Slowly, after much imitating and experimenting, men learned to sing their feelings. This achievement was so important that there is hardly another one to be compared with it. For the growth of civilization has been simply the growth in men of consciousness—consciousness of themselves and their surroundings. And every new song that men were able to make for themselves marked a new step in consciousness. To us it seems quite obvious that a deer, for instance, has four legs. But the fact is obvious only as everything else is obvious when it is really looked at. The great difficulty is to get people to look at things. And it was probably a real (and most important) discovery when the primitive huntsman realized that the deer he had been hunting had four legs, and not three or five. He simply hadn’t thought about the matter before. He hadn’t observed clearly. Now he had added one more fact about life to his mental treasure house. He had become one more degree clearly conscious.
Now, art has been the chief agent of this advancing consciousness through the centuries. Our huntsman perhaps never thought about the number of the deer’s legs until he tried to draw the deer with a bone knife on the wall of his cave. But when he had to create the deer in a work of art then he had to come to clear consciousness about the matter. And the same is true of every song that simple people have made. It necessitated true observation. It forced its author to see. It may seem childishly obvious to say in a song that the bluebells are blue, but most people pay little attention to the question. It is something to have thought the fact worth mentioning.
But it was much more. It was not only an increase in consciousness. It was an increase in experience. By singing over his little song about the bluebell the peasant enjoyed the bluebell a second time in his imagination. It is nothing against the song that the blueness of the bluebell is obvious. Most of the beautiful things in life are obvious but nevertheless go unrecognized. The important thing about the song is that somebody enjoyed the blueness of the bluebell so much that he had to sing about it.
The great use of these personal songs to people was that it helped them to feel at home in the world. ‘The first poet of human things,’ says the Countess Martinengo-Cæsaresco, ‘was perhaps one who stood in the presence of death. In the twilight that went before civilization the loves of men were prosaic and intellectual unrest was remote, but there was already Rachel weeping for her children and would not be comforted because they are not.’ Death as a mystery was a horror too great to be borne. But death made into a song could be looked at and in some degree known. The awful sense of helplessness as people stood beside a fresh grave was alleviated by their singing of their grief. When the mystery had become incarnated in a work of art they could face it and know who their enemy was.
Every man who feels emotions craves expression of them. The ability to express is perhaps what separates man from the animals. The man who cannot achieve the expression of what he feels sinks back into a spiritual numbness in which joy and sorrow are of less importance. But the man who is able to see the things that are within him and about him—to see them clearly enough to express them in songs—is able to take his place in life and go on to more consciousness and more power.
Something like this is the service songs have performed to men’s souls. But, most of all, of course, songs have taught men how to love. As men began to realize that love must be more than a mere blind craving they had to answer the question: ‘How much do I love her? How do I love her?’ And the question had to be answered in some kind of concrete terms. One old French lover says in his song that if King Henry gave to him the town of Paris on condition that he give up the love of his sweetheart, he would reply to Henry the King: ‘Take back your town of Paris; I love my sweetheart more, heigh-ho, I love my sweetheart more.’ And when we read the fine straightforward old French in which the song is sung we know that he meant it. It is evident that the whole estate of love and marriage has risen to a vastly higher level when the lover, instead of saying, ‘I want my sweetheart,’ can sing, ‘I want my sweetheart more than I want the town of Paris.’ So songs gave to life definite meanings and values.
IV
In the beginning, as we have said, it is probable that everybody made songs for himself. Helen Vacaresco noted a long song improvised by a Roumanian peasant woman who was going mad; the woman was suffering under a great sorrow and was trying to express it. Being simple and without knowledge or fear of artistic forms and laws, she was able to express it. And each day she wandered in the fields singing the song she had composed, changing it little by little. It was not made for the sake of making a song, but for the sake of expressing her sorrow. It was, of course, only half a song and a half a mechanical repetition of her troubles. But it had its beauty of word and something like a set melody; it was an emotion objectified, put into a work of art where it could be looked at and known.
Here was song at its very earliest beginning. It was spontaneous, it was personal, it was utterly sincere. And, because it sought some objective form, it was a primitive work of art. We may imagine the earliest songs starting in just this way. Perhaps this Roumanian peasant woman had her counterpart thousands of years ago. Her song, or part of it, was heard and imitated by others who felt the same sorrow. It was changed in passing from mouth to mouth. Needless words were dropped, weak expressions were strengthened. As men became able to look more clearly at their trouble the essential things in the song were emphasized or put in a more emphatic position. Everything was dropped from it that did not express the very heart of the emotion. The lines perhaps became more rhythmical; the verses began to balance and contrast with each other; the metaphors became more brilliant or more precise. Soon all members of the tribe knew it, and when the young men wandered away to other lands they took the song with them.
At the same time a similar perfecting process was going on in the music. The original melody was perhaps little more than a chant of two or three notes, the tune rising when the emotional pitch was raised and dropping when the movement became more calm. The tune was at first not thought of as a thing in itself. But gradually people became conscious of the two or three notes in their relation and succession. And they began to make them more varied, to express the changes of emotion more accurately. The melody became divided into stanzas and lines corresponding with the words and showed in itself where the thought came to a partial stop and where it began again. Then people began to notice peculiar figures which they had unconsciously put into the melody. They made use of these, balancing or contrasting them to add beauty to the tune. And gradually the melody came to have beauty and meaning of its own.