Comparative Literature/Book 2/Chapter 2

by Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett

CHAPTER II.

EARLY CHORAL SONG.

§ 28. From the subordinate position of the commonalty (dêmus) in the Homeric poems, a position not much superior to that of the serfs as compared with the kings and chiefs, it might not be supposed that song in Greece, as elsewhere, was in its beginnings neither the making of royal minstrels like Demodokus, nor the celebration of princely heroes like Achilles and Ulysses. But the width of sympathy between Greeks of many tribes and cities in the Homeric poems, no less than the common knowledge they imply of heroic and divine myths, and even special tales of epic character,^[1] are enough to prove that behind the Iliad and Odyssey existed poetry of local sympathies and songs of local sentiment long before the genius of one master-bard, or of many, built up the Greek epics into the forms in which they have reached us. As has frequently been observed, the picture of social life in the Homeric poems is that of men who have left the barbarous isolation and exclusiveness of clan life far behind them; men who, if they have lost much of the clansmen's equality, are gaining wider sympathies and artistic refinement under the guidance of chiefs and kings. Social life as depicted in the Homeric poems bears striking resemblances to that of the medieval seigneurs, allowing for great differences wrought among the latter by ideas of a world-religion and a world-empire. If the medieval priest was the mediator between the serfs and God, the Homeric priests are honoured by the commonalty (dêmus) as gods.^[2] If the medieval singers wander from seigneur to seigneur, or enjoy their permanent patronage, the Homeric bard enjoys like patronage or security in his wanderings.^[3] But in all this we have personal power and personal poetry. We have left far behind us the communal life and song of the clan; and we must not suppose, because we have thus left these out of sight, that the banquets of the princes are the true homes of early song, and that the aoidos or the troubadour are the earliest of song-makers. The truth is that the sentiment of the lines—

"Lordship of the many is no good thing,
⁠One lord let there be, one king to whom Zeus,
Son of crafty-counselled Kronos, giveth
⁠Sceptre and themistes^[4] for his rule"^[5]—

is almost equally removed from the spirit of the clan and that of the city republic; and the makers of such lines are the poets neither of the commune nor the commonwealth. Let us, then, try to discover the character of the songs which we believe to be older than those of either the cities or the kings.

Critics of Greek literature have long distinguished the lyric poetry of the Dorians, intended to be executed by choruses and accompanied by choral dances as well as instrumental music, from the Æolian lyric, meant for recitation by a single person who accompanied himself with some stringed instrument, such as the lyre, and with suitable gestures. The former, public and often religious in its character, preferred subjects of general interest, while the thoughts and feelings of the individual were the appropriate themes of the latter. It is true that no hard-and-fast line can be drawn between these Doric and Æolian lyrics; we know, for example, that Lesbian poems were sometimes composed for choral recitation, such as the humenaios of Sappho imitated by Catullus. Still, the general difference between these choral and personal lyrics is clear; and no less clear is the difference of social conditions which such lyrics respectively reflect. Like the communal institutions of the Dorian states, their choral poetry keeps before our eyes those groups of kinsmen, with common property and feasts, which lie in the prehistoric background of Greek history. The contrast of personal and impersonal poetry is indeed found in literatures which have passed far beyond the clan age. Thus, the epic poetry of medieval France has been divided into the popular and the individual narrative, the former sung or chanted to a monotonous tune, the latter artistically recited.^[6] But the contrast of the choral and personal lyric carries us back much farther than feudalism, and brings out some of the earliest characteristics of song and consequently of literature. Some pictures of communal festivals will enable us to realise how much older are these choral songs than any courtly makings of the troubadours.

We are among the Dacotahs of North America. We are present at the sacred feast of one of their clans, "The Giant's Clan," as it is called. High festival is now being held in honour of Ha-o-kah, "The Giant." We enter the wigwam within which the ceremony is taking place. Round a fire, over which are boiling kettles full of meat, there are Indians dancing and singing. They wear no clothing but a conical cap of birch, so streaked with paint as to represent lightning, and some strips of birch round their loins. As they sing and dance they thrust their bare hands into the boiling pots, pull out pieces of meat and eat them scalding hot. For does not the god, Ha-o-kah, in whose honour they dance and sing, shield them from all pains?^[7] Here, and in many like cases, it is clear that the words of the choral song are altogether of secondary importance—the magic symbolism of dance and gesture is nearly everything. We watch an infant drama, a savage mystery-play, in which dance and music and gesticulation are as yet confusedly blended. Perhaps in the next tribe we meet we may find another of these infant dramas going on. Here the supply of buffalo-meat has fallen short. The prairie is deserted by the herds. Somehow a new supply must be secured; and the magic dance which the braves are now performing is designed to lure back the herds to the old hunting-grounds. The Indians, dressed in buffalo skins, are dancing the Buffalo-Dance; and, as each tired warrior drops out, acting as he does so the death of the buffalo, another brave takes his place; and so the dance goes on, perhaps for weeks, until the object of the magic rite is secured and a herd discovered on the prairies. Here, again, the symbolism is everything; as yet we are far from having reached the stage at which the words of the choral song are separated from the music and the dancing, much less written down.

Let us pass from the hunting-grounds of the Red Indian to the Mir, or village community, of Russia. It is a fine spring day, and the girls^[8] of the Mir have determined to hold their "circle" or Khorovod, their village festival of blended dance and song. In holiday dress they are now streaming towards the open space where the Khorovods are held—the choros, or "dancing ground," of the commune, as a Greek of the Homeric age would have called it. "When the appointed spot is reached," says Mr. Ralston, in his Songs of the Russian People, "they form a circle, take hands and begin moving this way and that, or round and round. If the village is a large one, two Khorovods are formed, one at each end of the street; and the two bands move towards each other, singing a song which changes, when they blend together, into the Byzantium-remembering chorus, 'To Tsargorod will I go, will I go; With my lance the wall will I pierce, will I pierce.'" Little dramas, too, we might see these Khorovods performing, if we had time. But we must pass on to another picture of communal song-dances; only let us note in passing how the singing and dancing are of greater import than the words or the authorship of the song. The village, like the tribal, community has far less to do with written poetry and personal authorship than with the dramatic dance.

But now we are in Sparta, spectators of the Gymnopædia, or festival of "naked youths." Large choruses of men and boys are taking part in the festival; and, as in medieval towns the burghers assisted at the mystery-plays, the general body of the Spartan citizens joins in the song and dance, and has not yet become mere onlookers at a professional performance.^[9] The boys in their dances are imitating the movements of wrestling and the pancration; and soon they will begin the wild gestures of the Bacchanalian worship. It is a choral carnival in which an outburst of communal feelings has for the moment drowned the little voices of self-interest. These choral dances and songs contrast remarkably with the personal and artistic lyrics of an Alcæus or Sappho; and perhaps this is one reason why the intensely personal art of later Greece cared so little to preserve them. However this may be, our communal song-makers of the Greek city, as of the Russian village community and the Indian tribe, are a group in which individual song-making and the celebration of individual feelings are still in the background.

§ 29. Dr. Hans Flach, in his History of the Greek Lyric,^[10] has written with all a German scholar's usual erudition on the folk-songs of the Greeks, their development of flute-playing, the Oriental influences on their lyric, and other topics deeply interesting to the special student of Greek literature. We cannot, however, regard Dr. Flach's book as an adequate study of the choral or the personal lyric from the standpoint of social life in early Greece. We believe that K. O. Müller's method of studying the beginnings of Greek song in close company with social life has been too much neglected by recent subjective criticism. Nay, farther, we believe the study of early Greek poetry as dependent on social development in Greece to be only a step towards a larger comparative study, which shall forget classic exclusiveness to learn from Norse or Arab as well as from Thrace and Pieria. The truth is that when we soberly survey the materials out of which Dr. Flach and others would build up a history of lyric poetry in Greece, we find them singularly inadequate. We find ourselves hazarding theories of Greek lyrical progress without real knowledge of early Greek music and dances—two-thirds at least of the old choral poetry. Moreover, when it is remembered to how small an extent the evolutions of dancing, especially when of a dramatic character, can be expressed in words, and how improbable it is that the Greeks, in days when even writing was unknown, should have possessed any system of musical notation, it is hard to believe that accurate information on these subjects can have reached us through such channels as the works of a Plutarch or an Athenæus. We shall be contented, therefore, to listen here to some echoes from old Greek choral song, observing how faint they are compared with the many voices of the personal lyric, and to support our belief that the choral was the oldest form of the Greek lyric, by comparison with other fragments of ancient song and by the communal organisation of early social life.

Who does not remember the picture of the vintage-festival on the Shield of Achilles? The beautiful vineyard, wrought in gold, is heavy with grapes, the black bunches hanging overhead, and ladders wrought in silver are standing all through the vineyard. Round about are the trench and hedge, and a single path leads to and fro for the grape-bearers at the vintage. Maidens and youths are gleefully bearing the luscious fruit in wattled baskets; in their midst is a youth, playing delightfully on a clear-sounded harp and "singing with sweet voice the lovely Linus Hymn," while others, with measured beat of foot and with reels (σκαίροντες), are following with the cry of ai Line. The scholiast on this passage has preserved for us a specimen of this Linus Hymn which critics have variously emended. Adopting the emendation of Bergk,^[11] we may thus express the meaning and metre of the song in English:—

"O Linus, honoured of all gods,
For unto thee have they given,
First among men, to sing ditties
Sung with the clear-sounding voices;
Phoebus in jealousy slays thee,
Muses in sorrow lament thee."

It has been observed that a pair of these lines with slight alteration can form an hexameter; and, accordingly, the origin of the hexameter, with its strong cæsura, has been found by some writers in the junction of two such lines. However this may be, both the form and spirit of the Linus Hymn are thoroughly primitive; and whether we believe, with Müller, that it laments the tender beauty of the spring burned by the summer heat of Phœbus, or see in it the dirge of some human hero like the yearly lament of the Hebrew maidens over Jephthah's daughter, we cannot but feel in it the communal air of the choral lyric in which, as in the Ialemus song, or the Tegean Scephrus, or the Phrygian Lityerses, or the Syrian laments for Adonis, "not the misfortunes of a single individual but a universal and perpetually recurring cause of grief was expressed."^[12]

Again, this communal spirit meets us in traditionary choral songs of ancient Greece, consisting, like the Indian choral songs described by Dr. Schoolcraft, of a few words in which the principal thoughts were rather touched than worked out. Thus, as Plutarch tells us in his Life of Lycurgus (ch. xxi.), there were in certain Spartan festivals responsive choruses of old men, young men, and boys. The chorus of old men began and sang—

"Valiant young men once were we;"

the chorus of young men reply—

"We are still so; if it please you, look upon us and rejoice;"

and the chorus of boys rejoin—

"Yes, but we are yet to be stronger far than all of you."^[13]

So the women of Elis, Plutarch tells us,^[14] used to sing the ancient hymn—

"Hero Dionysus, come
To a holy ocean-shrine,
With the Graces to a shrine,
Rushing on with hoof of ox;
Holy ox!
Holy ox!"

But here we must be careful to draw a distinction between merely popular songs and the old communal poetry. Just as Simonides and Pindar represent that lyric which in the growing unity of Greek tribes and cities found an opportunity to rise above local idioms and local sympathies, just as in the Homeric epics we find a feeling of Greek unity in spite of local kings and tribal distinctions, so in the old choral songs we should expect strongly local feelings and a much weaker sense of common Greek kinship than is to be found either in the personal lyric or in the epic poetry. We cannot, therefore, hope for light on the character of the early Greek choral lyric from such fragments of popular songs as the address of the wandering minstrel to the potters (Kerameis), or the Eiresiône of children going from house to house, levying what they can, in autumn during Apollo's feast, preserved in the pseudo-Herodotean life of Homer. These are no more indications of clan poetry than the English street-ballad, or the Indian songs which civil servants in India have heard from the lips of wandering singers, and sometimes taken down in writing as specimens of primitive song-making. Such fragments, perhaps all extant fragments of Greek song, belong to days when the local life of the Greek tribes and cities had lost much of its early separateness; indeed, the development of Greek language as well as sympathy must have been largely fatal to the preservation of old local song. Even the specimens of early song just given cannot, therefore, be accepted as really carrying us back to the local origines of Greek poetry. Still we may gain from them some conception of such poetry. In the same way, there are ancient descriptions of these choral lyrics which may be accepted as truthful, and graphic pictures of early, though not the earliest, Greek song-makers. Two of these we shall now present as belonging respectively to the autonomous city, and to the sacred festival of leaguered clans meeting at the seat of their league-god's worship. Students of the Amphiktionic League need not be reminded of the prominent part played by such tribal federations in early Greek life, a part which at one time promised to be as prominent in the social life of Greece as the Berith or Sacred League ("The Covenant") in that of the Hebrews, or the Sacred Months in the early history of the Arab tribes.

§ 30. One of these descriptions brings before us the humenaios, or choral song of marriage, in the life of the old Greek city. The marriage festival is going on, and under the flashing lights of torches the bride is being conducted through the streets. "Then a loud humenaios arises; dancing youths were whirling round (ἐδίνεον), while among them flutes and harps resounded; and the women, standing at their thresholds, one and all admired and wondered."^[15] like picture of the humenaios song and dance is given in the Shield of Hercules, attributed to Hesiod. "Some bear the bride to the husband on the well-formed chariot; while a loud humenaios arises. Burning torches borne by boys cast from afar their lights; forward move the damsels beaming with beauty. Both are followed by joyful choruses. One chorus, of youths, sing to the clear sound of the pipe with tender mouths, and make the echoes to resound; the other, of damsels, dance to the notes of the harp."^[16] In this choral song of marriage in the early Greek city, the publicity of the festival and the communal sympathy of the citizens remind us that as yet the city dêmus is not far removed from the settled clan or village commune, and that the feelings of common kinship and connubium have not yet been altogether lost by the clans and tribes of the city. The epitaphios of Adonis is scarcely so far removed from the thrênos, or dirge of the clan, as is the marriage song-dance of the commune from the artificial marriage-songs of modern poetry, such as, for example, the Prothalamion of Spenser.

In the hymn to the Delian Apollo we have a glimpse of a Greek tribal league-festival, which reminds us of the Hebrew tribes going up to the place which Yahveh chose, or the Arab at the Fair of ʾOkâdh. No doubt this hymn as it has reached us, written in hexameter verse of thoroughly epic tone, is no true specimen of the old and sacred "chorlyrik" of Greece. But it may be accepted as an echo of those sacred chants which are known to have prevailed in the early worship of Greek communities, and a truly ancient picture of choral singers. The allusion, at the end of the lines here translated, to dramatic imitations of different languages or dialects shows that the religious hymn of the Greeks, like some of the Vedic hymns, or like the medieval service of the Mass, contained the germs of a drama.

"But in Delos, Phœbus, thou art happiest;
⁠There Ionians long-robed gather for thee
With their children and their lovely ladies;
⁠So with boxing and with dance and singing
When the games are set they gladly praise thee.
⁠He who met Ionians thus assembled
Well might think them gods, to old age strangers,
⁠Looking on the men and well-girt women,
Ships of speed, and many forms of wealth,
⁠And, beside, that wonder ne'er to perish,
Girls of Delos, handmaids of Apollo,
⁠Handmaids of Apollo, the Far-Darter,
Who, when first they hymn Apollo's praises,
⁠Next remember Artemis and Lêto,
Artemis rejoicing in the arrow;
⁠Then a hymn of ancient men and women
Sing they, and delight the tribes assembled;
⁠For they know to mimic tongues of all men
And the rattle of the castanets,
⁠So that each would think his own speech uttered;
Such the skilful song they fit together."^[17]

§ 31. The war-song, the marriage-hymn, the dirge, chants to the ancestral gods, songs of the spring and autumn festivals—these and such as these would nearly exhaust the varieties of the clan's choral poetry. Many of these we perhaps hear at a distance in the more refined music of individual song-makers—the war-song, for example, in the embatêria or anapæstic marches of Tyrtæus, the dirge in such fragments of the thrênos as those of Pindar. In any work aiming at an exhaustive treatment of early choral song, the close communion of music and early poetry would require a special study of vocal and instrumental music in their beginnings. Such treatment in the present work, however, is clearly impossible; and the student can only be referred to the works of specialists, such as that of Dr. Flach previously mentioned. The beginnings of music and metres appear to have been almost as closely connected in Hebrew, Indian, and Chinese literatures as in the early lyrics of Greece, and the development of music and religious ritual seem, at least up to a certain point, to have been closely united in all these literatures. Without entering on any technical discussions of Greek or Hebrew, much less Indian or Chinese, music, we can discover abundant evidences showing that clans or guilds of bard-musicians, for the most part sacred, were the chief makers of early poetry; and without some such organisation it is difficult to imagine how the old song-dances could have been developed.

Among the early composers of Greek hymns stand out prominently the Eumolpids of Eleusis in Attica. To this clan the chief sacerdotal functions in connection with the worship of Demeter are known to have descended as an hereditary privilege. The very name of the clan—"Beautiful Singers"^[18]—points to their original office of sacred choristers; and, if the social development of the Greeks had resembled that of the Indian Aryans or the Hebrews, these hereditary musician-priests might have grown into Bráhmanic or Levitic castes. In the Lycomids of Attica we have another clan of sacred singers; and at Athens the playing of the Kithara at processions belonged to another clan, the Eunids. But these clans of musicians were by no means confined to Attica. Like the Hebrew clans of musician-poets, to which we shall presently refer, the flute-players of Sparta continued their art and their rights in families. To a family of musicians Terpander, the Lesbian, the reputed founder of Greek music, belonged. Simonides of Keos, who exercised the functions of chorus-teacher at the town of Karthæa, belonged to another such family. Other members of this family were Bacchylides and Simonides the younger, the writer on genealogies. Finally, Pindar himself seems to have belonged to a family in which music was a kind of hereditary art.^[19] Early epic poetry, also, was apparently arranged and perfected for recital, perhaps in some cases actually composed, by similar clans or castes of bards. Such, for example, were the Homêridæ of Chios, who, even if they were not a clan (γένος) of really common descent, were organised on the clan model like the Hebrew "sons of the prophets." Even the dramatic poets, as we shall see hereafter, did not altogether lose the hereditary culture of the poetic art.

Turning to the united cultivation of music and song among the Hebrews, we find the clearest evidences of its communal nature. Before the organisation of Yahveh's central worship we find local bodies, apparently organised on the clan model, engaged in this culture under the guidance of a leader, much as each town in early Greece appears to have had its chorodidaskalos, or teacher of the chorus. In one place^[20] we have a picture of "a band of Nâbîs"—a word by no means satisfactorily translated by the Greek word "prophet"—"descending from the high place, and before them lyre, and timbrel, and flute, and harp, while they dance and sing together as Nâbîs" (mithnabbëîm). There is another bard-clan at Naioth—"an assembly of Nâbîs singing and dancing, with Samuel standing as leader over them."^[21] Such also are the "sons of" (an ordinary Hebrew and Arab expression for clan) "the Nâbîs" at Jericho, and the "sons of the Nâbîs" who sit before Elisha at Gilgal.^[22] After the establishment of central government, however, among the Hebrew tribes, the service of the temple was directly modelled on the hereditary system of the clan or caste; and "sons" of Asaph, Heman, Jeduthun, became not only the performers but apparently the arrangers and composers of sacred hymns.

How far communal hymn-making extended in the early literatures of India and China it is now possible only to conjecture. Each of the Súktas (metrical prayers or hymns) of the Rig-Veda is attributed to a Rishi, or holy and inspired author. But the hymns of the Rik—evidently the oldest of the Vedas from the manner in which its hymns enter into the composition of the three later Vedas, Yajur, Sáma, Atharva—contain no directions for their use, the occasions on which they were to be employed, or the ceremonies at which they were to be recited; these were pointed out by later writers, in the Sútras, or precepts relating to the ritual; and even the deities in whose honour the hymns were composed are for the most part known to us through independent authorities, especially an Anukramaniká, or index accompanying each Veda. We cannot, therefore, attach much value to the reputed authorship of these ancient hymns. Yet it is worth observing that the Súktas of the Rik are arranged on two methods, one of which would seem to bring before us directly the communal authorship of the hymns. The arrangement by Khandas (portions), Ashtakas (eighths), Adhyákas (lectures), does not seem to depend on any fixed principle; but in the arrangement by Mandalas, "circles," six out of the ten "circles" comprise hymns by the same person or by members of the same family. Thus the hymns of the third Mandala are ascribed to Viswámitra and his sons or kinsmen; of the fifth, to Atri and his sons; of the seventh, to Vasishtha and his descendants. The ceremonies (offerings of clarified butter and the fermented juice of the Soma plant) of which these ancient hymns formed the verbal portion, seem to have taken place in the dwelling of the worshipper in a chamber set apart for the purpose; and the absence of allusion to temples or other public places of worship in the hymns apparently implies their family or clan character. We may, therefore, agree with Professor Wilson that the hymns of the Rik "were probably composed in many instances by the heads of families, or of schools following a similar form of worship, and adoring in preference particular deities."^[23] And if it is probable that different Indian families "had their own heroes, perhaps their own deities, and kept up the memory of them by their own poetic traditions,"^[24] if parts of the Veda are represented as actually belonging to such illustrious families, is it not still more probable that in China, the ancient seat of ancestor worship, the old hymns to the dead (some of which have come down to us in the Shih King) were regarded as the common property of the family or clan?

§ 32. In the Roman song of the Arval Brothers we have a specimen of the sacred guild-chant more closely allied to the solemn psalm of the Hebrew musician-castes, or the earnest appeals to Indra and other deities in the Vedic hymns, than to the artistic spirit of the Delian Hymn. In Rome, as among the Hebrews and the Indian Aryans, clan life long retained an intense vitality; and when it is remembered how the archaic family-system of the Romans, itself descended from the clan, formed the basis of Roman law, it need not surprise us that this song of a religious brotherhood is to be reckoned among the oldest of Rome's literary monuments. This primitive hymn was discovered at Rome in 1778, on a tablet containing the acts of the sacred college. Varro tells us that these Arval Brothers—"Brothers of the Fields"—were a rustic priesthood whose duty it was "to perform public rites that the fields (arva) may bear fruits."^[25] At the Ambarvalia, or Lustration of the Fields, the Arval Brothers apparently performed for the Roman people as a community what each house-father did for his own farm. Cato^[26] and Tibullus^[27] have described these Ambarvalian ceremonies, which seem to have been thoroughly in keeping with the agricultural spirit of certain Hebrew festivals. As in the Carmen Sæculare of Horace, in spite of Sapphic measure having displaced the old Saturnian, and sundry other signs of Greek influence, we may fancy an elegant improvement of the old communal hymns of Rome, so in the elegiac poem of Tibullus on the Ambarvalia we may find, if not an imitation of the Arvalian prayer, at least a description of the festival.

 

"Whosoe'er is by, be silent:
⁠Fruits and fields we purify
As the rite, from hoary ages
⁠Handed duly, doth ordain.
Bacchus, come with tender vine-branch
⁠Hanging from thy horns, and Ceres
Bind thy temples with the corn-ears.
⁠Rest the earth this holy dawning,
Rest the ploughman from his toiling,
⁠Let his heavy work be ended
While the ploughshare idle hangs.
⁠Loose the yoke-chains; now by full stalls
Oxen with wreathed heads shall stand.
⁠For the god be all things sacred;
Nor let any set her hand
⁠Woollen-weaving to the task-work. …
Look you, how to shining altars
⁠Goes the consecrated lamb,
While a white-robed crowd attendeth,
⁠All their locks with olive bound."

The next few lines seem to contain the prayer, which in its simplicity has at least all the appearance of being imitated, so far as elegiac metre and classical Latin would allow, from the old hymns.

"Gods ancestral, we are purging
⁠Fields and country-folk together;
Drive ye mischief from our confines;
⁠Let no crop with shoots deceptive
Mock the harvest, nor the slow lamb
⁠Fly the bounding wolves in fear."

The prayer is over, and the worshippers, confident in their due performance of the rites, may now enjoy their domestic amusements.

"Blithely, then, for full fields trustful,
⁠Let the countryman pile up
On the blazing hearth the big logs,
⁠While a crowd of household slaves,
Goodly marks of thriving farmers,
⁠Dance and build of twigs toy-houses."^[28]

The rest of the poem is modern enough in thought and sentiment, at one moment smacking of the Horatian wine-jar, at another recalling Lucretian theories of social progress.

The legendary origin of the Ambarvalia was that Acca Laurentia, foster-mother of Romulus, had twelve sons, with whom once every year she sacrificed for the fields. On the death of one of these sons, Romulus took his place, it was said, and with his eleven foster-brothers constituted the first college of the Fratres Arvales. At the yearly festival, which took place in May, the members of the college wore, as a sign of their priestly rank, crowns of ears of corn bound with white ribbons. The following translation of the ancient hymn is taken from Wordsworth's Fragments and Specimens of Early Latin.^[29]

"Help us, O Lares, help us, Lares, help us!
⁠And thou, O Marmar, suffer not
⁠Fell plague and ruin's rot
⁠Our folk to devastate.
Be satiate, O fierce Mars, be satiate!
⁠Leap o'er the threshold! Halt! now beat the ground.
Be satiate, O fierce Mars, be satiate!
⁠Leap o'er the threshold! Halt! now beat the ground.
Be satiate, O fierce Mars, be satiate!
⁠Leap o'er the threshold! Halt! now beat the ground.
Call to your aid the heroes all, call in alternate strain;
⁠Call, call the heroes all.
Call to your aid the heroes all, call in alternate strain.
Help us, O Marmar, help us, Marmar, help us!
Bound high in solemn measure, bound and bound again;
⁠Bound high and bound again!"

§ 33. This primitive hymn clearly combined the sacred dance (suggestively marked by such a name as the Carmen Saliare) with the responsive chant; and the prominence of the former suggests how readily the processional or stationary hymn might grow into a little drama symbolising the supposed actions of the deity worshipped. Professor Réville, in his interesting study of Mexican and Peruvian religions as illustrating the general growth of religious ideas throughout the world,^[30] rightly assigns a very prominent place to the sacred dance. Referring to the Peruvian hymns to the sun which were chanted at great festivals, every strophe ending with the cry "Hailly," or "Triumph," he remarks that "the grand form of religious demonstration among the Peruvians was the dance. They were very assiduous in this form of devotion; and indeed we know what a large place the earliest of the arts occupied in the primitive religions generally. The dance was the first and the chief means adopted by prehistoric humanity of entering into active union with the god adored. The first idea was to imitate the measured movements of the god, or, at any rate, what were supposed to be such. Afterwards, this fundamental motive was more or less forgotten; but the rite remained in force, like so many other religious forms which tradition and habit sustained even when the spirit was gone. In Peru this tradition was still full of life. The name of the principal Peruvian festivals, Raymi, signifies a 'dance.' The performances were so animated that the dancers seemed to the Europeans to be out of their senses. It is noteworthy that the Incas themselves took no part in these violent dances, but had an 'Incas' dance' of their own, which was grave and measured."^[31] When it is remembered that the choral hymn is not merely, as M. Burnouf tells us,^[32] "the first literary form that poetic thought assumed among the Aryan race," but even contains apparently the germs of lyric and dramatic poetry alike in the West and East, this accompaniment of choral song by symbolic dancing, which is found in many parts of the world, and has left its marks on dramas so widely removed in their social conditions as those of Athens and Japan, must be regarded as a very significant fact in the growth of literature.

As the Russian Khorovods performed by girls may enable us to realise the Greek parthenia, or the hymeneal chorus with its responses of youths and maidens,^[33] so the symbolical song-dances of American Indian tribes, while supplying interesting parallels to such dances as the Pyrrhic of the Greeks, may enable us to catch the spirit of the sacred dance in spite of the trivial associations of modern dancing. In the American Indian war-dance, the tribal leader, with his war-club in his hands smeared with vermilion to symbolise blood, raises the war-song, accompanied by drum, and rattle, and the voices of a few choristers. The song, brief and full of repetition, is repeated slowly and with measured cadence, to which the most exact time is kept, the singer every few minutes stepping out of his circular path to shout the war-cry. Clearly the words he sings are far from occupying the most prominent place in the aesthetic appreciation of the Indian; for him the graceful dance, the graphic symbolisation of battle and victory by vehement gestures, the familiar music of drum and rattle and the voices of the choristers carry a significance scarcely imaginable by bookish minds. Still, a specimen of the words may be here quoted from Dr. Schoolcraft's work on the Indian tribes as an aid in realising the nature of these song-dances.

"Hear my voice, ye warlike birds!
I prepare a feast for you to batten on;
I see you cross the enemy's lines;
Like you I shall go.
I wish the swiftness of your wings;
I wish the vengeance of your claws;
I muster my friends;
I follow your flight.
Ho! ye young men that are warriors,
Look with wrath on the battle-field!"^[34]

In the same work Dr. Schoolcraft gives us a picture of the famous Arrow-Dance, as described by an eye-witness, Surgeon Ten Broeck, who served in the United States army in New Mexico, 1851–2. Part of this description may be here quoted as a very vivid illustration of the symbolic dance. "After dancing and singing fifteen or twenty minutes, the sound of another tombe (Indian drum) is heard, and another brave, with a malinchi (girl specially attired) and his friends, shouting and whooping, enter on the north side (a similar party having previously assumed a position on the south side of the plaza), and, ranging themselves opposite to the first party, commence the same kind of performance. The tombe of the first party then ceases; and one of the men, going out, leads the brave in front of his friends, who are drawn up in two ranks. Here he is placed on one knee, his bow and arrow still in his hand, while the malinchi commences the Fleeka or Arrow-Dance. At first she dances along the line in front of him, and by her gestures shows that she is describing the 'war-path.' Slowly she pursues, but suddenly her step quickens—she has come in sight of the enemy. The brave follows her with his eye, and the motion of his head intimates that she is right. She dances faster and faster—suddenly she seizes an arrow from him, and now by frantic gestures it is shown that the fight has commenced in earnest. She points with the arrow—shows how it wings its course—how the scalp was taken and Laguna victorious. As she concludes the dance, and returns the arrow to the brave, firearms are discharged, and the whole party wend their way to the Estufa, to make room for another warrior and his friends; and thus the dance was maintained, warrior succeeding warrior, until dusk." If any one doubts the world-wide influence of such symbolical dancing on the development of early lyric and dramatic poetry, let him reflect upon the prominence of symbolic action in a sphere in which it was far less to have been expected—early law.^[35]

Side by side with these American examples of symbolic dancing may be placed some Chinese illustrations of like symbolism. Just as the Sanskrit term for "drama" (nataka) properly applies to "dancing," so the earliest kind of dramatic spectacle among the Chinese seems to have been pantomimic dances closely connected with religion. "The majority of these dances," says M. Bazin,^[36] "were symbolic, and represented the business of tillage, the pleasures of harvest, the fatigues of war, or the comforts of peace. The dancers bore shields, battle-axes, and banners, according to the various religious ceremonies. … In his notes on the Chou-King, Gaubil speaks of a Chinese treatise on the dance; the author has there given the following description of an ancient pantomime. 'The dancers sallied out on the northern side. Scarcely had they taken a few steps when, suddenly changing the order in which they had come, they symbolised by attitudes, gestures, evolutions, a battle array. In the third direction the dancers kept advancing southwards; in the fourth, they formed a kind of line; in the fifth, they represented the two ministers, Tcheou-kong and Tchao-kong, who aided Wou-wang with their advice; in the sixth, they kept motionless like the mountains. This dance was a history of the conquest of China by Wou-wang, who, entering the empire, defeated King Cheou, penetrated farther and farther, fixed the limits of his states, and governed them by the wise counsels of his two ministers.'" These old Chinese pantomimes, like the rude farces of early Rome, became after a time, in spite of their religious origin, so obscene that they required to be checked by law. But the early union of dance and song in China seems to have left its marks on Chinese criticism. In the Great Preface to the collection of ancient Chinese odes known as the Shih King, poetry, song, and dance are pictured as a kind of graduated scale of emotional expression. The passage, as translated by Dr. Legge, is as follows: "Poetry is the product of earnest thought. Thought cherished in the mind becomes earnest; exhibited in words it becomes poetry. The feelings move inwardly, and are embodied in words. When words are insufficient for them, recourse is had to sighs and exclamations. When sighs and exclamations are insufficient for them, recourse is had to the prolonged utterance of song. When these prolonged utterances of song are insufficient for them, unconsciously the hands begin to move and the feet to dance."

§ 34. Like the Indian and Chinese, the Greek symbolised the actions of battle in his dances. The dancers in the Pyrrhic dance even bore the same name as the practised and armed combatant (prulis);^[37] and we learn from a passage in Plato's Laws^[38] that this Pyrrhic dance imitated all the attitudes of defence—avoiding the thrust, retreating, springing up, crouching down and the opposite movements of attack with arrows and lances. We have now scanty means of estimating the perfection to which artistic dancing was brought in the progress of the Greek choral lyric save the complicated strophes and antistrophes of Pindar and the dramatic chorus. But the union of symbolic dance with choral song at the beginnings of Greek literature may be easily illustrated.

In the choral dance which Vulcan represents on the shield of Achilles we have clear indications of dramatic action accompanying the choral song, as it sometimes does in the dance-songs of the Russian Mirs. "At one time the youths and maidens dance round nimbly with measured steps, as when a potter tries his wheel whether it will run; at another they dance in rows opposite one another. … Among them sang and played upon his harp a bard divine, and two tumblers whirled among them as the song directed."

δοιὼ δὲ κυβιστητῆρε κατ᾽ αὐτοὺς
Μολπῆς ἐξάρχοντος ἐδίνευον κατὰ μέσσους.^[39]

So, in the hymn to the Delian Apollo, Delian maidens in the service of Apollo sing a hymn which pleases the assembled multitude, and consists partly in a dramatic imitation of different languages or dialects, and partly in the production of certain sounds by instruments apparently resembling the Spanish castanets.^[40] Again, Ulysses, looking at the Phæacian youths who form the chorus of the song of Demodokus, admires not the sweetness of their voices but (as Gray might have expressed it) the glance of their many-twinkling feet. "So spake the godlike Alkinous, and a herald uprose to bear a hollow lyre from the royal house. Then judges of the folk, nine chosen men in all, who were wont to order all things well in the contests, stood up; they levelled the dancing-place (χορὸν) and made a fair wide ring. So, bearing a loud-sounding lyre for Demodokus, the herald drew near; and Demodokus gat him into the midst, and round him stood boys in their first bloom, skilled in the dance, and they struck the good floor with their feet; and Ulysses gazed at the twinkling feet (μαρμαρυγὰς θηἔιτο ποδῶν) and marvelled in spirit."^[41] Indeed, the very words molpê and melpesthai, applied as they were by the Greeks to singing, dancing, and even any graceful gesticulation (as in a game at ball^[42]), significantly mark the close union of song, instrumental music, dance and mimetic action in early Greece.

As the dancer speaking the epilogue at the end of Shakspere's Henry IV., Part II, or the allegorical herald Rumour "painted full of tongues" at the beginning of the same play, or the Vice "with his dagger of lath" in Twelfth Night, or the Shaksperian clowns with their tag-ends of popular songs, carry us back to the rude beginnings of the Elizabethan drama, so in these choral dance-songs we may see survivals from the rude efforts of literary art in early Greece. How far these combinations of dance, and song, and symbolic gesture were infant dramas our scanty means of information do not now enable us to decide. But we are by no means left to picture their nature from choral songs of early Greeks alone. Among the Hebrews, for example, we find a similar connection between music, dance, violent gesticulation, and choral song. Early Hebrew, like early Greek song, discloses itself in the form of the choral lyric. Indeed, the dance-song seems to have occupied a more prominent place in Hebrew than in Greek literature, just as the clan and tribe retained a stronger hold on Hebrew than on Greek life.

From the days of tribal and local worship to those in which the centralised religion of Yahveh had cast its shadow over old local associations and traditions, the dance-song is the choral hymn of Israel. Thus, in the early days of tribal federalism, at the feast of Yahveh held from year to year in Shiloh, the maidens of the town come out to "dance in the dances;"^[43] and, long after the worship of Yahveh has been centralised and organised, his worshippers are exhorted in one of the choral lyrics collected in the books of psalms "to praise the name of Yahveh in the dance."^[44] So important was song in national tradition and worship, that not only do we find the Hebrew law-chronicle appealing to folk-songs as among the earliest sources of the history of the tribes,^[45] but the teaching of song (possibly a leading duty of the early Nâbîs) is directly ordained by the priestly law-book.^[46] Old polytheistic worship, against which Yahvism waged a long conflict, also possessed the choral song-dance as the essence of its ceremonial. Thus, we find the early Hebrews before the idol of the calf singing and dancing songs of such a rude description that it was possible for them to be mistaken for shouts of war.^[47] The violent character of the sacred dance among the Hebrews reminds us of the Peruvian Raymi; and a still more interesting parallel is observable in the degradation which such dancing seems to have undergone among the Hebrews as among the Peruvians. The Nâbîs combined dance and song; for example, Miriam "the prophetess," Nebîah, takes a timbrel in her hand while the women "go out after her with timbrels and with dances."^[48] "To play the Nâbî" apparently meant to sing, dance, and violently gesticulate, so violently indeed that the verb nâbâ is used of madness and excited raving. In a well-known passage of Hebrew story this violence of gesticulation is very prominently brought out. Saul has sent messengers to seize David at Naioth, a centre of Nâbî culture, and the king's messengers, thrice sent, have thrice been infected by the spirit of the place and joined in the sacred festival. "Then Shâûl himself went to the high place and came to the large well that is by the hill and asked, Where are Shemûêl and Dâvîd?' Men said, 'Yonder in Nâyôth at the high place.' So he went thither to the high place at Nâyôth; and even on him came the spirit of God, and, as he walked on, he acted the Nâbî till he reached the high place at Nâyôth. Then he stripped off his garments himself, and himself acted the Nâbî, and fell down naked before Shemûêl all that day and all that night. Wherefore they say, 'Is Shâûl also among the Nâbis?'" (1 Sam. xix. 22 sqq.). But such violent dancing was not altogether decorous for a king. David "whirls about" (mekarkér," whirling in a circle," a word with which the Homeric expression ἐδίνευον, applied to the two "tumblers," should be compared) "with all his might before Yahveh," but in the eyes of Michal he has "uncovered himself as one of the vain fellows shamelessly uncovers himself;"^[49] and, though the incident is made to reflect honour on the king's devotion to Yahveh, we may be sure that the orgiastic dance-song was softened down into stately processions in the civilised and centralised worship of Yahveh. Perhaps the latest survival of the violent gesticulation with which the Nâbîs' name and worship had been associated among the early "sons of Israel" is to be seen in the symbolical action of later Nâbîs, as when Ezekiel takes a tile and portrays upon it the beleaguered city of Jerusalem. But these men were rather lyrical preachers than leaders of communal song; and if the gesticulations of the Nâbîs ever contained the germs of a drama, the progress of social life among the Hebrews was clearly fatal to any such form of literary expression. The strength of clan life among the Hebrews (as that of family life among the early Romans) prevented the distinctness of personal character and the degree of individual independence without which the drama has little or no place.

§ 35. Thus, looking on choral songs of war or peace as the primary sources from which literature has everywhere been developed, we may accept the vulgar canon that all literature begins in song; but it is song widely differing in nature and in impersonal authorship from any to which modern art is accustomed; it is a hymn strangely unlike the choral services of our civilised religions both in form and spirit. In this primitive song the words, the dance, the music (such as it is), and gesticulations contribute to make a unity nameless in the languages of peoples far removed from the beginnings of social life. These curious combinations of mimicry and music, dancing and words, vary in their purposes. Sometimes they are magic incantations, sometimes theyare war-songs, sometimes they are songs of marriage, sometimes they are dirges of death. In some the gestures predominate, in others the rude music, in others the refrain of a few simple words. But the main points to be borne in mind are that these elements are confused together, and that the mere preservation of the words alone cannot enable us to imagine the true nature of primitive song. Hence the impossibility of applying our highly-developed modern ideas of prose or verse to such performances. For not only have dance and gesticulation among us ceased to convey any sacred meaning, not only have we long distinguished these from the mimetic action of the regular drama, but we have also separated words from any accompaniment of music or dance, poetry from recitation as well as from these accompaniments, and prose from metrical forms which, far from being joined to dance and melody, or sustaining the memory in an age when writing was unknown, simply appeal to the reader's sense of harmony through the medium of printed letters. Accustomed to artistic ideas based upon distinctions impossible in early social life, it is not strange that we neither possess the words, nor in many cases the imaginative powers, needful to carry us out of our own literary conditions into the primitive homes of literary development.

In the progress of this literary differentiation we may observe some striking changes, not of course capable of chronological data—for they have everywhere occurred insensibly in the course of social development—but none the less real because they lie outside the range of such measurements. The gradual severance of acting, dancing, and musical accompaniment from the words of the song marks a whole series of such changes partially illustrated by the rhapsodists of early Greek, and the Râwy or reciter of early Arab, literature. Another and greater change than any of these is introduced by the invention of writing, parting still farther the music and gesticulation (which once supplied excellent props to the memory) from the bare words, and turning the attention of the makers of literature to the study of metres as distinct from music and recitation. Finally, the rise of prose composition as a distinct species of literature, at first apparently constructed largely on the older metrical models (as, for example, in the rythmical prose of the Qur'ân), but afterwards passing by degrees into a plain reflection of public or private conversation, and finding its proper sphere in the speech or philosophic discussion, brings us far on the road to that severance of science from literature which characterises the most civilised communities. It is clear that the status of early song-makers must have undergone prodigious changes during this evolution of literary forms. It is clear that the communal culture of early literature, which among the Irish Celts, for example, seems to have left its traces in "Literary Fosterage,"^[50] breaks up with the decomposition of clans into their component families, and the farther development of personal freedom from such family restraints as those of the Roman patria potestas. But, before we turn to this individualising process or to the evolution of literary forms, we shall illustrate another side of clan literature, viz. that on which the clansman's personality, so far as communal sentiments permit, is most distinctly visible.

Footnotes

1. E.g. the ship Argo is called "interesting to all" (πασιμέλουσα), Od., xii. 70, an epithet implying a familiar story. For further examples, see K. O. Müller, Hist. of Gk. Lit. (Donaldson's translation), vol. i. p. 54.
2. Od., xiv. 205.
3. Ibid., xvii. 383 sqq.
4. Inspired decisions. Cf. Maine, Ancient Law, ch. i.
5. Iliad, ii. 201–206.
6. Hueffer's Troubadours, p. 11.
7. Dr. Schoolcraft's History, Condition, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes in the United States, pt. iii. p. 487.
8. Cf. the Parthenia, or "Maidens' Choruses," of the Greeks.
9. Cf. Müller's Dorians, bk. iv. ch. 6.
10. Tübingen, 1883.
11. Fragg. Lyr., 1297.
12. K. O. Müller, Hist. Gk. Lit. (Donaldson's tr.), vol. i. p. 25.
13. Ἁμὲς ποκ᾽ ἦμες ἄλκιμοι νεανίαι.
    Ἁμὲς δέ γ᾽ ἐιμές αἰ δὲ λῇς, ἀυγάσδεεο.
    Ἁμὲς δέ γ᾽ ἐσσόμεσθα πολλῷ καῤῥονες.
14. Quæs. Græc., 36.
15. Iliad, xviii. 490–496.
16. Hesiod, Scut., 274–280. Cf. K. O. Müller, Hist. Gk. Lit., vol. i. p. 29.
17. Hymn to Delian Apollo, ll. 146–164.
18. Cf. Swinburne's Erechtheus, ll. 52, 53—

    "Eumolpus; nothing sweet in ears of thine
    The music of his making," etc.

19. K. O. Müller, Hist. Gk. Lit., pp. 34, 199, 263, 275, 289, vol. i.; and cf. authorities cited.
20. 1 Sam. x. 5.
21. Sam. xix. 20.
22. 2 Kings ii. 5; iv. 38.
23. Preface to translation of First Ashtaka, or Book, of Rig-Veda, p. xvii.
24. Max Müller, Hist. Anc. Sans. Lit., p. 55.
25. Varro, L. L., v. 85.
26. R. R., 141.
27. El. II. 1.
28. Tibullus, El. II. i.; for last line translated, cf. Hor., Sat. II. iii. 247, ædificare casas.
29. Vide pp. 386 sqq.
30. Hibbert Lectures for 1884.
31. Hibb. Lect. 1884, p. 224.
32. Essai sur le Vêda, p. 31.
33. Cf. Catullus, lxii.—a poem in which the burden, "Hymen O Hymenæe, Hymen ades O Hymenæe," like the àiá(w Tov "Adwviv of Bion, or the apxeTE ZIKEAIKal of Moschus, seem like distant cchoes of ancient hymencal or threnic choruses.
34. Hist. Ind. Tribes in U.S., pt. ii. p. 60.
35. Cf. Maine's Ancient Law, ch. x.
36. Théâtre Chinois, pp. ix., x.
37. Cf. Müller, Dorians, bk. iv. ch. 6.
38. vii. p. 815.
39. Il., xviii. 590–606.
40. 11. 161–164, translated above; cf. K. O. Müller, Hist. Gk. Lit., pp. 32, 33.
41. Od., viii. 256–265.
42. Cf. Od., vi. 101.
43. Judg. xxi. 21.
44. Ps. cxlix.
45. For example, the song of the well, Numb. xx. 17.
46. Deut. xxxi. 19.
47. Exod. xxxii. 17–19.
48. Exod. xv. 20. The word yâtzâ, "go out," is the same as that applied to the maidens of Shiloh "going out" of their town to dance in the dances (Judg. xxi.), and seems to betray the social conditions under which the author writes, viz. those of settled city life.
49. 1 Sam. vi. 14, 20.
50. Sir Henry Maine (Early History of Institutions, pp. 242 sqq.) has cited evidences of Literary Fosterage in India resembling the Celtic. Signs of communal literary culture, however, are to be found in any literature with which the author of the present work is at all acquainted.