Читать книгу The Beginnings of Poetry онлайн

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Here, then, are the vital elements in the discussion. Rhythm is an affair of instinctive perception transformed into a social act as the expression of social consent. It has been said that beginnings and not origins are the object of our quest; how rhythm in poetry may stand to rhythm in nature, to the breath or the pulse of man, to periodic movements of tide, of star, and so in vaster and vaster cosmic relation, or, again, to infinitesimal rhythms in the cell, in the cell of the cell,—are queries apart from the present purpose. Important, however, is the doctrine held by modern scholars that poetic rhythm is objectively an outcome of human activity, and subjectively a process of human perception.^[225] Perhaps the best short study of the wider question has been made by Wallaschek.^[226] Insisting that “rhythm is the form of the objective movement, time-sense (mesure, takt) the form of the perceiving subject-mind,” noting that “the evenness of time-groups in music arises from the original organic union of dance and music,” he goes on to point out a fact which seems to be fundamental for any study of beginnings in poetry as well as in the sister art, although it is music of which he speaks. Vocal utterance merely as result of “corporal stimulus,” song like that of birds, is not yet music,—nor, one may add, is the cry of the solitary infant, individual or racial, to be counted as poetry. “The peculiar germ which has alone been found capable of the enormous development actually accomplished in music”—and in poetry—“is the chorus, with its framework, the dance.” A bird’s song or a man’s cry is merely vent for emotion; but when several persons sing together, there is more than emotion, there is consent, and consent means that they must observe, group, and order the tones. “They could not keep together if they did not mark periods ... for there is no concert possible without bars. What they perform is rhythm, what they think is takt, and what they feel is surplus of vigour.” There may be some error in the details of this analysis. Wallaschek has not done justice to the “genesis of emotion,” as Ribot^[227] calls it, through unaided rhythm; he may not concede enough to the song of birds, and may be wrong in saying that no one ever heard animals sing in concert;^[228] hysteric cries, which tend to be rhythmic and show a maximum of emotion with a minimum of purpose, have doubtless more to say in early rhythm—one thinks of the songs of lament, the voceri—than he admits;^[229] but his main point about choral beginnings is of immense importance. Poetry, like music, is social; like its main factor, rhythm, it is the outcome of communal consent, a faculté d’ensemble; and this should be writ large over every treatise on poetry, in order to draw the mind of the reader from that warped and baffling habit which looks upon all poetry as a solitary performance. The modern reader is passive; even hearing poetry is mainly foreign to him; active poetry, such as abounded in primitive life, is to him the vagary of a football mob, the pleasure of school children; and to such a reader the words of Wallaschek are salutary indeed, insisting that not the sense of hearing alone is to be studied when one takes up the psychology of music, but the muscular sense as well, and that the muscular sense has precedence. “‘Making music’ means in the primitive world performing, not listening,” a statement which applies as well to poetry. And what sort of rhythm, under leave of Norden and the rest, is one to assume for the primitive consent whether in music or in poetry? Well, earliest music shows “an unsettled melody, an uncertain and constantly varying intonation, a perpetual fluctuation of pitch,” but, contrasted with all this, “the strict and ever prevailing rhythm,” “the precision and marvellously exact performance of numberless performers.”^[230] For two facts, then, of great moment in the study of poetry, there is universal testimony from savage tribes all over the earth. Singing is mainly choral and timed to the dance; and the rhythm, no matter how large the throng, is amazingly correct.