truth." Himself a flute-player, he would have been interested in the statement of a distinguished American organist who once declared the ultimate sound of Niagara, or the roar of a windswept forest, or the multitudinous din of a great city, to be in the key of A, octaves below the bass. Even this rather surprising dictum is not hastily to be dismissed; for many a musical ear, on experiment, will determine that these sounds are at least nearer A than C or E. As regards language, with which poetry is chiefly concerned, Claude Fauchet, at the close of the sixteenth century, said in his still serviceable treatise on the Origines de la Langue et Poesie Françoise, Ryme, et Romans (1581): "Car cela estant uniuersel en la nature, que tout mouuement se fait auec temps, le son & les paroles estans mouuements, ainsi qu'il appert par leur origine (qui n'est autre chose qu'un air batant l'artere par laquelle il passe, & qui depuis est moderé par le palais, la langue & les dents), il est necessaire que ce mouuement de paroles se face auec le temps." And again: "Puis donc (dit Aristote) que le temps est le nombre du mouuement; le rhythme (s'il est la mesme chose que le temps) sera le mouuement du nombre." The historian Mitford, in his Inquiry into the Principles of Harmony in Language (2d ed., 1804), had similarly striven to explain the movement of verse by reference to the laws of music. Melody, said he, is a pleasing succession of varying tones exhibited in the flow of speech. There was nothing new, therefore, in Sidney Lanier's detailed attempt to find the basis of verse in the laws of sound, and to measure rhythm by musical notation. Modern methods go still farther, in making poetry visible as well as audible; for Professor Scripture's phonograph cylinders, described in his Experimental Phonetics, show similar curves for similar that is, symmetrically rhythmical, or rhyming sounds. Here, of course, are no words or syllables - in themselves mere phonetic devices - but wave-lines corresponding to vocal or other sounds.1 Thus the poet's dream of harmony becomes a fact in the labora 1 "With the aid of new and more sensitive methods of making gramophone and zonophone disks, we may hope to catch verse as it flows from the mouth of the unsuspecting poet, and thus to obtain and study some tory, where, not less than in the field or wood, there is exact truth in Keats' statement that "the poetry of earth is never dead." thing far closer to the real poem than the cold and inadequate skeleton of it that appears on the printed page." E. W. Scripture, in The Century Magazine, February, 1902. II THE RYTHMICAL CREATION OF BEAUTY WHAT is the relation between the poetry of earth and the poetry of man? Whatever we may dismiss as fanciful or unproved, this at least is certain: Nothing moves without vibrations; were the eye and the ear not reached by waves of light and sound, nature and art, as far as man is concerned, would almost disappear. Pulsation, impulse the very etymology of the words tells the universal fact that communication from man to man is ever related to the rapidity, force, regularity, or variability of vibrations. The more rhythmical they become, the more intense the feeling aroused. Reversing the statement, the deepest feeling instinctively adopts the rhythmical form: the wail of the animal, the lamentation over the corpse, the battle-cry, the love-song, the "Laus Deo" of noble triumph. The spontaneous singer may burst into recitative, parallelism, alliteration, assonance, end-rhyme, or what not; but he is sure to be rhythmical, and to stir his hearers in proportion to the strength and skill of his wave-like swing from thought to thought and stress to stress. "Observe," says Carlyle, “how all passionate language does of itself become musical, — with a finer music than the mere accent; the speech of a man even in zealous anger becomes a chant, a song. All deep things are Song. It seems somehow the very central essence of us, Song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls! The primal element of us; of us, and of all things. The Greeks fabled of Sphere-Harmonies: it was the feeling they had of the inner structure of Nature; that the soul of all her voices and utterances was perfect music. . . . See deep enough, and you see musically; the heart of Nature being everywhere music, if you can only reach it." 1 Poe's definition of poetry as "the rhythmical creation of beauty" has never been bettered. Strictly considered, it includes song and symphony, - vocal and instrumental music of every kind. In the broad sense, music is poetry and poetry music. If we say that verse is the rhythmical creation of beauty in language, the statement is sufficiently accurate for all purposes of criticism. Whence comes the universal desire to create the beautiful? Many are the theories of the origin of art—that is, of created beauty in the world. Plant- and animal-decoration, for allurement or defence, accounts for the subconscious development of many lovely things, from the petal of a flower to the tail of a peacock. Phyllotaxy and flower-adornment, in the botanical world, are both serviceable and symmetrical; and in the animal kingdom many creatures survive simply because they appeal, by attractiveness at pairing-time, to an unquestionable sense of beauty in their kind. From the beautiful in substance to the beautiful in act is but a step; hence the gallop, the play of the body, the spectacular flight, the bird-song. Animals and children gesture, intone, sing; and here the element of feeling, indispensable in the lyric, is added to the satisfaction inherent in proportion. Puttenham declared that "all arts grew first by observation of nature's proceedings and custom." Many other theorists have connected the beginnings of song with direct imitations of birdmusic, reproduced by the human voice, or by a primitive flute, like Siegfried's." But the more natural explanation is to be found in the instinc 1 On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, 78. 2 So Lucretius (I, 5, 1378): “At liquidas avium voces imitarier ore Ante fuit multo quam laevia carmina cantu and compare the onomatopoetic imitations in the Birds and Frogs of Aristophanes. The "Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo," of Nash's Spring is known to everybody from its place on the first page of Palgrave's Golden Treasury. away tive development of the human voice itself, as truly a musical instrument as the skylark's. In that development, of course, onomatopoeia and the "bow-wow theory" explain many things. The poetry of language would be a different thing without the melodious 7, the explosive p, the dull d, the hissing s, and so on. There was an entire sentence of woe in the Anglo-Saxon "walawa." Lord Bacon understood all this very well when he said, in his Natural History: "There is found a similitude between the sound that is made by inanimate bodies, or by animate bodies that have no voice articulate, and divers letters of articulate voices; and commonly men have given such names to those sounds as do allude unto the articulate letters; as trembling of hot water hath resemblance unto the letter ; quenching of hot metals with the letter z; snarling of dogs with the letter r; the noise of screech-owls with the letters sh; voice of cats with the diphthong eu; voice of cuckoos with the diphthong ou; sounds of strings with the diphthong ng." Long before Bacon, Ovid had been reminded by m of the lowing of the ox. Birds and most savages use a very primitive melody, chiefly relying, for effect, upon iteration. Some Indian-songs- and Indian prayers are always lyrical-consist of only three words, which are sung over and over again. At first, the human song, like that of the bird, shows little emotional variation; stress of intonation and emphatic gesture come later, in the savage as in the child. When Darwin suggested that singing preceded speech and was the author of it, he simply sent us back to the baby's cry and coo, and to the interjection, which is language before it is disintegrated into words. While the play-instinct in childhood does not account for the origins of art, it does make plain the universality of the artinstinct, and its early appearance in the individual life. Aristotle perceived that the two chief causes of poetry were our implanted instincts of imitation and of harmonious rhythm, by which rude improvisations gave birth to true song. The child, as every one knows by his own experience, is a primitive singer, player upon musical instruments, orator, dramatist, painter, architect, soldier, and military and naval engineer. In his various |