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All this is useful and suggestive; but it by no means does away with the fact of regular rhythmic utterance for primitive times. Who, for example, is going to believe that rime and alliteration were developed before regular rhythm,—regular rhythm, as will presently be shown, standing out as the one fact about savage poetry to which nearly all evidence of ethnology gives assent? Who will deny that quite as early as any priest recited his prayer or buzzed his magic in solemn prose, there was a throng of folk dancing and singing with a rhythm as exact as may be? Did the priests, even, recite in “irregular rhythmic prose” that repeated enos Lases juvate of the Arval rites, sung as they beat the ground in concerted measure of the dance? “So long,” says Usener^[167] in his book on old Greek verse, “so long as human societies turned in solemn and festal manner to the divinities, so long they made petition, thanks, laud, in measured and rhythmic verse, and the words were inseparable from singing and the steps of the march.” For purposes of this kind, and such purposes are the very soul of primitive social life, chanted prose is out of the question. An excellent authority in musical matters, Dr. Jacobsthal,^[168] points out that the rhythm, if one may so call it, of the chant stands to real rhythm as prose stands to verse, and that the song to which a throng must dance, as in primitive times, can “in no case” lack the regular rhythm. Who, moreover, that has read Bücher’s essay can overlook the fact that primitive labour must have begotten an exact rhythm, and very early must have given meaning to this rhythm by more or less connected words? The proof, offered not only by Norden but in those scattered hints already noted, breaks down when confronted with hard facts. Ballad metres are often rough in the copies which have come down to us, but a hundred considerations show this to have been the fault of the copy itself, not of the makers and singers,^[169] and to have been due to the transfer from oral to written conditions. There seems to be no reason why a letter should not be quoted which the late Professor Child wrote in 1885 to the author of the present book; “any volkslied,” he said, “shows as good an ear as any Pindaric ode by Gray or whomever else.” It is the sense of complicated metres which is due to culture and intellectual development, and not the sense of exact and simple rhythm. As regards that protoplasmic prose of the popular tale, which Norden calls “the essential test of primitive speech,” how can he prove that it is the essential test of primitive song? How different Bruchmann, who admits early prose narrative, but says distinctly that early poetry, lyric outpouring of emotion, was song; “the earliest of all poetry” for him is communal song, gesang in gemeinschaft, golden words indeed! Grosse is to the same effect. Who denies the tale, the loose prose style in short sentences verging on rhythmic effects? Of course the entertainer told his tale betimes; but earlier than this tale, the dance of the throng, as well as the labour of daily life, had from the very beginning mated sounds and words with rhythm, precise rhythm, as a festal and consenting act. A mass of evidence, soon to be considered, is overwhelmingly for this state of things. Norden appeals for the form of the tale to Radloff, a great authority; let us do the same for the form of the song. In an article on poetic forms among the Altaic Tartars,^[170] Radloff remarks that in these isolated tribes popular literature, without even the faintest influence from the lettered world, has been developed in a quite natural way. Especially worthy of note, he says, is the strictness of metrical form in their poetry. He notes, moreover, the inseparable character, under such conditions, of poetry and song. The specimens which he gives are anything but rhythmic prose, and the rhythmic law is anything but loose. The tales on the other hand are quite different; “these are not sung,” he says, “but recited,” although now and then the reciter sings a verse or so. Which came first, the entertainer and his audience, or the festal, singing throng? Evidence of ethnology and conclusions of sociology certainly put the singing, dancing throng as a primary social fact, and the relation of audience to entertainer as a secondary social fact. Mr. Joseph Jacobs^[171] has hailed the cante-fable as protoplasm alike of the metrical ballad and of the prose tale, one omitting prose, the other omitting verse; and while this does not really help Norden’s claim, it is worth the while to note how it assumes a development which is counter to all the facts. Even on its chosen ground of Celtic tales, this theory meets indications that the verse is original and the prose of later date.^[172] The cante-fable seems like a late form, a device of the entertainer; the scraps of verse are survivals, just as the chorus in a Greek drama is the survival of a drama in which all took part, with no division into actors and spectators. In the Chinese drama^[173] an Occidental ear is offended by a remarkable confusion of speaking and singing; even a single sentence in the dialogue is so divided that part is spoken and part is sung. This is no primitive and protoplasmic state; it is rather the confusion of contraries, than the germ of related and naturally developed forms of art. Poetry and prose in historic times have been approaching each other, not diverging, and the curve of evolution would indicate a wide distinction at the start. Mixture of prose, as Professor Sievers sees it, is a sign of decay in the Muspilli, in the Hildebrand Lay.^[174] On the other hand, in vigorous poetry like the Roumanian ballad there is no mixture of prose, while the Roumanian popular tale is sprinkled with verses; yet here is precisely where the protoplasmic state ought to be found for both arts, since the poetical style is “simple as possible,” has often no relative clauses for whole pages, and is full of repetition.^[175] Under simple conditions, poetry often breaks up into prose, but prose is not found in its transition to poetry; for proof it is enough to quote a recent writer on German ballads.^[176] “More and more,” he says, “the ballads disintegrate into prose, a process which has been noted for Spain, Sweden, Scotland, Portugal, and is also known in Germany.”^[177] He gives quotations and references to support his assertion, going on to name several well-known ballads which began as such and then, in the guise of prose tales, won as wide and as great a vogue as the originals had enjoyed before. Perhaps in the case of poetic composition at a time when intellect has mastered emotion, prose may be the basis of poetry, but this case has no bearing on primitive conditions. Whether a poet nowadays conceives his work in prose, as Goethe did in the Iphigenie, or begins with the “brains beat into rhythm,” is an individual matter. “When Gautier wished to do a good piece of work, he always began in verse,” say the Goncourts.^[178] Tradition makes Vergil write out his Æneid in prose and then turn it into verse; Vida^[179] commends this method for the prentice in poetry. There is a curious passage in Goethe’s letter to Schiller of 5 March, 1798, about renewed work on Faust. “Some tragic scenes were done in prose; by reason of their naturalness and strength they are quite intolerable in relation to the other scenes. I am, therefore, now trying to put them into rime, for there the idea is seen as if under a veil, and the immediate effect of this tremendous material is softened.” This, however, has nothing to do with primitive conditions of poetry; the simplicity of modern prose is an effort of art, and belongs with the intellectual empire, while rhythm, particularly in its early form of repetition, is the immediate and spontaneous expression of emotion, and likely to be more pronounced and dominant the nearer one is to the primitive state of things.