Vaughan, in his Golden Grove (1600), to label Moses and Deborah "the most ancient poets." 1

2

The thought of the Psalms and of King David naturally suggests the antiquity of the dance, and its connection with lyrical and instrumental music. Some one has said that when Adam and Eve leaped their first leap of joy and shouted their first shout of joy they gave the start to the dance and the duet. At any rate, in the dawn of history "the Apollinean instinct of solitary song and the Dionysian impulse of ecstatic communal emotion" were often accompanied by rhythmical motions of the body. At the close of a newly-discovered fragment (of the fourth century B. C.) of Timotheus' 'O IIépoaι we read: "But the Greeks set up a trophy, most holy shrine of Zeus, and aloud they shout the song of victory to Apollo, their protecting god, and in harmony with the rhythm beat the earth with measured tread." "The beat," says the latest work on musical notation," "is derived from the pulse, and is shown by raising and lowering the hand, — levatio, up-beat; positio, down-beat; or in Greek, arsis and thesis. Time was indicated by the raising and lowering of the foot by the Greeks, hence the word foot for a poetical measure." That is, the foot is the unit of time in verse, as the measure is in music. Later, in the delivery of the Greek ode, to the accompaniment of music and dancing, the singers moved to one side during the

...

1 A clean definition is that given in Chaytor's Companion to French Verse: "Poetry in its formal aspect may be defined, in order to distinguish it from prose, as language in strictly recurrent rhythmical form. By the use of rhythm we mean the introduction into language of a principle of proportion in the arrangement of words. .. When .. the recurrence of a voice-modulation can be anticipated with certainty by the hearer, rhythm becomes metre, and such rhythmical language becomes verse or poetry (in form). Hence metre may be defined as regularly recurrent rhythm." According to this, the English version of the Psalms, or Whitman's Leaves of Grass, would not be formal poetry, and would come under the head of rhythm, not metre.

2 (6 Dancing, the most real of the arts (Wagner), seeing that the whole man is concerned in it, from head to foot, with motions and gestures that give it tone, and rhythm that gives it speech, was also the primitive and universal art, the sign of social consent: consenting steps, with mimicry of whatever sort, timed a series of rude cries which expressed the emotion of the moment, and so grew into articulate language."— F. B. Gummere: The Beginnings of Poetry, 328. Notation, by C. F. Abdy-Williams: London, 1905.

strophe, and to the other in the antistrophe, standing still in the concluding epode.

At the basis of the Hebrew parallelism, the Greek strophe, antistrophe, and chorus, and the Teutonic refrain is, of course, the inherent animal-idea- already mentioned - of strength accumulated by repetition.1 This is notable in herdsmen's calls to animals; in parents' summons to children; in men's adjurations to work, fight, or win athletic triumphs; in funeral croons repeatedly dwelling on the virtues of the dead, etc. Such iteration goes from one word to a whole passage. Similarly, children demand absolute uniformity in the oral telling of their best-loved stories, and correct the narrator when he makes the slightest slip from the received version.

During the American civil war, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, then colonel of a regiment of colored troops, largely composed of former slaves, gathered at first hand thirty-six folksongs, religious, aspirational, and other. Most were of unknown or apparently remote authorship; one or two were of recent and known composition. Nearly all were influenced by scriptural thought or expression, but not to the destruction of racial characteristics or proper originality. As a rule, the songs abounded in the repetitions, refrains, contrasts, or parallelisms which are sure to characterize primitive verse. All were sung or chanted by groups, rather than by soloists, and often with a gusto amounting to frenzy. Instrumental accompaniments were exceptional. A favorite device was to add to some general statement or exclamation the names of the individuals of the company, one by one: "Hold your light, brudder Robert," etc., or

"Oh, my mudder is gone! my mudder is gone!

My mudder is gone into heaven, my Lord!"

followed by "my fader,” “de angels," and so on.

"The dusky figures," says Colonel Higginson, "moved in the rhythmical barbaric dance the negroes call a shout, chanting, 1 The refrain is "the main communal element in songs of labor; its functions in communal play [are] primarily a combination of consenting cries and movements in the festal dance." - F. B. Gummere: The Beginnings of Poetry, 314.

2 The Atlantic Monthly, 19: 685.

often harshly, but always in the most perfect time, some monotonous refrain." In one song, looking toward freedom, the inevitable "no more" burden bears a strong part: no more peck o' corn, no more pint o' salt, no more hundred lash, no more mistress' call. "My brudder, how long" is also a cry of universal humanity.

Some of these "negro spirituals," as Colonel Higginson calls them, have end-rhyme, with the usual ballad indifference to anything but rough assonances; but as a rule the balanced ideas, in refrains or elsewhere, furnish all the rhyme-art deemed necessary.

The gem of this important little ballad-collection is

"I KNOW MOON-RISE.

"I know moon-rise, I know star-rise,

Lay dis body down.

I walk in de moonlight, I walk in de starlight,

To lay dis body down.

I'll walk in de graveyard, I'll walk through de graveyard,

In one instance Colonel Higginson was able to catch folkpoetry in the making. He had long wondered whether these songs "had a conscious and definite origin in some leading mind, or whether they grew by gradual accretion, in an almost unconscious way." At last, in response to questioning, an oarsman confessed: "I been a-raise a sing, myself, once. Once we boys went for tote some rice, and de nigger-driver, he keep a-callin' on us; and I say, 'Oh, de ole nigger-driver!' Den anudder said, 'Fust ting my mammy tole me was, notin' so bad as niggerdriver.' Den I made a sing, just puttin' a word, and den anudder word." Thus, one began the singing, and the men, after listening a moment, joined in the chorus as if it were an old acquaintance, though they evidently had never heard it before, - with the following result:

Here, in South Carolina in the 'sixties, was the communal chant, developed on lines probably followed a thousand times before, in far antiquity and in many sundered lands.1

As all early songs were meant to be heard, not read, any sort of repetition helped the singer's memory and the listener's attention. "All the moods of verse," said Poe, "rhythm, metre, stanza, rhyme, alliteration, the refrain, and other analogous effects . . are to be referred to the human enjoyment of equality, fitness." The universality of the refrain satisfied Poe of its intrinsic value, but he undertook to improve it by variation, on the ground that "duplicate sameness or monotony" would have been rejected even in the origins of rhyme - which it certainly was not. Of the beautifully variant effects of Poe's "repetend" there can be no question; but the primitive ear, like the child's, better enjoyed the unaltered "over-and-over-again" effect, as even to-day we enjoy the refrains of Fine Flowers in the Valley, A Lyke-Wake Dirge, Tennyson's The Sisters, or Longfellow's My Lost Youth. The effect of cumulative contrast is sometimes best attained, as in the last-named poem, by a final utterance in prose. The purpose of the refrain is to furnish a contrast or a climax, or both. In such poems as Mrs. Browning's The Rhyme of the Duchess May the former is desired; in Poe's Raven both are kept in mind. Thus, in all lands and times, the rhythmical creation of beauty has proceeded, by variant means, to the arrangement of words in

1 "Negro music is spontaneous. In Africa it sprang into life at the war-dance, at funerals, and at marriage festivals. According to African students at Tuskegee, there are in the native melodies strains that reveal the close relationship between the negro music of Africa and America." Booker T. Washington.

such measured order as shall give utterance to passion and at the same time give pleasure to the ear. It must be sufficiently like ordinary prose to be easily understood, and yet obviously removed from common speech. In a way, rhythm is added to speech, in a way it is inherent in it. There is no need to hunt backward, from Teuton to Roman, or Roman to Greek, or Greek to Arabian and Egyptian, for the origins of an instinct which is universal, and is certain to appear indigenously. Tacitus says that the Germans went to war chanting the deeds of their ancestors, put into verse. The Anglo-Saxons rushed into battle, singing while they smote with the sword on the shield. The sad processions of Russian exiles on their way to Siberia have timed their monotonous songs to the clanking of their chains.

In all these different but similar creations, the ear is the lawgiver. Bede, our first English writer on versification, saw that the difference between metre and rhythm is that the latter is a free chant, not subject to any strict law.1 Before him, St. Augustine had said that all metre is rhythm, but all rhythm not metre. Rhythm is merely a somewhat regular arrangement of time-intervals. In it, as in verse, the syllable is by no means the metrical unit.

Balanced prose, the oratorical swing, the strong iteration, the effective contrast, have always been recognized by all writers on oratory, from Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian down; and all have argued that they must never become regular verse. Thus there may be rhythmical prose, but never metrical prose. But the best Greek and Roman rhetoricians all understood and emphasized the fact that "the harmony of language, even of prose, belongs to the science of music."

It is no wonder that writers as late as William Webbe (1586) believed in the old fable that Orpheus "by the sweet gift of his heavenly poetry withdrew men from ranging uncertainly and wandering brutishly about"; or that he reverently cited Plato in support of the theory that the first singers were called Vates because "inspired with some divine instinct from heaven," while the rest, "which sang of love matters, or other lighter devices alluring unto pleasure or delight, were called Poetae or makers. Thus it appeareth both eloquence and poetry to have their be1 See page 46.