Chapter VI: Science and Communal Poetry (2)

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.

One thus faces a seeming paradox in the conception of poetry as at once the highest expression of the differentiated, deliberate, artistic individual, and, at the same time, the fullest expression of a homogeneous, spontaneous, automatic mass; the paradox vanishes at once if one will only see in rhythm consent and emotional cadence of a dancing, singing multitude, and in artistic phrase and thought the deliberate control and plan of the individual,—Apollo in the foreground, and the background filled with a festal Dionysian throng. Why refuse to see this social background, or, in another figure, this communal foundation of poetry? Guyau puts beyond doubt the essentially social character of the art, even under modern conditions; but one makes a phrase, and returns to the old way. A long succession of deliverances on solitary genius has befogged the critical vision and blotted this lode-star of social conditions from the sky. In other fields such a mistake is unknown. The student of political science would never deny that a representative in Congress, as his name implies, is the deputy of a throng that once, say in the forests of Germany, would have come together as a compact legislative body and settled questions of state. But in poetry the poet ends and the poet began, a creature of solitude, now in commerce with the immensities and infinities, and now holding out his hat to the public for a _honorarium_,—the public’s only part in the poetic process. If the public is brought in, it is to explain the poet, as with Sainte-Beuve and Taine, or to explain the gentle reader, as with Hennequin. Poetry is a whisper, a confidence, to this gentle reader. When the throng, not to speak of the silence about its active functions in poetry, catches up a poem that it likes, and roars it, as it roared Mr. Kipling’s _Absent-minded Beggar_, over all England, this is very salt in the wounds of the critic, who declares, with some justice, that here is no “poetry” at all; while the same author’s _Recessional_, with its individual appeal, its recoil from popular sentiment, its assertion of thought over emotion, is set down, and rightly, as “poetry of a high order.” Judging poetry by the standard of modern conditions, which are wholly individual, artistic, intellectual, the critic is right. The war-song of to-day, all lyrics of the throng, have a hollow and unreal ring in them; even Tennyson’s _Light Brigade_ somehow gives the effect of armour which is laced with bonnet-strings. The real song of war in an age of communal poetry was heard at that moment which Müllenhoff calls the supreme moment of all Germanic life, when the images of the gods were brought out, when the wedge was formed,—leaders of battle at the thin forward end and women and children in the rear,—the whole community at hand; with the hurling of Woden’s spear, all swept into the fight, chanting the great chorus of war. Here is the folk communal in organization to great extent, but not quite homogeneous; not a leaderless horde, but still holding to elements of that primitive life; here is still poetry of the people. Communal elation still furnishes the main cause of poetic utterance; the utterance is immediate; and development of the individual has not yet sundered the making and the hearing of a song.[976]