exclusive and certainly overwhelming frequency of choral singing among rudest savage tribes. If, now, one takes a modern popular ballad and seeks to follow it back in such a way as to join it, as the end of a long line of survivals, to these primitive choral songs, one falls at once into confusion and halts sooner or later before insuperable barriers. Apart from the controversy about artistic or communal origin, apart from the theories of the epic, of the cante-fable, what not, it is out of the range of possible things to trace ballad or folksong, as such, back to a primitive form. Yet it seems to have occurred to no one that the way to treat the ballad for historic, comparative, and genetic purposes is to separate it into its elements, and to follow these elements back to the point where they vanish in the mists of unrecorded time. Such elements—and, unlike the ballad itself, they can be traced—are the fact of singing, the fact of dancing, the fact of universal improvisation, the fact of a predominant chorus or refrain. Are these elements, as far back as one can trace them, stronger, more insistent, as one approaches primitive conditions? What is the curve of evolution? Add to it the evidence of ethnology, and the conclusions of sociology, in regard to the composition and character of the early social group: here are materials which are solid enough to bear the weight of certain and definite conclusions in regard to the communal element in earliest verse. Again, there is another curve to consider. The poem of our day is mainly individual and artistic; how far back, and in what degree, waxing, waning, or stationary, can these elements be traced, and with what ethnological and sociological facts can they be confronted? The differencing characteristics of the poetry of art, and those of the poetry which is rightly or wrongly called communal, must be studied for themselves and traced back in their curves of evolution in order to ascertain what part they played in the beginnings of the art. And thus, too, the question must be answered, a question neither idle nor without wide sweep of interest, whether poetry has been one and the same element of human life from the outset, under varying circumstances, indeed, but under fixed conditions and with stable elements, or whether the conditions and the elements are now different from those which obtained at the start.
The method, then, of this attempt to study the beginnings of poetry is not to transfer outright the facts and conditions of savage life, result of ethnological investigation, to primitive song, not to take a supposed “popular” or communal poem of modern tradition and essay a somewhat similar transfer, but rather to use the evidence of ethnology in connection with the progress of poetry itself, as one can trace it in the growth or decay of its elements. The facts of ethnological research have been largely digested and can be easily used. The elements of poetry, in the sense here indicated, and combined with sociological considerations, have never been studied for the purpose of determining poetic evolution; and in this study lie both the intention of the present book and whatever modest achievement its writer can hope to attain. Before, however, this actual study is begun, two propositions must be established: the writer must prove that what he takes as poetry is poetry in fact; and, as was hinted just above, he must show a clear title for his use of the terms “communal” and “artistic.”
CHAPTER II
RHYTHM AS THE ESSENTIAL FACT OF POETRY
For the purposes of this book, poetry is rhythmic utterance, rhythmic speech, with mainly emotional origin. One must not write a book on poetry without essaying that iter tenebricosum of a definition—a definition, too, that will define, and not land the reader in a mere maze of words. “Rhythmic speech” is a short journey, puts one on solid ground at the end, and brings about no doublings and evasions in the subsequent path of investigation. It says what Robert Browning says in his summary of his art:—
“What does it all mean, poet?—Well,
Your brains beat into rhythm....”
By rhythmic must be understood a regular recurrence which clearly sets off such speech from the speech of prose; and by speech is meant chiefly the combination of articulate words, although inarticulate sounds may often express the emotion of the moment and so pass as poetry. The proportionate intellectual control of emotion in this utterance is a matter of human development, and largely conditions the course of poetry itself. We agree, then, to call by the name of poetry that form of art which uses rhythm to attain its ends, just as we call by the name of flying that motion which certain animals attain by the use of wings; that the feelings roused by poetry can be roused by unrhythmic order of words, and that rhythmic order of words is often deplorably bad art, or “unpoetic,” have as little to do with the case as the fact that a greyhound speeding over the grass gives the spectator quite the exhilaration and sense of lightness and grace which is roused by the flight of a bird, and the fact that an awkward fowl makes itself ridiculous in trying to fly, have to do with the general proposition that flying is a matter of wings. A vast amount of human utterance has been rhythmic; one undertakes to tell the story of its beginnings. With such a definition the task is plain though hard; let go this definition, and there is no firm ground under one’s feet. The patron and the critic of poetry, to be sure, must make deeper and wider demands; from the critical point of view one must find the standard qualities of excellence to serve as test in any given case, one must ascertain what is representative, best, highest; poetry for the critic has its strength measured by the strongest and not by the weakest link in the chain. From the æsthetical point of view, again, poetry must be defined in terms of the purely poetic impulse. On the other hand, any comparative and sociological study must find a definition wide enough for the whole poetic product, whether of high or of low quality, whether due to this or to that emotion. It needs a simple and obvious test for the material. Now as a matter of fact, all writers on poetry take rhythm for granted until some one asks why it is necessary; whereupon considerable discussion, and the protest signed by a respectable minority, but a minority after all, that rhythm is not an essential condition of the poetic art. This discussion, as every one knows, has been lively and at times bitter; a patient and comprehensive review of it in a fairly impartial spirit has led to the conclusion, first, that no test save rhythm has been proposed which can be put to real use, even in theory, not to mention the long reaches of a historical and comparative study; secondly, that all defenders of the poem in prose are more or less contradictory and inconsistent, making confusion between theory and practice; and thirdly, that advocates of a rhythmic test, even in abstract definition, seem to have the better of the argument. Indeed, one might simply point to the actual use of the word “poetry,” and be done. However the student and collector may proclaim the rights of prose to count as poetry, his history, his anthology, shows no prose at all, and he meekly follows in practice the definition against which, in theory, he was so fain to strive and cry. Of this, one example, but a very remarkable example. Baudelaire, in the preface to his Poems in Prose, speaks of one Bertrand[[49]] as his master in this art, and of a book, Gaspard de la Nuit, as its masterpiece. This book,[[50]] praised highly by Sainte-Beuve, this fantaisie à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot, as its subordinate title runs, makes occasion for a very bold assertion, and apparently for a great innovation, by one of the editors of a collection of French poetry.[[51]] “To admit a prose writer,” he says, “into a poetic anthology needs to be explained. It is certain there are poets in prose just as there are prosers in verse,”—the dear old cry, the dear old half-truth! Now Bertrand is “poet not only by his sentiment, not only by the pomp and sublimity of his thought, ... but by the very art itself” which he lavishes upon this poetic prose. True, he wrote verses also in his Gaspard; but his main work is an artistic marvel of prose. “Louis Bertrand prosodie la prose....” Well, a fine defence for the prose-poet; and one turns to the selections for an example of the poetic prose, not only “main work,” but very rare work of the writer, whose book is most difficult to obtain. And what are the selections from the prose-poet? Two poems in the most incorrigible verse! A sonnet, a ballade:—
“O Dijon, la fille
Des glorieux ducs,
Qui portes bequille