Psychology, too, joins biology in allowing that instinctive forms of utterance and expression in primitive times may have led to that gemeinsames dichten in chorus, refrain, dance, which is claimed for nature and opposed to art. Imitation, in any sense that concerns the argument in hand, is after all a matter of deliberation, reason, choice; but the expression of emotion in children as in savages is rapid, instantaneous, instinctive. “Except fear,” says Ribot,[[919]] “all primary emotions imply tendencies to movement, sometimes blind and violent, like natural forces. This is seen in infants, animals, savages, the barbarians of the first centuries of our era.... The passage of emotion into action, good or bad, is instantaneous, rapid, and fatal as a reflex movement.” Panic fright, where animals are almost paralyzed, is, indeed, a matter of rapid suggestion and imitation in cases where the cause is not apparent; but panic elation is active, a movement, a sympathy, an instinctive consent of voice and limb. Moreover, the throng is always to be kept in mind, and the analogy of children in a family, as well as of savages brought among civilized folk, is to be held resolutely back; it is no analogy at all. Who played the suggestive part of parent, of grown or civilized people, to the imitation of a mass of human beings in those earliest days? Horde conditions are too easily forgotten, and psychology needs to take them more into account, just as it is taking instinct again into favour. Beginning about 1850, a movement against instinct is plainly traced through the writings of men like Bain and A. R. Wallace; but the feud was carried too far, and Professor Karl Groos, in one of the best books[[920]] which have lately appeared on this subject, notes the reaction not only in Wundt, but in Lotze, Spencer, Sully, and Ribot, against this effort to blot the word instinct from our dictionaries. Groos, who has ample respect for imitation as a leading force in development of both body and mind, refuses to give it absolute rule. Play, he says, is not imitation, “but, if the phrase will pass, a foreboding of the serious occupation of the individual”;[[921]] and again, “particularly in the most important and most elementary forms of play, there can be no question either of imitating the animal’s own previous activity, or of imitating the activity of other individuals.” Mr. Lloyd Morgan allowed that his young moor-hen, with imitation out of the question, executing “a pretty and characteristic dance,” showed instinct “even in the narrower acceptation of the term.” Now if this solitary activity is “congenital” and “instinctive,” imitation must also yield some ground to instinct in gregarious play of animals and in communal play of men. When Wundt[[922]] says that human life “is permeated through and through with instinctive action, determined in part by intelligence and volition,” he states in scientific terms the old dualism of nature and art, of throng and artist, at which the rationalists of criticism have directed so many attacks. That fascinating book, Hudson’s Naturalist on the La Plata, gives evidence about gregarious play among animals.[[923]] All mammals and birds, he says, have “more or less regular or set performances with or without sound, or composed of sound exclusively ... performances which in many animals are only discordant cries and chorus and uncouth irregular motions,” yet, “in the more aerial, graceful, and melodious kinds, take immeasurably higher, more complex, and more beautiful forms.” Again, “every species, or group of species, has its own inherited form or style of performance; and however rude and irregular this may be ... that is the form in which the feeling will always be expressed.” Plainly, for whatever reason, the individual is here under the control of the species; and imitation cannot be the sole explaining cause either of the impulse or of the performance. In fact, as Groos concludes,[[924]] in regard to play “the instincts are sole foundation. Foundation, for not all play is pure work of instinct; on the contrary, the higher one proceeds, the richer and more delicate grow those psychological elements which are added to the simple impulse of nature, ennoble it, elevate it, and now and again almost conceal it. But the foundation is instinct.”
What Professor Groos has not done in his interesting books is to give adequate importance to the choral and communal fact; he neglects the antithesis between common action and imitated action in a social group. This choral impulse may be referred to a pleasure in common, instinctive action, rarely noted by psychologists, which is a quite different affair from the pleasure of imitating as well as from the pleasure of seeing or hearing a thing done. Groos himself notes that the mass-play of birds is like the mass-dance of primitive men which sprang from sexual excitement. Still, in the table[[925]] printed at the end of his earlier book one sees how completely he leaves the choral and communal case out of account. He recognizes in the first column of this table the representation of self, the personal impulse, but not as a social expression by social consent; these forms of play should differ according to the solitary or social character of the performance, and this again not simply in terms of personal instinct and communal imitation. There is a social or communal personality, at all events where human society is in question, created by any combined action and deriving from the instinctive, not necessarily imitative acts of individuals as conscious parts of a whole. Society is not the sum of individuals, but the mass of them, differing as a mass in its parts from these parts as individuals, plus the greater or less influence of generations of previous masses,—in traditions, custom, and the like. Dead and living form a combination partly organic and vital, partly immaterial; against this stands the centrifugal, thinking, protesting, innovating individual. But even ignoring tradition, the difference holds. If I vote with a party, and “it” gains, my joy is not mine plus the joy of all who voted with me, but mine because I am a part of the voting body. How much stronger the direct case under almost exclusively communal conditions! Communal elation, quite apart from personal elation, any one can still study in his own mind, but under conditions which make his elation a thing of shame to his intellectual, critical self. This shame, which breeds the “mugwump” and breaks up political parties, barely existed in primitive life,—so sociology concludes with no dissenting voice. Communal elation, instinctive expression in consent, began, by Donovan’s reckoning,[[926]] in the spontaneous “play-excitement” of a festal throng, which may or may not have parallels in the play of beasts and birds; here were human fellowship, homogeneous conditions, “a common cause of excitement,” and a common expression of it in the social consent of rhythm. Donovan, too, has a table[[927]] to illustrate all this; “play-excitement,” instinctive, drifts into “habits of movement” and into song; individual song-making is a later affair, and is developed “out of the racial memories.” So great a factor was this communal elation, this play-excitement, in the making of poetry. But life has never been all play; poetry echoes, perhaps even clearer than in the case of play, the stress and pain of human effort. As was shown in preceding pages, Bücher laid stress upon the instinctive cries and motions of labour, the rhythm of individual and social work. Rhythm, he insisted, “springs from the organic nature of man”; it is automatic, instinctive,[[928]] and nowhere so much as in labour. Nor were the realms of play and labour very far apart. Treading the grapes of Dionysos, treading the wild dance of Dionysos,—there was little space between the two activities, and no distinction at all so far as rhythm and instinctive motion were concerned. In brief, whether one takes the instinct of play, as preparation for work, with Groos, or the play-excitement, with Donovan, or the instinctive rhythm furnished by work pure and simple, with Bücher, there is ample recognition in each case for the spontaneous, and in two of the cases for the communal, as essential elements in the beginnings of poetry. The conclusions of psychology[[929]] and sociology are still in tune with the dualism hinted long since by Aristotle, and stated just a century ago by A. W. Schlegel. Aristotle referred the beginning of poetry to two instincts,—imitation and “the instinct for harmony and rhythm”; but the art itself came only with individual effort. “Persons ... with this natural gift little by little improved upon their early efforts till their rude improvisations gave birth to poetry. Poetry now branched off in two directions according to the individual character of the writers.”[[930]] So, too, he speaks of tragedy, which, like comedy, “was at first mere improvisation,” festal excitement of the throng;[[931]] and there is the same hint of communal spontaneity coming under artistic control when Aristotle notes that “Æschylus diminished the importance of the chorus,” and when he speaks of a time when “poetry was of the satyric order, and had greater affinities with dancing.” Would there were more historical work of this sort from that “honest and keen-eyed observer,” as Schlegel calls him! Could the dualism be more plainly set forth? Döring[[932]] points out that Aristotle distinguishes two kinds of dithyramb; one is natural, spontaneous, improvised, and this is nothing, in his eyes, but the raw material of poetry; the other is the dithyramb of art. Schlegel’s position has been defined already, but part of a brief[[933]] for a lecture which was never written out, may be noted as in point; he is more generous to the ruder stage of verse than Aristotle seems to be. “The idea of a natural history of poetry.... End of this. Transition to art and to the consciousness of it. All primitive, original songs inspiration of the moment.” Now the evidence of ethnology has set this last remark upon the surest base;[[934]] no fact is better established for savage poetry. Creatures of impulse, without individual thinking, without individual plan and purpose, with uniform and circumscribed conditions, with homogeneous natures, they are swayed by communal emotion to a degree which seems incredible to the man of culture. Schlegel himself had an eye on this sort of evidence. Speaking[[935]] of the songs before Homer, he calls them “quite artless outpourings of lyrical impulse”; they were “made up of a few simple words and outcries, constantly repeated, such as we find to-day among savages.” Again, returning to the dualism of instinctive and artistic, one may note his happy phrase for it when he speaks[[936]] of “the change of nature-purpose into art-purpose.”
A deeper study of this change, a study of the beginnings and development of Hellenic poetry, was made in one of the earlier and saner works of Nietzsche,[[937]] written while he was still in philological harness and before he broke with Wagner. Art, he thinks, depends on the enduring strife and occasional reconciliation of two opposing forces which the Greeks embodied in Dionysos and Apollo. Apollo finds expression in sculpture, in the individual work of art, Dionysos in the impersonal art of music; the genius of Greece united these two in Attic tragedy. Apollo is the personification of that principium individuationis, the deification of man as artist, as the solitary boatman whom Schopenhauer imagined[[938]] driven and tossed in this frail bark of individuality upon a sea of troubles. Now “individual” is as much as to say bounded, definite, restricted; hence the Hellenic dislike of exaggeration, its love of artistic reticence and restraint, and that “Know Thyself” as final word of the god who is simply a deification of the individual. But there is the other side. From time to time, say in intoxication, which has its god in all popular mythologies, or in those great upheavals of communal emotion due to victory, to love, to the coming of spring, rises the Dionysian impulse and shatters all sense of the individual. Such a movement made the chorus of the Greeks as well as the St. John and the St. Vitus dances of mediæval Europe. Man the individual, so Nietzsche puts it in his own dithyrambic style, sinks back, a prodigal son, into the bosom of that nature which he has deserted. “By song and dance man shows himself a member of the higher unity; he forgets how to walk, to talk; he is on the way, dancing and leaping as he goes, fairly to fly aloft. His gestures tell of the magic which holds him.... He is no longer artist, he is art,”—and all this in the communal, Dionysian frenzy, the folk as a whole, and the individual lost in the throng. Turba fit mens. Here in spontaneous song, dance, gesture, of the crowd is the opposite of that reticent, deliberative Apollinian art; “this demonic folksong” is set over against the “artist of Apollo, chanting psalms to his harp.”[[939]] The Greek dramatic chorus, Nietzsche goes on to say, is simply the old Dionysian throng, once transformed by their spontaneous excitement into satyrs,[[940]] pure nature and instinct, now conventionalized and brought under artistic control; the separation of chorus and spectators is artificial, for at bottom there is no difference between them, and all make a single body of dancing and singing satyrs,—that is, the greater part of the throng now dance by deputy.[[941]] We are absurdly narrow, he thinks, in applying modern ideas of authorship to primitive conditions. “Dionysian ecstasy,”—and Nietzsche’s fantastic style[[942]] should not hide the soundness of his idea,—“Dionysian ecstasy can give to a whole throng this artistic power of seeing itself ringed about by a host of spiritual forms with which it feels itself essentially one.” This passing into another character on the part of a throng, homogeneous of course and instinctive, is the beginning of the drama, and differs from the work of the rhapsodist. “All other choral lyric of the Greeks,” says Nietzsche, “is only the Apollinian solitary singer intensified; but in the dithyramb there stands before us a community of unconscious actors[[943]] who see one another as transformed.” The drama, in short, came from the union of a Dionysian spontaneous, communal song, in itself chaotic outburst of passion, and the ordering, restraining, artistic, deliberative spirit which breathed order into this chaos and is known as the spirit of Apollo. Thinking on the functions of this artistic, Apollinian spirit, one is reminded of De Vigny’s definition of art, as “la verité choisie”[[944]]; while it is clear that in the cadences of his verse, and in the emotion that surges through it, the poet is still a part of that Dionysian throng. In a word, the Apollinian process, which is the only process one now connects with one’s idea of art, or of poetry, intellectualizes and therefore individualizes emotion. An instructive essay by Dr. Krejči[[945]] regards the fundamental dualism of poetry as a contrast between the involuntary or mechanical element, and the element of logical or voluntary creation. As we follow back the course of poetry, he asserts, the voluntary and creative element decreases, while there is a steady gain in the automatic, the mechanical, and the spontaneous,—a gain which is made still more probable by Bücher’s theory of rhythm. If one could see the conditions and hear the songs of a primitive time, one would find poetry, so Krejči makes bold to assert, entirely swayed by the unreflective, mechanical, and spontaneous element.[[946]] In this sense, Apollo is thought mastering emotion, art in control of that spontaneous, chaotic, and yet rhythmic expression of the Dionysian throng.
Instinctive and spontaneous expression, then, is to be assumed for primitive song; but the communal idea involves something more. It demands a homogeneous body of people. Again tradition points this way, as in the case of rhythm and of the dualism between nature and art; again, as before, voices are raised in protest; again M. Tarde is in the field with a formula directly opposed to the formula of tradition; and again we must turn to modern science for some definite answer, only to find it fairly in favour of tradition and backed in this respect by ample evidence from ethnology and literature. Modern psychology, it seems, leaves one free to conceive a throng of primitive men so homogeneous that a common emotion would call out a common and simultaneous expression. Thoughts diverge, and thought, or purpose, controls modern art as it controls modern emotion; but primitive folk did little thinking, if one may here trust ethnology and the savage, backed by the controlling evolutionary facts of literature.[[947]] Savage thinking is limited to the few objects of the savage world, and any effort beyond this is painful; the wild man complains of headache the moment he is forced to “think.” Deliberation implies memory, and purpose regards future complications; but we saw that the Botocudos have no legends, and we know how accurately care for future needs marks progress in culture; barring those ancestral shadows, as with Eskimos, it is true of all savages that they have no history at all. So utterly disappears our sharp individual thinking as one touches savage life. Herodotus was surprised to find a tribe “that had no name”; but, as Schultze notes, Bushmen now do not know one another by any individual appellation. The language of all savage tribes reflects this lack of individual thinking in our sense; and it is to tribal emotion, instincts of tribal life and their social expression, that one always looks for what must pass as the intellectual life of the savage. The individual savages do not think, but they feel; and feelings, unlike thoughts, tend to converge. Nor, again, a most important point, is the communal elation of the primitive throng to be confused with the imitation of a modern crowd, yielding, after individual mental suicide, to the suggestions of a leader who does the thinking while the crowd acts out his thought. Ethnology records the fact, but few if any scholars have noted its significance, that savages are formidable and command civilized respect in proportion as they act in mass and as a unit, while modern man is contemptible in the mass; modern man is formidable as an individual, while the individual savage is little better than an idiot. Detached from the throng in which and by which he thinks, feels, acts, he is a silent, stolid fellow, into whose silence romantic folk like Châteaubriand and Cooper have read vast philosophies, and from whose forced conversation, uncentred and mobile as a child’s, missionaries have drawn most of their conflicting and suspicious statements about savage myths, customs, beliefs, and ways of thought. Evidence about savages in the mass, about their communal life, on the other hand, is nearly all straightforward and consistent. Hence a conclusion of vast reach and meaning for the beginnings of poetry: just as individuals are superior now, just as the mob, the masses, the profanum volgus, what not, are objects of contempt in these latter days,[[948]] so this mob, these masses, were far and away superior to individuals in conditions of primitive life and at the start of social progress. By the very terms of the case, and in the struggle for existence, social man was forced to win the early fight by social consent, and this was the overwhelming fact to which all individual considerations had to yield. This superiority attached, of course, to what the mass did and said and sang as compared with individual utterance. Human nature remains unchanged, but human conditions are always changing. One must not treat primitive man, with regard to the conditions and outcome of his life, in terms of modern man. The mob, the masses, exist for us mainly as the raw material of social and political factions. Lack of bread, of work, or the infringement of fancied rights, leads to a common and intense emotion, the first requisite of mass movement; a leader of some sort, with a plan which comes of more or less thinking, sways the mob to a definite act. But the behaviour of a mob, the doing and expression of a mob, are now in sharp antithesis to that doing and expression of individual men at the bidding of individual thought, of deliberation, plan, and definite purpose. Conditions of primitive life, so all evidence goes to prove, reversed this order; and it is a totally evil process when one transfers the value of a modern mass of men to the communal throng, the horde, if one will, which began our social progress. Hence the error in Tarde’s ingenious argument.[[949]] Attacking the idea that a mass of men ever created language, he conceives the mass in terms of a mob, language in terms of our highly intellectualized and individualized speech; and he applies the same impossible test to religion and to poetry. Who, he cries, “ever saw a masterpiece of art ... planned and wrought out by the collective inspiration of ten or a hundred poets or artists?” None of us, certainly, save in some form of survival hard to recognize, has seen such a thing. Primitive man, on the other hand, knew nothing of a poetical masterpiece in M. Tarde’s sense. When communal “inspiration” was dominant, when the throng absorbed the individual, when thought hardly dared to show its solitary visage before a solid communal emotion, the masterpiece of art, that is, of individual planning, hardly had a place; under modern conditions of individual thinking, communal emotion is just as unproductive in the æsthetic realm. The masterpiece waited for the master; and one remembers M. Tarde’s delusion about the origins of all poetry in some “great book.” In stating his case for the artist, which is perfectly true for modern conditions, he is really stating the case, by implication, for primitive communal song.
But was this throng really homogeneous? Are the facts in accord with this theory of communal conditions and the outcome of them? Mr. Spencer, as every one knows, laid down the law that all social progress is from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous;[[950]] and M. Brunetière has adopted this principle as a guide to the study of literary development,[[951]] regarding it as the one doctrine of evolution, held by Spencer as by Haeckel, which stands the test of criticism and is beyond the reach of doubt. The history of culture, so M. le Bon thinks,[[952]] points the same way; “counter to our dreams of equality, the result of modern civilization is not to make men more and more equal, but to make them more and more different.” Comte assumed that the common trait of biology and sociology is this passing from the whole to the parts; and although Mr. Spencer, with his doctrine of cells, has largely set Comte aside, that part of the old system is intact. Popular books, supposed to sum up the best results of science, are to the same effect. In primitive times, says Reclus,[[953]] “all felt, thought, and acted in concert. Everything leads us to believe that at the outset collectivism was at its maximum and individualism at its minimum. The individual,” he declares, “was not the father of society; society was the mother of the individual.” Studies of prehistoric man, as in the stone age, point to a sameness of individuals now quite impossible to imagine.[[954]] Hennequin is not with Tarde on this point; the primitive community was homogeneous, and its members “were all nearly exactly alike in body and in mind.”[[955]] Gumplowicz is explicit for the beginning of society in homogeneous hordes.[[956]] A recent writer who has made a study of the horde and the family in primitive development,[[957]] and who is by no means of the extreme school,—he rejects promiscuity, for example,—declares the horde to have been the starting-point of social progress. Grosse, casting about for a state of savage life which shall give the best idea of the life of primitive man, finds it in a “homogeneous, undifferentiated mass,” thus backing Spencer at least in his sociological assertion;[[958]] and the best authorities bear out this view. The hordes which serve, in lack of better ethnological material, as the type of primitive man, are small and scattered; they have no arts, no division of labour; individual property is almost unknown, and the one piece of property, their hunting-ground, belongs to all the adult males in common. As little difference of rank exists as of property; seldom are there any leaders, and where, in a few cases, these are found, their authority is pitifully small. The only individuals who break this “homogeneous and undifferentiated” monotony are the supposed possessors of a magical power.[[959]] So runs the certainly unprejudiced account of Grosse. Even by Sir Henry Maine’s extreme patriarchal views, the family itself, the first social group, was a homogeneous and undifferentiated mass in those characteristics with which the student of poetry must deal. Mr. Tylor’s group of Caribs,[[960]] with uniformity of physical and mental structure, amply bears out the communal and homogeneous argument for earliest song; but perhaps the shortest way with dissenters is a passage by Waitz,[[961]] where he sums up the evidence for this uniformity of the individuals in a horde and in social groups of a low order. All their relations of life, he says, are simple, and are bent in one direction, the procuring of food; there is a maximum of instinct and common appetite, and almost no stir of mind such as follows the division of labour; and this uniform mental habit works upon the outward person, so that, physically as well as intellectually, the single man fails to stand out from the mass. Waitz, who quotes Humboldt to the same purpose, thus explains why the Romans, with their complicated civilization, found the Germans all looking alike, all of one type.[[962]] Wherever the horde is visible, even in a comparatively civilized case, as with the Scottish clans, there the resemblance of individuals, the emphasis of a type, is unmistakable; and it is precisely under these conditions that we find the survivals of communal song. Primitive man, moreover, dependent on the nature about him, and acting in his horde like other creatures in the face of a power which they fear, surrounded himself with a like horde of spirits,[[963]] themselves as little differentiated or distinguished in any way as the human horde which conceived them. Even under the highest civilization such conditions of the horde survive in communal worship. True, the informing power of Christianity is its individualism, its “flight of the one to the One”; but the litany, the general confession, the spirit of congregational worship, are suggestive not so much of the “O God, I” as of the “O Spirits, We,”—homage once paid by all the living souls to all the souls of the dead, and still lingering as a shadowy survival in two great festivals of the church. Religious emotion is still the strongest communal element in modern times, particularly when it takes the form of a great revival.
Against all this in general and Mr. Spencer’s theory in particular, M. Tarde, as was noted, set up his theory of the infinitesimal and the cell; against the narrower idea of differentiation in poetry,—epic, lyric, and dramatic regarded as developments from an earlier compact form in which the three were still united,—Professor Grosse,[[964]] who was so bold in his assertion of homogeneous life, asserts heterogeneous poetry from the beginning. Yet he presently lays down[[965]] the larger truth, which carries with it a confusion of his own particular denial on poetic grounds. “In the lowest stage of culture,” he says, “art appears, at least for us, simply and only as a social phenomenon.... In the higher stages, however, along with the influence which art exerts upon social life, there comes more and more into view the value of art for the development of individual life.... Between the individual and the social function of art is a deep antithesis.” In other words, he proves by his admirably selected facts, throughout the whole book, that the art of primitive times was mainly social, whereas the art of modern times is mainly individual. Moreover, he is very sure that primitive society was homogeneous. The inference is inevitable. Dr. Wallaschek, we saw, set down the “collectiveness of amusement” as main characteristic of primitive life. These things cannot be said in one breath, only to be followed in another by such amazing contradictions as the implication of Grosse[[966]] that the egoist in man is the first of poets, or the jaunty talk of Scherer about primitive poets and their public, their royalties, their authorship, when only a few pages away he tells us that “mass poetry,” poetry of the throng, is the differencing element in primitive æsthetic life. Posnett, to whom all students of poetry are under deep obligations for his vigorous sketch of comparative literature, does justice to the communal element in early song and reduces the individual, heterogeneous element to a minimum; his formula for poetic development is “the progressive deepening and widening of personality.”[[967]]
It is to be conceded that a superficial view reverses this order of progress. What does one meet oftener in history and song,—
O nimis optato saeclorum tempore nati,
Heroes, salvete, deum genus[[968]]—
than talk of a “heroic” age in the remote past, and of the commonplace, average-ridden present, the epoch, as Le Bon calls it, of crowds? Against the mediocrity, the hustings, the juries, the lynching-bees, the “suffrage of the plough,” the dead level of uninteresting masses, there floats up a vision of the knight on his quest, of the solitary hero at odds, like Hercules, with divinity itself, of the good old king who sits to judge his people in the gates. Have not we moderns the homogeneous mass, and was not the individual a child of the early world? Wilhelm von Humboldt[[969]] finds the secret of Homer in his “sense of individuality” and “individualizing impulse.” Haym, a careful writer, talks of the individualism of the Middle Ages as opposed to modern times. Blémont[[970]] admits that democracy is individualism, but contends that it makes for anything rather than for individuality, and simply levels human life; the mind ceases to be free, and men act in masses, simplify everything, make life monotonous. Against this, however, one needs only to recall that quotation just made from Le Bon: the process seems to be toward sameness, but is really toward diversity. Men may dress alike, may show concerted action, may discourage the unusual and set up a god of averages; but the individual is stronger than ever before, and he does more thinking for himself. Men move in masses, true; but it is less and less the herd instinct and more and more the voluntary coherence of thinking minds. Instinct has yielded to thought. The history of civilization is the making and unmaking of communities; society means more than it ever meant; but this is not denying the fundamental law of progress from homogeneous to heterogeneous, from communal to individual and artistic. One must not juggle with these terms. It is true that an army, a group of men for any purpose, which marches as one man, is the end and not the beginning of communal effort. It is true that the savage is notoriously fitful; there is anything but splendid purpose in his eyes; combined action, under certain conditions—that is, conditions of civilization—is difficult even for members of one tribe; their prevailing force seems to be individual and centrifugal; the bond that binds them to the community often seems slight beyond belief; as to their feelings, just now assumed to be almost a unit, “emotional variability” is the report of many a traveller.[[971]] This has been extended to primitive life, and to the moral side of the case; early man, says Pulszky,[[972]] was ruled by “unqualified selfishness,” and asserted “his individuality in every respect.” The same author speaks of “a gradation, the first word of which is selfishness, and the last, public sentiment.” Where in all this coil of caprice and incoherence is the homogeneous community expressing a common emotion by a common utterance? The answer is clear enough. Escape from this caprice, this incoherence, this centrifugal force, is found primarily in social consent, in the communal utterance which began the long struggle against purely selfish ends; and communal utterance begins, as has been shown, in the consent of rhythm. Strong as the selfish impulses were, so strong the need for at least an incipient check upon them in social action; and from social action and utterance sprang all those altruistic virtues which Pulszky lauds—patriotism, piety, duty to kin and to the race. The end of society is to take brute man and make him a civilized man, to let “the ape and tiger” in him die; man when nearest ape and tiger, at the beginning of social union, was individually brutish, stolid, selfish, idiotic, fitful, in a word, individually bad; and just so far as he submitted to social consent, lived for the horde, the clan, kin, country, so far he was socially good. Hence it is easy to see that in this homogeneous society all the beginnings of civilization, art, poetry, religion, would be overwhelmingly homogeneous, social, communal; the condition of their existence was the abnegation of the individual man in favour of the social man. In a word, society itself began in this social consent, and since it had such tremendous forces of selfishness arrayed against it in the primitive individual instincts,[[973]] the only way in which it could make its way was by utter suppression of the individual in so far as he was a party to the social bond itself. Hence a contradiction that is only apparent. The savage as a creature of animal instinct is as capricious and centrifugal as one will; as a creature of social act, emotion, thought, he has no individuality, and puts none into his expression; for it was precisely this tuition of social consent which little by little gave him the impulse to deed, feeling, deliberation, as member of society. Here is the solution of the problem. Arab boatmen who can not pull ropes in unison,[[974]] sing and dance together with a consent that astonishes the traveller. They are capricious, fitful individuals in regard to the new kind of work, but compact, communal society in regard to the festal consent which united their wandering hordes thousands of years ago. Descriptions of the savage state easily bear out this contradiction and this solution, if one will analyze the facts; and this is why one finds Spencer and Grosse asserting on one page the homogeneity and collectiveness of savage communities, and on another page the heterogeneous, capricious, individual, selfish traits of the savage himself. In literature we do not so clearly see both sides. Throng-poetry is rarely recorded; one merely describes a village or tribal chorus,—and takes down the individual song. Luckily, however, the “collective character” of primitive amusement is made as certain as such things can be, by the ethnological evidence considered in the chapter on rhythm, by the evidence of popular survivals collected in the chapter on communal song and dance, and by the evolutionary curves of poetry itself. Considering all this evidence, one escapes the snare laid in one’s path by the idea of individualism in the savage. That “emotional variability”[[975]] is individual indeed, and disappears precisely as the communal expression of emotion comes into play. It has been proved, too, that, like speech, rhythmic utterance and rhythm itself in the sense which Bücher gives to it, are not so much the outcome as the occasion of social union. The sense of this union, “the consciousness of kind” as Professor Giddings calls it, is at bottom a sense of order, and the “instinct for order” is best expressed in rhythm; rhythm, it was seen, is not invention and imitation, but discovery and consent. Anterior to any process of invention and imitation, which is a social act, must be the condition which makes this act possible,—a consciousness of kind and a social consent. Instinctive emotions of a homogeneous horde felt in common on a great occasion gave birth to a common expression in which the separate individuals discovered this social consent. Invention and imitation, begun as early as one will after this social consent, gave them the conditions of their activity; but they must not be put before it, nor, for considerable stretches of social development, could they be said to have an important place, since they grew with the growing importance of the individual in society. If one may dogmatize on the matter, one may think of three gradations in social progress. First, there is the consent due mainly to external suggestion working on instinctive movements: in the dance it is due to that festive joy of victory and that “rhythmic beating” outward, that rhythmic impulse inward, which Donovan describes; and in labour, as Bücher thinks of it, it is either the consent of a solitary labourer with the labour itself, or, more often, the consent of several labourers with those instinctive and necessary movements. Vocal and significant cries went with the movements in each case. Secondly, but contemporary with the other, one may figure a less festal occasion and a more active personal agency; five or six men marching abreast fall into step and find the labour of marching is lightened,—not a very different matter from the dance, but less communal and more unrestrained. Imitation comes slightly into play, but it is wholly subordinate to consent. Thirdly, imitation and invention get their rights where the individual discovers or invents an isolated act, in various degrees of artistic and social significance, from the jump over an obstacle by the leader in a row of men marching in Indian file, the sheep-over-a-fence process, as Mr. Lloyd Morgan calls it, up to the clever throwing of a spear, the tying together of two vine branches, the fashioning of a spear-head, which are invention outright, triumph of individual thinking, plan and deliberation detached from communal emotion. The leader is on hand; the “headless” hordes have heads. Spontaneity, instinct, the automatic, still dominant in communal dance and song, in reminiscential rites of every sort, have yielded in active life to thought and purpose of the individual, to division of labour, to that power to plan a protracted piece of work and carry it out in detail which makes for progress. But before this formula of invention and imitation can apply, before one talks of the leader and the led, there must be a coherent body which can resolve itself into these relations of parts; and precisely here is the beginning of society in social consent, and here, too, the beginning of poetry in communal and rhythmic utterance.