CHAPTER VI
SCIENCE AND COMMUNAL POETRY
We have Dr. Johnson’s word for it that one does well “to see great works in their seminal state, pregnant with latent possibilities of excellence; nor could there be any more delightful entertainment than to trace their gradual growth and expansion.” So science came to think; and all the works of nature and of man have been treated in this spirit to the convincing of sane minds everywhere, except in the domain of poetry. There one still clings to a paradise and a perfect poet at the start,—perfect, that is, because he had all the functions and privileges and opportunities of the latter-day bard, and stood to his public as a poet stands to the public of this age. A study of facts, records as well as survivals, leads us to no such perfect primitive bard; at the end of the path we see no dignified old gentleman in flowing robe, with a long white beard, upturned eyes, and a harp clasped to his bosom, but rather a ring of savages dancing uncouthly to the sound of their own voices in a rhythmic but inharmonious chant. This, however, is only saying that poetry, like all human institutions, like the earth itself, goes back to rude and barren beginnings; and the lowest stratum of poetry to which one can come either by sight or by inference is only what one ought to expect from the doctrine of evolution, applicable in this case as in any other case. With a sense not intended by Browning, “rock’s the song-soil rather,” and even fossil signs of life are few. But it is precisely here that Johnson’s unconscious praise of these studies should be borne in mind. Not the bard come down from Olympus, with majesty in his mien and the light of divine song shed about him, singing to his rapt hearers of the deep things of life, is the nobler view: nobler by far is the sight of those little groups gathered on the marches that lay between the old beast and the new man, facing inexorable powers which had crushed out life upon life before, and whole systems of life; dimly conscious of a force that treads down the individual and dooms the solitary to defeat; dimly conscious, too, of the resisting power that lies in coherence, union, common front in a common cause; marshalled by the instinct of kind into a tentative confederation of single resources; and so beginning the long battle which humanity is still waging against foes unseen as well as seen. The first cry of emotional consent along with the consenting step, the cry that remembered a triumph found in instinctive common action, and felt itself to be prophetic of a triumph yet to come; this concerted step and shout which seemed the expression of concerted purpose, of communal will, force, effectiveness, has more in it even for the man of sentiment than can be found in any flight of poetry in later time. But we are not seeking sentiment in the case; and having come in this rude dance and song, so it would seem, to the beginnings of poetry, we ask what was the beginning of this beginning. If one must have a formula for the process, it need not be in those intolerant terms of personal initiative and gregarious imitation upon which M. Tarde insists so strenuously, but rather in the mild and quite as scientific terms of consent, the consent of instinctive individual gestures and sounds due to the perception by a group of human beings that common action makes unity out of diversity. Art is of social origin; that is the thesis of Guyau in his well-known book; and the social sense precedes any relation of master and pupil, leader and followers. It is overwhelmingly probable that rhythm, the simplest form of social consent, was the earliest form of a discovery which made social progress possible. Still, this probability must not be taken for granted.
The question, like the democratic thought of a century and more ago, has an outer and an inner circle.[[881]] For the latter, let us ask whether poetry, queen of the arts, is an art in the sense of something invented by the artist, not only in details, but in essence. The arts of life belong to the artist; but is the artist anterior in every way to his art? Is there no spontaneous, instinctive background? In the first place, one must guard against a fallacy of terms. The invention of a tool, for example, even though it be “organic projection,” is different in kind from the invention of a poem, which, by the principles of æsthetic, has no one practical end in view,—for theory, at least; in reality, the inventor of a poem nowadays has a practical end in view, the sale of his verse, and Scherer carried this commercial idea back to the very origins, setting up a primitive literary market, with supply and demand, poet and public, bargains, sales, entertainer and audience, on the very tree-platform of our hairy ancestors. But Scherer fell into absurdities. Gigadibs the literary man does not thrive in those regions; and one cannot reduce the primitive choral to terms of artist, invention, public, sale. If anything has been made clear in preceding pages of this book, if anything can be made clear in the study of improvisation about to follow, if there is any certain curve of evolution in the course of poetry, it is that the passive element, the audience, the receptive public, disappears inevitably as one recedes from conditions of the present time, and that the throng as a productive active body assumes more and more the functions now regarded as belonging almost exclusively to the individual. Invention itself has been reduced to a convenient absurdity, for this very article of rhythm, by M. Kawczynski, in his essay on rhythmic origins.[[882]] Nobody denies that an Alcæus may invent an Alcaic strophe,[[883]] that another master may hit upon the elegiac couplet; but this vivacious essay declares that rhythm itself was invented by some thoughtful benefactor of the race, some genius of prehistoric times. A book published in the same year, the Æsthetics of Movement, by M. Souriau,[[884]] had made temperate protest against Mr. Herbert Spencer’s doctrine[[885]] of the universality of rhythm in the realm of nature, and had asserted that rhythm, exceptional in nature, is nevertheless “the constant law of muscular movements,” and not the result of will. But this spontaneity of rhythm in the motion and muscular exertion of man, this tendency in each of our motor organs “to adopt a fixed rhythm which becomes its normal movement,” is precisely what M. Kawczynski will not allow; he is bent upon banishing “the false system of spontaneity” from its last place of refuge and will hound it off the face of the earth. Not only was this or that dance invented, this or that march and walk; dancing, marching, leaping, yes, walking, are inventions all. This is very clear language of M. Kawczynski, but it is a trifle too clear; one asks for a bill of particulars,—first for an explanation of the inventive process, and secondly for an account of the imitation; and here one meets difficulties. The individual mind plays about general instincts, modifies them, develops them into a thousand forms, precisely as it does with the raw material of nature. It invents a dance as modification of the general instinct to dance; it invents the steam-engine, but is not yet credited with inventing steam and iron. So one easily understands the invention of a distinct song; but what of singing? Or say of breathing? The Dogberry who says that these things come by nature, and asks how they could come by art, is pained to find the advocate of invention wrapping himself in a cloak of biological mystery not unlike the theological garment donned, under similar questions, by Jacob Grimm himself. We shall see that in the outer circle this question is answered by M. Tarde with a reference to the cell; ultimate individual invention is an affair of the individual cell; while the process itself is a mystery, described only in the most modest and euphemistic hints, and to stare at it would be the part of peeping Tom. M. Kawczynski makes no effort to explain invention, but simply asserts it; and although imitation is a clearer case, yet even here he says things which are not good for the interests of his theory. He is safe so long as he keeps to general terms and describes all literature as a gigantic system of borrowings,—German from Roman, Roman from Greek, Greek from Egyptian mayhap, and Egyptian from creditors unknown, all imitation, with here and there a bit of invention going on decently behind closed doors. But M. Kawczynski dares too much, and blunders in the particular case. A witness should be taken from the box when he tries to help his cause by making German Siegfried an imitated compound of Jason, Achilles, and Perseus; by naming Otfried as the founder of really Germanic literature; by making alliteration in Norse an imitation of German, which got it from Anglo-Saxons, who got it from the Irish, who got it from the Latin; and by calling Germanic verse itself an imitation of the classic hexameter.[[886]] “Historic influences,” one is told, “are stronger than the natural and proper gifts of any people”; but are not natural and proper gifts themselves the strongest of historic influences? This question is worth a glance by the way.
No one denies the great part played in poetry by imitation; but it is not the only element in the case. True, it is the most obvious element. Comparative literature, as a science, is young. The task put before its followers was plain enough; they had first of all to sift the material, to note where deep has called unto deep in the influence of one poet upon another, as well as to follow the fortunes of a primitive bagman’s jest carried on the old trading routes from land to land and starting up at last as conte or schwank in a hundred scattered communities, in cloister, school, and court. But this is not all, and the task is not done even when one has struck the balance between the borrowings of a poet and what one suffers to pass as his individual and original genius. Abused as the terms have been, the genius of time, place, community, is still a factor in the growth of any literature; and M. Gaston Paris, who has done so much for the study of sources, is emphatic on this point. In several passages, notably in a discussion of the method to be followed in studying poetry of the people,[[887]] he sets a bound to the theory of borrowings, and insists upon the common fund or “patrimony” of national tradition. Steinthal, too, is not altogether negligible with his query; why assume, he asks,[[888]] that because Europe imported so much, she must have been herself sterile? That old Aryan patrimony, to be sure, as source of myth, legend, poem, rite, is out of favour, perhaps definitely abandoned; but Comparetti,[[889]] who approves this abandonment, is full of zeal for the development of all poetry, provided it has the spontaneous and native note, within the limits of its own nation and its own tongue. Borrowing is, after all, incidental, however conspicuous in fact; and it would be a wild system of economics which should explain the industrial life of the world as purely a matter of exchange, of debtor and creditor, without any hint of agriculture and manufactures. One sees all the faring of ship and car, the tumult of docks, drays, storehouses, the stir in counting-rooms, banks, exchange; what of plough and mill and mine? It is just these, so to speak, that one fails to see in such clever literary balancing of accounts as certain scholars have made in the study of Scandinavian ballads. Take a holiday throng of the unlettered mediæval community, intent upon song and dance, all dancing and all singing; will no one tell us what they sing? A score of scholars. They produce the ballad,—no easy feat,—and for this alone deserve lasting gratitude. As they find it, it is not likely to be merely a local affair, for such things seldom come upon record, although it is quite clear that perhaps the majority of ballads in this class were of purely local interest. Very likely, however, it is borrowed, and the scholar—again, no easy feat—traces the loan to its source. The form of the stanza may be imported, too, with its simple air; and even now and then the peculiar rhythm of the lines may be an echo of alien song. Here, then, is imitation; it need not have been imitation, and in some other place was doubtless a home product throughout; but here imitation must be conceded. Our ingenious literary accountant, however, is emboldened to take another step; the impulse which drives that throng to express its feelings by rhythm, movement, cry, he takes away from instinct and sets down to the credit of some other community; the very dancing and singing, that is, he regards as an imitated, borrowed thing. Rosenberg, in his book on the Intellectual Life of Scandinavia,[[890]] tries to prove that “dancing and singing to the dance” came to Norsemen from the Celts; and to make this probable, he has recourse to that perilous figure, the universal negative. There were no dancing-songs, he says, in oldest English; dancing-song and refrain, he argues from records notoriously imperfect, were also unknown to the early German, and came to him as a Celtic export, although the German was the first to use these forms in narrative.[[891]] That is, the Germans had at first no song for the dance, but got it from the Celts, who in their turn had not used the narrative song for dancing, and by way of barter imported it, as among the Bretons, from a German source. The refrain and the dance, novelties both, came with viking spoils into Scandinavian life, made things “lighter and more gay,” and “for the first time gave ladies the chance of active participation in social enjoyment.” In Iceland, Rosenberg goes on to say, there was no dancing until about the year 1200;[[892]] though folk there took hugely to the thing when they once had it. Moreover, “all agree that this dance and song was at first an exclusive prerogative of noble families.” A thousand years, then, one is to conceive the case, foot and voice went never paired in Norland, dance and refrain were unknown, until example came from the South! Tantae molis erat; to set folk dancing to their own songs needed such ponderous machinery and such a stretch of time! Had Rosenberg’s comparative literature only made itself comparative beyond the shreds and patches of written records, beyond the narrow range of Europe and the mediæval limits; had he only taken Adam Smith’s or Lord Monboddo’s interest in African natives like that one who danced a war dance before the genial Adam and his friends, compelling all hands to leap upon chairs and tables for safety! Rosenberg and scholars of his class are not comparative enough; they forget wider and more important reaches.[[893]] The habit of turning an event or a situation straightway into improvised verse with gestures and dancing, is so well attested in the accounts of savage life, so well attested in cases where isolated and unlettered communities in modern Europe have been left to their own “literary” devices,[[894]] that in the face of such evidence the assertion that Norse folk waited a thousand years for a hint from the Celts before they began to dance to rough chorus and refrain of their own singing, falls like a house of cards. Borrowing money is not a sign of bankruptcy; and the valuable affirmative evidence of literary loans which these scholars give us is half spoiled by the absurdity of their universal negative in regard to native production. For example, we know that Finns, in very recent times, borrowed a store of Swedish ballads, and that the name veisa,[[895]] used in Finnish for a ballad, is taken from that source; but, as every one knows, the Finns had their own native songs. Suppose, now, that these native songs had long since disappeared, as they doubtless would have disappeared under the circumstances of primitive Scandinavian ballads; and how cheerfully the literary accountant could have assured his reader that there were no Finnish songs whatever until those Swedish loans were made!
Let us go back now to the main question, and take its outer circle. Here one is told to blot from one’s dictionary such words as instinct, spontaneity, homogeneous; but, with these well erased, how is one to speak of that group of primitive men huddled on the frontier of civilization? They have no instincts, no spontaneous gestures and cries; they are not homogeneous, and no homogeneous expression can come out of them. They cannot borrow; for they are opening the first concern of its kind. What are they doing, then? Getting ready, one is told, for a game of follow-the-leader, the game of all civilized and uncivilized beings, and the law of all animate things. Here is a formula not merely valid in the explanation of literary progress, but the last word of philosophy itself. It is labour lost to set up the spontaneous, communal impulse as a factor in solving these problems of primitive poetry, if the spontaneous and the communal are impossible ideas, mere superstitions, props on which rationalism once leaned in passing from the grosser explanations of ghosts, gods, what not, but now broken and cast as rubbish to the void. By the theory of M. Tarde, for example, there is no spontaneity possible; rhythm in its widest sense, dancing, even tears and laughter, breathing, all cease to be outcome of emotion common and instinctive; they are imitation by one individual of another individual, or, to take refuge in biology, of one cell of another cell. The microcosm is here no figure of speech; in this little world of man is a commonwealth of individual cells, with crossing and varied interests; an inventive, masterful cell takes the lead, sweeps along most of the other cells, which imitate and obey, opposes and destroys others, adapts itself by compromise to a few more,—and this is man, just as it is society: invention, imitation, but no spontaneity. Invention is the rare and difficult factor; imitation is the constant factor.[[896]] That is, to put the case more concisely, Tarde attacks two theses, the assertion of spontaneity in a throng and the assertion that development is from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous.
All this is not so new as it seems to be. It is early eighteenth-century philosophy translated into late nineteenth-century science. It is a reaction from a reaction; for Wilhelm von Humboldt, Hamann, Herder, and the rest, “tired of kings,” tired of the “great man,” turned to man himself, to humanity, nature, to great forces revealed in human institutions everywhere. Speech, said Humboldt, is no invention; it is an energy, a power. At the beginning, says M. Tarde,[[897]] “a savage genius” in a single family, invented the earliest form of language; and families everywhere came to borrow this anthropoid’s linguistic fire. M. Tarde is suavely bent on exterminating the idea of nature. Even Darwin had said speech was half art, half instinct; and an early Darwinian, Lord Monboddo,[[898]] believing that “everything of art must be founded on nature,” derived language from “natural cries.” Nature, says M. Tarde, is a superstition; and with it he tosses away instinct and spontaneity. The solution for every possible problem of man’s destiny he seeks in one of those cerveaux de génie, savage or civilized, heterogeneous factors of life, like the masterful cell from which all has come and to which all shall yet return. All social adaptation is reduced to the work “of two men, of whom one answers, by word or by deed, to the question, verbal or silent, of the other.” Men are alike, think alike, do alike, not by any law or by any instinct of species, but by this fact of imitation; any group, large or small, will consist of two parts, one learning and one teaching, one producing and one consuming, “one actor, poet, artist, and the other looker-on, reader, amateur.”[[899]] The group of two individuals, the harmony of it, Tarde now pushes back to an earlier harmony between two ideas in the brain of the individual inventor; and this is to stretch into the infinitesimal. How, he cries in an eloquent passage,[[900]] how can a Spencer, as well as the man in the street, go on treating this infinitesimal as of no moment, as a homogeneous, neutral thing, with naught in it spiritual and distinct? Why make the vast range of space your theatre of existence? Within this despised infinitesimal, mayhap, lie the chances of death or immortality, the secret of being itself. And we call this ovule, this part of the ovule, this part of the part,—undifferentiated![[901]] Darwin is right in his general theory of descent, but he is wrong in his explanation, thinks M. Tarde; for the true cause of the species is “the secret of the cells, the invention of some early ovule endowed with peculiar and rich originality.” What, once more, what of our little group of primitive men, their instinct of kind, their spontaneous gestures and steps and cries, their homogeneous character and therefore homogeneous expression? Seek out the masterful cell in the masterful brain of the masterful leader of that sorry set of imitators, and it will tell all secrets of civilization and human progress, poetry and the arts included. There is no “society” for M. Tarde, and, for the sake of dignified and decent thought, no milieu, no “they,”[[902]]—that figment of nonsense in the phrase “they say,”—no “social forces.” Instead of explaining the small by the great, the detail by the mass, he explains a group of similar things by the accumulation of minor elementary processes, the great by the small, the mass by the detail. There is for M. Tarde no genius of a race, of a language, of a religion; at the best, this genius of the people is a label for the individuals, or a sort of composite photograph. Hennequin[[903]] argued in the same way against an English type in literature, against a Norman or a Gascon type in French; it is worth noting that his arguments and Tarde’s philosophy were anticipated at one of the Magny dinners in January, 1866. “Taine asserted,” so the Goncourt Journal reports, “that all men of talent are the product of their environment. We took the other side. ‘Where are you going to find,’ we said, ‘the exotic root of Chateaubriand,—a pineapple growing in the barracks!’ Gautier came to our support, and maintained that the brain of an artist was the same thing under the Pharaohs that it is now.”
M. Tarde, however, with his followers, is by no means in undisputed possession of the field, whether in sociology or in literature. Gumplowicz[[904]] declares that “the behaviour of collective entities is determined by natural and sociological laws, and not by the motives and natural qualities of individuals.” Moreover, as he says, the horde and the social group make a unit, and this is unlike its parts; it cannot be inferred from its parts. Social thought came before individual thought. Some of the best scholars in sociology have come out frankly for dualism; and in the opinion of Dr. Barth,[[905]] dualism has now been proved for the past and recognized for present and future. Professor Giddings[[906]] takes this view and offers proof; he puts the consciousness of kind before invention and initiation, for society, as he says, is an organization and not an organism. Perhaps a majority of French scholars hold against M. Tarde; and while Germany has been rampant for individualism, a distinct reaction has set in with the work of Bernheim, of Lamprecht, and of Barth himself. As Ranke grew older, says Lamprecht, he grew less willing to lay stress on great personalities in history, which, he thought, must more and more find its account in the movement and condition of masses. Comte is not discredited in the spirit of his theory, whatever has become of the details; and, turning to psychology, one finds Wundt[[907]] actually defending the social mind, so vehemently attacked by Paul in his Principles. Wundt says there is such a thing as the volksseele, the sum of experiences in a multitude; and the products of such communal experiences, due to the coexistence and mutual working of many minds, cannot be explained by conditions of the individual mind. Language, myth, and custom, he says, are the three products of this mind or soul of the people; and it is not hard to find room for poetry in the province lying between speech and myth.[[908]] The problem thus stated and studied by Wundt has been undertaken by several other writers, notably by M. Le Bon,[[909]] and even, in a hostile spirit, by M. Tarde himself. Von Hartmann[[910]] studied the “collective mind” as long ago as 1869, and fitted it into his philosophy of the unconscious; while the Journal of Demo-psychology and Philology, of Steinthal and Lazarus, fought a losing fight for demos in the old days from 1860, merging at last into the Journal of the Ethnological Society.[[911]] It is the fashion to laugh at this old journal, and it had its defects; the student of poetry, however, will do well to bear in mind that Ten Brink,[[912]] in his spirited account of communal song as the basis of English poetry, expressly declares that he “learned the most” about his subject from an article by Steinthal in the same periodical. Again, there is Bastian for ethnology; obscure in expression, hazy in thought, he backs his pet idea of the völkergedanken with a range of ethnological facts which no one will neglect or despise. These are positive considerations; and with them must go a negative but valuable result due to the failure of Tarde, Kawczynski, and others, in applying their arguments to facts. Take M. Tarde’s signally unfortunate illustration of his idea that invention is the only initial power with which one reckons in literature,—that poetry, for example, always “begins[[913]] with a book”—a book—“an épopée, some poetical work of great relative perfection, ... some high initial source.” And what are the examples of this law of poetic origins? “The Iliad, the Bible, Dante.” Here is sheer absurdity. Each of these cases tends to prove the exact opposite of what M. Tarde would have it prove. Did he come to this fatal idea, that all great literature starts with a great book, by reading Hugo’s preface to Cromwell?[[914]] Worse, even, is his assertion that “modern literature begins with the Romance of the Rose.”[[915]]
The theory of M. Tarde, noteworthy as it is, and salutary as some of its appeals must prove in correcting romantic extravagances, cannot be upheld even as a theory, and breaks down lamentably when applied to poetical facts. A saner belief would accept the immense part played by imitation, but would refuse to give it sole possession of the field. It is the clash of communal and individual tendencies,[[916]] of centripetal and centrifugal, with which M. Tarde forgets to reckon; now the individual invents, rules, awes, masters, and the throng follow like sheep, and now again this throng is—not are—tyrannical to such a degree that the philosopher of that epoch cries out that there is no individual initiative, all is law, natural forces, social forces,—and so comes to an extreme as illogical as that of M. Tarde. It is true that a work of art is not a mere registry of popular sentiment, of environment, of the temper of the time; it is also true that the artist cannot take himself out of those influences. Art is social, and without society would not exist. It is simple recognition of facts to assert that art, like religion, law, custom, serves as an index for tendencies which underlie the thought and emotion of an epoch; it works below the surface, this movement, and is often belied by all signs that can be read on the surface, until suddenly these change too, and the period has registered its characteristics after the fashion of a clock which moves its hands only at the end of each minute. It is true, moreover, that this movement must belong to the body in which it takes place; yet it is also true that the movements of communal thought, as Wundt pointed out, are different in kind from the movements of individual thought.
But this is too fine-spun stuff for that group of primitive men concerned with their first effort at song. Granted the communal force with which we would endow them, what of the instinctive step, gesture, cry,—can these really be instinctive and not mere imitation of a leader?
As to instinctive utterance, that idea, though somewhat rudely shaken, still stands.[[917]] There are instinctive sounds, and man is or was no exception to the rule. The social influence, assumed by everybody as real cause of articulate speech, would work not upon a new sound “invented” by some primitive genius, but upon the instinctive sounds uttered by each unit of a throng. That individuals discovered or invented modifications of these sounds, no one will deny; but the conditions of primitive life were those of a horde, with individuals at a minimum of importance, so that the earliest progress in speech and poetry was due to the almost unconscious changes made by a festal throng under the excitement of social consent,—a very different thing from invention and imitation as the terms now hold. Whether one wishes to carry farther this mutual influence of man upon man in a throng equally active in all its parts, or not, is of little moment. The conditions of progress in speech and song were immediately communal, in strong contrast to the isolated, individual, mediating conditions of such progress at the present day. All we ask of biology is the concession of instinct; at the basis of human poetry, that vast edifice of art, and, as it seems to the modern man, of nothing but art, lie instinctive utterances, homogeneous, if one may judge by chick and bird,[[918]] and subject to their first modifications not from individual effort but from social consent and the enormous force of communal emotion.