If after spending some time over the deep metaphysical speculations of a number of German linguistic philosophers you turn to men like Madvig and Whitney, you are at once agreeably impressed by the sobriety of their reasoning and their superior clearness of thought. But if you look more closely, you cannot help thinking that they imagine our primitive ancestors after their own image as serious and well-meaning men endowed with a large share of common-sense. By their laying such great stress on the communication of thought as the end of language and on the benefit to primitive man of being able to speak to his fellow-creatures about matters of vital importance, they leave you with the impression that these “first framers of speech” were sedate citizens with a strong interest in the purely business and matter-of-fact side of life; indeed, according to Madvig, women had no share in the creating of language.
In opposition to this rationalistic view I should like, for once in a way, to bring into the field the opposite view: the genesis of language is not to be sought in the prosaic, but in the poetic side of life; the source of speech is not gloomy seriousness, but merry play and youthful hilarity. And among the emotions which were most powerful in eliciting outbursts of music and of song, love must be placed in the front rank. To the feeling of love, which has left traces of its vast influence on countless points in the evolution of organic nature, are due not only, as Darwin has shown, the magnificent colours of birds and flowers, but also many of the things that fill us with joy in human life; it inspired many of the first songs, and through them was instrumental in bringing about human language. In primitive speech I hear the laughing cries of exultation when lads and lasses vied with one another to attract the attention of the other sex, when everybody sang his merriest and danced his bravest to lure a pair of eyes to throw admiring glances in his direction. Language was born in the courting days of mankind; the first utterances of speech I fancy to myself like something between the nightly love-lyrics of puss upon the tiles and the melodious love-songs of the nightingale.[110]
XXI.—§ 13. Primitive Singing.
Love, however, was not the only feeling which tended to call forth primitive songs. Any strong emotion, and more particularly any pleasurable excitement, might result in song. Singing, like any other sort of play, is due to an overflow of energy, which is discharged in “unusual vivacity of every kind, including vocal vivacity.” Out of the full heart the mouth sings! Savages will sing whenever they are excited: exploits of war or of the chase, the deeds of their ancestors, the coming of a fat dog, any incident “from the arrival of a stranger to an earthquake” is turned into a song; and most of these songs are composed extempore. “When rowing, the Coast negroes sing either a description of some love intrigue or the praise of some woman celebrated for her beauty.” The Malays beguile all their leisure hours with the repetition of songs, etc. “In singing, the East African contents himself with improvising a few words without sense or rime and repeats them till they nauseate.” (These quotations, and many others, are found in Herbert Spencer’s Essay on the Origin of Music, with his Postscript.) The reader of Karl Bücher’s painstaking work Arbeit und Rhythmus (2te aufl. 1899) will know from his numerous examples and illustrations what an enormous rôle rhythmic singing plays in the daily life of savages all over the world, how each kind of work, especially if it is done by many jointly, has its own kind of song, and how nothing is done except to the sound of vocal music. In many instances savages are mentioned as very expert in adapting the subjects of their songs to current events. Nor is this sort of singing on every and any occasion confined to savages; it is found wherever the indoor life of civilization has not killed all open-air hilarity; formerly in our Western Europe people sang much more than they do now. The Swedish peasant Jonas Stolt (ab. 1820) writes: “I have known a time when young people were singing from morning till eve. Then they were carolling both out- and indoors, behind the plough as well as at the threshing-floor and at the spinning-wheel. This is all over long ago: nowadays there is silence everywhere; if someone were to try and sing in our days as we did of old, people would term it bawling.”
The first things that were expressed in song were, to be sure, neither deep nor wise; how could you expect it? Note the frequency with which we are told that the songs of savages consist of or contain totally meaningless syllables. Thus we read about American Indians that “the native word which is translated ‘song’ does not suggest any use of words. To the Indian, the music is of primal importance; words may or may not accompany the music. When words are used in song, they are rarely employed as a narrative, the sentences are not apt to be complete” (Louise Pound, Mod. Lang. Ass. 32. 224), and similarly: “Even where the slightest vestiges of epic poetry are missing, lyric poetry of one form or another is always present. It may consist of the musical use of meaningless syllables that sustain the song; or it may consist largely of such syllables, with a few interspersed words suggesting certain ideas and certain feelings; or it may rise to the expression of emotions connected with warlike deeds, with religious feeling, love, or even to the praise of the beauties of nature” (Boas, International Journ. Amer. Ling. 1. 8). The magic incantations of the Greenland Eskimo, according to W. Thalbitzer, contain many incomprehensible words never used outside these songs (but have they ever been real words?), and the same is said about the mystic religious formulas of Maoris and African negroes and many other tribes, as well as about the old Roman hymns of the Arval Brethren. The mere joy in sonorous combinations here no doubt counts for very much, as in the splendid but meaningless metrical lists of names in the Old Norse Edda, and in many a modern refrain, too. Let me give one example of half (or less than half) understood strings of syllables from “The Oath of the Canting Crew” (1749, Farmer’s Musa Pedestris, 51):
No dimber, dambler, angler, dancer,
Prig of cackler, prig of prancer;
No swigman, swaddler, clapper-dudgeon,
Cadge-gloak, curtal, or curmudgeon;
No whip-jack, palliard, patrico;