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 TECHNOLOGY IN AC TION™

Science and
Engineering Projects
Using the Arduino
and Raspberry Pi
Explore STEM Concepts with
Microcomputers
—
Paul Bradt
David Bradt
 Science and
Engineering Projects
Using the Arduino
and Raspberry Pi
Explore STEM Concepts
with Microcomputers

Paul Bradt
David Bradt
Science and Engineering Projects Using the Arduino and Raspberry Pi:
Explore STEM Concepts with Microcomputers
Paul Bradt David Bradt
Houston, TX, USA Houston, USA

ISBN-13 (pbk): 978-1-4842-5810-1 ISBN-13 (electronic): 978-1-4842-5811-8

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-5811-8

Copyright © 2020 by Paul Bradt and David Bradt

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part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of
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The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks, and similar terms, even if
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While the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of
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Printed on acid-free paper
 The authors dedicate this book to
all of the Science, Technology, Engineering,
Math (STEM) teachers who guide and
shape the paths of many young minds (including ours)
to question, learn, and utilize new technology to
solve problems. Without these unsung heroes,
the world would not have powerful cell phones,
highly reliable cars, the Internet, and many other
amazing things we routinely take for granted.
Table of Contents
About the Authors��������������������������������������������������������������������������������xi

About the Technical Reviewer�����������������������������������������������������������xiii

Acknowledgments������������������������������������������������������������������������������xv
Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������xvii

Chapter 1: Key Technology Tools����������������������������������������������������������1

Arduino Basics������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������1
Arduino Setup��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������2
Ports and Interfaces����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������3
Lessons Learned About the Arduino����������������������������������������������������������������6
Raspberry Pi Basics����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������8
Raspberry Pi Setup����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������10
Lessons Learned About the Raspberry Pi������������������������������������������������������15
Basic Electronics Definitions������������������������������������������������������������������������������18
Summary������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������18

Chapter 2: Data Logging Basics����������������������������������������������������������19

Data Logging with the Arduino����������������������������������������������������������������������������20
Data Logging with the Raspberry Pi�������������������������������������������������������������������26
Summary������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������35

v
Table of Contents

Chapter 3: Physics and Mathematics Basics������������������������������������37

Temperature��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������37
Force�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������38
Pressure��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������39
Basic Concept of Algebra������������������������������������������������������������������������������������40
Statistical Concepts��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������41
Direct Compared to Inferred Measurements�������������������������������������������������������41
Summary������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������42

Chapter 4: Simple Science and Engineering Projects������������������������43

Buoyancy of Air���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������43
Arduino Buoyancy of Air Version��������������������������������������������������������������������45
Raspberry Pi Buoyancy of Air Version������������������������������������������������������������52
Buoyancy Recap��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������59
Demonstrating Pressure�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������59
Pressure/Force Recap�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������65
Capturing Counts������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������65
Counts Recap������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������70
Summary������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������70

Chapter 5: Advanced Physics and Mathematics for Science and

Engineering����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������71
Basics Terms of Calculus������������������������������������������������������������������������������������72
How Heat Transfer Works������������������������������������������������������������������������������������72
Conduction Heat Transfer������������������������������������������������������������������������������72
Convection Heat Transfer�������������������������������������������������������������������������������74
Radiation Heat Transfer���������������������������������������������������������������������������������76
All Three Heat Transfer Mechanisms Work Together!������������������������������������77

vi
 Table of Contents

Mass�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������78
Velocity and Acceleration������������������������������������������������������������������������������������78
Inertia������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������81
Momentum����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������81
Friction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������81
More Advanced Aspects of Calculus�������������������������������������������������������������������83
Summary������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������84

Chapter 6: Time/Condition-­Dependent Projects���������������������������������85

Conduction Heat Transfer Through an Aluminum Rod�����������������������������������������85
Ensure Consistency in Temperature Sensor Readings����������������������������������90
Aluminum Rod Conduction Heat Transfer Recap�������������������������������������������94
Conduction Heat Transfer Through a Window�����������������������������������������������������94
Window Conduction Heat Transfer Recap����������������������������������������������������103
Convection Heat Transfer����������������������������������������������������������������������������������103
Convection Heat Transfer Recap������������������������������������������������������������������108
Zero Gravity Demonstration������������������������������������������������������������������������������108
Zero Gravity Recap��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������118
Measuring Frictional Force Projects�����������������������������������������������������������������118
Arduino Frictional Force Project������������������������������������������������������������������119
Operational Schematic��������������������������������������������������������������������������������121
Arduino Frictional Force Recap�������������������������������������������������������������������124
Raspberry Pi Frictional Force Project����������������������������������������������������������124
Raspberry Pi Frictional Force Recap�����������������������������������������������������������131
Acceleration Projects����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������131
Acceleration Direct to Computer�����������������������������������������������������������������131

vii
Table of Contents

Acceleration with Computer Recap�������������������������������������������������������������������139

Acceleration Measurement Without a Computer�����������������������������������������139
Acceleration Without Computer Recap�������������������������������������������������������������148
Summary����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������148

Chapter 7: Light and Imaging Projects���������������������������������������������149

Radiation Heat Transfer�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������149
Analysis of Heat Transfer�����������������������������������������������������������������������������161
Radiation Heat Transfer Recap��������������������������������������������������������������������162
Astrophotography with the Raspberry Pi Camera���������������������������������������������162
Assembling the Meade ETX-60AT and Raspberry Pi�����������������������������������165
Astrophotography Meade ETX-60AT Setup Recap���������������������������������������169
Assembling the 4 1/2-Inch Reflector Telescope and the Raspberry Pi�������������169
Components Needed to Assemble the Raspberry Pi 3
Mounting System to the 4 1/2-Inch Telescope�������������������������������������������172
Reflector Telescope Setup Recap����������������������������������������������������������������175
Basic Raspistill Previewing an Image with the Terminal Command Line����������175
Using Raspistill to Capture an Image�����������������������������������������������������������177
More Advanced Raspistill Input Without a Keyboard�����������������������������������177
Raspistill Image Capture Recap�������������������������������������������������������������������179
Astrophotography Raspberry Pi Python GUI������������������������������������������������������179
Initiating the GUI������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������183
PI_SN003 Raspberry PI GUI Recap��������������������������������������������������������������184
Assembling the Raspberry Pi and Touchscreen in the Case�����������������������������184
Raspberry Pi, Touchscreen, and Case����������������������������������������������������������184
Modification of the Case and Assembly������������������������������������������������������185
Components and Assembly of the Raspberry Pi Case Recap����������������������188

viii
 Table of Contents

Camera Modifications, Camera Case, and Power Cables����������������������������������188

Camera Modifications����������������������������������������������������������������������������������188
Building the Camera Case���������������������������������������������������������������������������189
Final Assembly of the Camera in the Case��������������������������������������������������196
Power Cord Combination�����������������������������������������������������������������������������197
Camera, Camera Case, and Power Cord Assembly Recap���������������������������197
Building the Shelf for the Meade ETX-60AT������������������������������������������������197
Shelf Components and Assembly Recap�����������������������������������������������������203
Helpful Hints Using the Telescope and Raspberry Pi����������������������������������������203
Lessons Learned Recap������������������������������������������������������������������������������207
Example Images and Enhancing Them Using a Video Capture GUI�������������������207
Example Images Taken with the Upgraded Meade ETX-60AT
Astrophotography System���������������������������������������������������������������������������208
Recap of Example Images and Enhancement Techniques��������������������������217
Summary����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������217

Appendix: Reference Material����������������������������������������������������������219

Soldering Safety������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������219
General Shop Safety������������������������������������������������������������������������������������220
Manufacturing Techniques��������������������������������������������������������������������������������220
Soldering�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������221
Basic Arduino and Raspberry Pi Python Commands�����������������������������������222
3D Printing���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������224
Computer-Aided Design Options�����������������������������������������������������������������������225
Project Management for Engineering���������������������������������������������������������������226
Decision Analysis for Engineering���������������������������������������������������������������������226
Thermal Conductivity Coefficients��������������������������������������������������������������������227
Coefficients of Friction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������228

ix
Table of Contents

Astronomy Terms����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������228
Specifications of the Meade ETX-60AT�������������������������������������������������������������229
Setup, Updates, and Repairs�����������������������������������������������������������������������231
Helpful Books����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������232

Index�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������233

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About the Authors
Paul Bradt has a BS in Computer Science
from the University of Houston–Clear
Lake. He currently owns a small business
and writes books, develops code, and does
IT support work. He has experimented
with the Arduino and Raspberry Pi system
and believes them to be excellent tools for
developing an understanding of electronic
components and hardware interaction in
integrated systems. He believes they are very
useful as a teaching aid in learning computer
programming, science, and engineering. He likes to perform sophisticated
troubleshooting of computer problems and has found that online
resources can be a great help for novice users to get their experiments
operating quickly and effectively.

David Bradt has a BS in Mechanical

Engineering from New Mexico State University
with many years of experience in the
aerospace industry and in the petrochemical
industry. He enjoys building and designing
devices to measure and control systems. He
has found the Arduino and Raspberry Pi to be
incredibly powerful little devices that with a
little bit of work can do many different tasks.
He is a big fan of Star Trek: The Original Series
and astronomy.

xi
About the Technical Reviewer
Sri Manikanta Palakollu is an undergraduate student pursuing his
bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering at SICET under
JNTUH. He is a founder of the OpenStack Developer Community in his
college. He started his journey as a competitive programmer. He always
loves to solve problems that are related to the data science field. His
interests include data science, app development, web development,
cybersecurity, and technical writing. He has published many articles
on data science, machine learning, programming, and cybersecurity in
publications like Hacker Noon, freeCodeCamp, Noteworthy, and DDI
through the Medium platform.

xiii
Acknowledgments
This book would not be possible without the authors’ gaining early
technical insight regarding the Raspberry Pi and Arduino from others.
Jared Brank and Dennis Pate provided a lot of basic information, key
insights, and Arduino hardware early in the process. The authors thank
the following individuals who listened to them on many occasions and
provided help, insight, and inspiration with their own experiences with
the Raspberry Pi and other projects: Jeff Dunehew, Todd Franke, and Fitz
Walker. Additionally, significant assistance with 3D printing was provided
by Mitch Long and David Thoerig.
Producing this book would not have been possible without the
excellent help and guidance regarding scope and early editorial reviews
by Joanna Opaskar and Ed Weisblatt. The authors also utilized many
ideas from Andrew Bradt and Laura Brank’s science fair experience. Most
important was the support and advice from Andrea Bradt.

xv
Introduction
The authors’ journey developing this book started in 2013 when they
discovered the Arduino microcontroller. It is interesting how something big
really starts with one step as they found the Arduino incredibly powerful.
Users are able to program it with computer code, and then it executes its
instructions for as long as it has power. The authors started evaluating
various applications of the Arduino around the house and in their hobby
endeavors. In 2017, they started experimenting with the Raspberry Pi
minicomputer which enables users to take projects to a whole new level
with a low-cost computer that interfaces with sensors. Since a Raspberry
Pi is very affordable, a real computer can now be dedicated to operating a
system permanently. While requiring some technical steps to set up, both
of these tools can be used to gather data, automate tasks, and provide a
lot of fun. The authors found it very satisfying to watch a device do several
tasks, especially when they set it up. This book chronicles some science
and engineering projects the authors developed over the past few years
and provides helpful hints, along with a few things to avoid.
There are two primary areas of focus or goals of this book. The first goal
is to help the reader explore the Arduino and Raspberry Pi. The second
goal is exploring science and engineering in interesting and fun ways.
The projects and concepts in this book are meant to accomplish
the first goal by providing information to get an Arduino or Raspberry
Pi system set up, running, and ready to capture data. The text provides
enough detail for users with average assembly or electrical skills to
complete them. Additionally, the goals of learning are to gain knowledge
and skills. When the reader engages in a project that requires them to
try new things, it reinforces how they learn and gain confidence and
encourages them to try even more complex tools and techniques.

xvii
Introduction

The second goal is exploring concepts of STEM (Science, Technology,

Engineering, Mathematics) and working through examples to demonstrate
basic scientific and engineering concepts. Finally, the authors provide
some detail on the mathematics needed to understand and explain the
science demonstrated.
Science and engineering provide critical skill sets for the modern world
that can be used in everyday life. People use these skills to develop the
technology that the modern world relies on. This book can establish these
skill sets for a fruitful and rewarding career.
The authors hope this book inspires the reader to expand and explore
their own STEM projects by including a wide range from beginner to
advanced. From these examples, the reader can learn many techniques,
tools, and technologies and apply them beyond the ones listed here; but
first, the authors introduce STEM.

What Is STEM?
STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) is a program
based on educating students in science, technology, engineering, and
mathematics in an integrated, interdisciplinary approach to learning.
School systems today strive to improve education in STEM. This goal is
an area where educators can use outside help developing and improving
students’ knowledge when they actively contribute, design, and build
hands-on projects. In many ways, the young mind is excited and motivated
building projects. They develop an in-depth understanding of what is
required and how it works. The authors believe this is the best way to learn
and remember these concepts, which results in a solid STEM foundation
for students.
A question not often understood is how the scientific method is different
from an engineering approach. Understanding the difference between
science and engineering can be seen in the original Star Trek series.

xviii
 Introduction

Mr. Spock was the science officer, and Montgomery Scott (Scotty) was
the chief engineer. Their jobs and how they approached new scenarios
or problems really provide a great explanation about the differences
and similarities between science and engineering. Let’s examine some
examples.
Mr. Spock used the term fascinating when describing a new event
or phenomenon. The role of science is to expand knowledge and
investigate new events. This fascination with new and unique areas is
key for a scientist. Scotty, the engineer, on the other hand always had to
fix the warp engines, the transporter, or some other critical system. The
normal role of an engineer is to develop and implement solutions to
problems. In one of the episodes, Scotty indicated he would rather read
his engineering journals to learn about how others solved problems
than go on shore leave!

Science
Researchers use the scientific method as a tool to understand questions
in their area of interest. Based on the information they have initially,
they develop a hypothesis and then methods to test the validity of the
hypothesis. When sufficient test data are gathered and analyzed, the
researcher either accepts or rejects the hypothesis. In many cases, positive
or negative results point to the next step or direction of exploration and
contribute to the general body of scientific and engineering knowledge.

Engineering
The primary goal of engineering is to evaluate alternatives and choose
the optimal solution to minimize or eliminate specific problems or issues.
Solutions are not necessarily new, but may be repurposed concepts
applied to different problem areas. Other aspects of engineering include

xix
Introduction

planning the work, selecting components to meet requirements, and

following through on managing and completing a project. Often projects
or systems fail because the planning, scheduling, and logistics of activities
are not adequately engineered for an optimum solution. These skills are
important and necessary in any job.
Science and engineering use many of the same tools and techniques,
but it is important to understand the distinction between scientific
experimentation and the engineering process of developing optimal
solutions. For one thing, they both use the language of mathematics to
describe percentages, results, probability, and other physical parameters.
However, science’s goal is to expand knowledge which is different than
engineering’s goal of selecting an optimum solution and proceeding with
solving the problem. One other difference is a scientific test often gains
new knowledge, whereas an engineering test often demonstrates how a
system performs a function. In many ways, they are synergistic as science
often provides new tools and ideas for engineers to use to solve problems.
In the authors’ minds, the roots of some key technological
advancements that exist now can be traced back 50 years to the original
Star Trek TV show. For example, in the show, they used tricorders to gather
data about aliens, equipment failures, medical problems, and a host of
other out of this world challenges. They had communicators that allowed
them to contact crewmembers all over alien worlds. Finally, they had the
replicators that allowed them to produce any type of food they desired.
Today we don’t have tricorders, but we do have some examples that 50
years ago would have been amazing. Today there are personal computers,
cell phones, 3D printing, and incredible sensors based on the early
transistors of the 1960s. The Arduino and the Raspberry Pi, two examples
of new technology, can be built into devices similar to the incredibly
versatile Star Trek tricorders.

xx
 Introduction

Both Mr. Spock and Scotty realized they needed each other (science
and engineering) to accomplish the goals of exploration and keep
the Enterprise flying safely through space. In today’s complex world,
integrating science and engineering is key to researching problems and
developing solutions.
In the following chapters, the authors will demonstrate all of the
components of STEM needed to research scientific questions, use new
technology (Arduino and Raspberry Pi), employ engineering techniques,
and use mathematics to quantify the scientific data. As Star Trek boldly
went forth to explore new worlds, the authors hope the students of today
do the same!

xxi
CHAPTER 1

Key Technology Tools

This chapter will highlight some of the basics about the Arduino and the
Raspberry Pi. It will help the reader get started if they are unfamiliar with
these powerful devices. It is amazing what these devices can do and this
chapter provides some basic aspects for getting them set up to run.

A
 rduino Basics
The Arduino is a powerful microcontroller that is ready to program and
acts as an intermediary device between a personal computer and various
sensors. It is relatively new technology that is a great tool for gaining
insight into physical properties and other scientific parameters.
The Arduino board was first developed in Italy in 2004 as a tool to help
train students in programming. It is an open source tool and as such has
developed a large base of helpful web sites and user groups. It represents
a breakthrough as an easy-to-use, relatively inexpensive, programmable
interface between a computer and various sensors. The software
development package and all of the online resources help make this an
ideal data logging tool for science fair/college projects.
The Arduino, Adafruit, SparkFun, Hacktronics, and other web sites are
great places to start. There are also several introductory books to help the
researcher get started using this device. Getting started with Arduino by
Banzi is a very good beginner’s book on Arduino.
Other sources of information for the Arduino novice are maker faires
and user group activities.
© Paul Bradt and David Bradt 2020 1
P. Bradt and D. Bradt, Science and Engineering Projects Using the Arduino and Raspberry Pi,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-5811-8_1
Chapter 1 Key Technology Tools

There are several versions and sizes, but for the projects in this book,
the Arduino Uno and the Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
version 1.89 were utilized. Figure 1-1 shows an example of the Arduino
Uno. The authors recommend for the person unfamiliar with Arduinos
to use an official version and not a clone. The authors have never
experienced a problem with an official Arduino, but there are many clones,
and the authors have experienced problems with one of them.

Figure 1-1. Arduino Uno

A
 rduino Setup
Setting up an Arduino is relatively straightforward; the reader should
follow these basic steps to get the device running:

1. The Arduino is connected to a computer via a USB

connection to the input port (see Figure 1-3).

2. Load code using the IDE (see Figure 1-2).

3. Open the serial monitor to get data.

These steps sound basic, and after the reader completes these steps a few
times, they will see how easy it is to connect and run an Arduino. In many cases,

2
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 Chapter 1 Key Technology Tools

the challenges occur with the code. If the reader is copying code from a source,
it is important to type it in exactly as it looks. Even then there could be errors, but
that is part of the adventure, and it’s very rewarding when the code runs.

Figure 1-2. Arduino IDE

P
 orts and Interfaces
Figure 1-3 shows the main ports of the Arduino Uno.

3
Chapter 1 Key Technology Tools

Figure 1-3. Arduino Ports

There are five primary port groupings that are used to connect to the
Arduino:

Computer port: This is the primary port that is

directly connected to the computer. It is a ­micro-­
USB port that powers and enables the user to
upload the sketches or programs to the Arduino.

Battery power port: This port allows an Arduino

to be unplugged from a computer and use battery
power to operate. A standard wall power supply that
provides 9–12 V DC can also be used.

Sensor power ports: These plug connections

provide 3.3 V and 5 V DC power. There is also a reset
connection and input voltage connection.

Analog device ports: These connections are for

analog inputs.

Digital device ports: These are for digital inputs

and outputs.

4
 Chapter 1 Key Technology Tools

IDE (Integrated Development Environment):

The IDE is the program that is used to develop the
code. It is the programming tool that runs on a
computer and has features to help the developer
write code. The IDE tool must be downloaded from
the Arduino web site.

Sketch: The code that runs on an Arduino is called

a sketch. Once the code is developed in the IDE, it is
uploaded to the Arduino.

Libraries: These are code modules that are installed

on the Arduino and called up by the program when
needed. Libraries add a lot of functionality and do
not require any additional coding.

There are other components and hardware that can be used with the
Arduino:

Shields/breakout boards: These are add-on boards

that are either inserted into the standard Arduino
board ports or connected via wires.

Sensors: A sensor is a device that senses some type

of data. It can be used to directly measure a physical
aspect, or it can be used with some mathematics to
infer a physical measurement.

Effectors: An effector imparts some change in the

physical world when activated. Motors, solenoids,
and servos are some examples.

LCDs: Liquid Crystal Display can be used to show

data.

LEDs: Light-Emitting Diodes or other incandescent

lights can also indicate an event has occurred.

5
Chapter 1 Key Technology Tools

Lessons Learned About the Arduino

The Arduino is relatively easy to use, but the authors found there are a few
key points that will help when using this powerful device:

• Each Arduino attaches to a specific com port. The port

may have to be changed or selected in the tools tab
under “port” to get the IDE to recognize the Arduino.

• If the code is being pasted into the IDE, do not copy

from Microsoft Word or another word processor. First,
put it in a text editor such as Notepad, Notepad++,
or some other C/C++ IDE editor and then copy it
from there. Important note: Notepad and Notepad++
are not development tools like the IDE. One other
very important item of note is when the code was
transcribed into the book format some of the code text
that must be on one line may show up on two lines in
this book. The authors have tried their best to highlight
the code that should be on one line in the IDE by
bolding it in the Listing. Please contact the authors if
there are questions at contact@pdanalytic.com.

• It is a good idea to test the devices with a basic program

to be sure they work, before moving to a more complex
program.

• If the final code is complex, get each piece of code

working before adding more modules. This way, it is
easier to find the module where the problem is located.

• The authors recommend for long timing events or

complex programs to not use the “delay command,”
because it locks the Arduino and prevents it from doing
anything else. Instead, use the “milli command” that

6
 Chapter 1 Key Technology Tools

tracks time intervals between events and still allows

other actions to occur. The milli code might be a little
more complex, but it allows the Arduino to perform
other functions simultaneously. Using the delay
command for short events or simple programs like
the ones in this book, such as a switch debounce, is
recommended.

• A feature built into the Arduino IDE is the “auto-format

command.” It can be found under the tools tab or using
“Alt+T.” This command helps identify missing items and
also helps organize the code for improved readability.

• One more key aspect of Arduino coding is the “loop

command.” There are a few different types, but common
ones such as “void loop” and the “for command”
perform several operations and then repeat them.

• Check the wiring twice before applying power. It can be

difficult to see which port a wire is plugged into when
there are several wires.

• It is hard to know what code is on an Arduino. One easy

way that helps determine what is loaded on an Arduino
is saving code with a descriptive name, date, and even
time information. This helps programmers who may
need to go back to a previous code version.

• One other very helpful trick is to put the descriptive

name of the code on a piece of tape and stick it on top
of the computer port. This helps when working on, or
programing, several different Arduinos.

• One of the advantages of the Arduino is that once it is

programmed, it remembers the code. When a power
source is plugged into the battery power port, it will

7
Random documents with unrelated
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 CHAPTER IV

THE DIFFERENCING ELEMENTS OF THE POETRY OF

ART

Nobody will deny that the modern man does more thinking and less
singing than the man, say, of Shakspere’s time; and nobody will
deny that thinking needs solitude, while singing—real, hearty singing
—asks the throng and a refrain. Thought, M. Anatole France[296]
declares in his vivacious way, “thought is the acid which dissolves
the universe, and if all men fell to thinking at once, the world would
cease to be.” “Lonely thinking,” says Nietzsche, “that is wise; lonely
singing,—stupid.” In the same fashion, a solitary habit of thinking
has made itself master of poetry, particularly of the lyric; while the
singing of a poem is going fast out of date. Poetry begins with the
impersonal, with communal emotion, and passes to a personal note
of thought so acutely individual that it has to disguise itself, wear
masks, and prate about being objective. For objective and even
simple poetry may be highly subjective at heart; and to define
subjective as talking about one’s self, what Bagehot, in his essay on
Hartley Coleridge, calls self-delineation, is by no means a sufficient
account of the trait. When the folksong runs:—
A Nant’s, à Nant’s est arrivé,
Saute, blonde, et lève le pied,
Trois beaux navir’s chargés de blé;
Saute, blonde, ma joli’ blonde....

and Béranger sings:—

 Une plainte touchante
De ma bouche sortit;
Le bon Dieu me dit, Chante,
Chante, pauvre petit!

it is not only wrong to take simplicity as the differencing factor of the

communal song, for Béranger is quite as simple, but it will not do to
fall back on mere self-delineation as end of the matter in art. Half of
the folksongs of Europe are self-delineations of the singing and
dancing crowd, in mass or by deputed “I.” The real difference lies in
the shifting of the point of view; song, once the consolation and
expression of the festal crowd, comes to be the consolation and
expression of the solitary poet. “I do not inquire,” Ribot remarks,[297]
“whether this sort of isolation in an ivory tower is a gain or a loss for
poetry; but I observe its growing frequency as civilization advances,
the complete antithesis to its collective character in the earliest
ages.” To study such a change in the long reaches of poetic progress
would be an almost impossible task even if the material were at
hand; it is best to take a comparatively short range of time and a
definite place,—say the literature of modern Europe from its
beginning in the Middle Ages down to the present time. The
extremes are fairly sundered. Europe had lapsed from civilization to
a half barbarous state, from the height of the Roman empire to the
depth of the dark ages, with a corresponding decline of intellectual
power and a great inrush of communal force. Out of these
communal conditions, individual and intellectual vigour made its
difficult way; how difficult, how tortuous that way, every one knows;
and it is along this route, and about the time of the renaissance, that
one may best watch the differencing elements of artistic and
individual poetry as they come slowly into view.
As the individual[298] frees himself from the clogs of his mediæval
guild, in literature as in life, there begins the distinctly modern idea
of fame, of glory, as a personal achievement apart from community
or state; and there, too, begins the idea of literary property. Fame of
the poet had its classical tradition, and was asserted in a
conventional, meaningless way by mediæval poets, chiefly in Latin;
but the market value of a poem is something new.[299] From this time
on there is a pathetic struggle in the poet’s mind whether he shall
regard his poem as offspring to cherish or as ware to sell. Randolph,
writing to his friend, Master Anthony Stafford, takes the nobler view:
—
Let clowns get wealth and heirs: when I am gone ...
If I a poem leave, that poem is my son.

There is pretty antithesis, too, between the director and the poet in
Goethe’s play before the play in Faust,—one for his box-receipts, and
the other for the solitudes of poetry and the gods. A happy solution
has been found of late for this dilemma; over the naked
contradiction of love and merchandise one throws the cloak of the
artist. The artist begets in pure love of his art; and he sells for
Falstaff’s reason,—it is his vocation. Until poetry got this market
value, however, it was common goods; poets had written generically,
as members of a class or guild,[300] and any member might use the
common stock of expressions and ideas. A translator was as great as
his original.[301] The eighth chapter of Dante’s essay on composition
in the vernacular opens with a curious discourse about artistic
property, as if the new idea and the new phrase needed a gloss.
“When we say, ‘this is Peter’s canzone,’ we mean that Peter made it,
not merely that he uttered it!” Such an explanation, however, seems
timely enough if one remembers that “a mediæval writer held it to
be improper to join his name to any literary composition,”[302] and
that Dante, “first of the moderns” as he is, and personal as his work
seems to be, actually names himself but once in the whole
Commedia. Here is the dying struggle of that clan ownership[303]
which had ruled from the days of the primitive horde; for it is clear
that intellectual property would be the last kind to be developed, and
even if the poet liked to see his name graven on the colder side of
the rock, this was not an isolated, personal distinction, but was
merged in the register of the guild like the names on a soldiers’
monument. Horace’s “write me down among the lyric poets” was an
intelligible ambition to mediæval minds; but the purely personal
triumph of his non omnis móriar and its splendid context was alien
to their way of thought. Barring the degree of genius in each, one
may say that Dante and Victor Hugo were equally strong in their
intense individuality; here is a case where Gautier’s phrase holds
good that the brain of an artist was the same under the Pharaohs as
it is now; yet that conditions change the product, that the individual
note, piercing in the modern, becomes almost communal and
generic in the older poet, that a distinct curve of evolution to the
personal extreme, even in artistic poetry, can be drawn between
them, is clear to probation for any one who will compare two famous
passages which a hasty inference would probably declare to be on
the same straight individual line. If one looks at the whole passage
where Dante speaks of his poetic achievement,[304] and if one neither
isolates a phrase nor yet sentimentalizes it all to suit modern ideas;
if one notes the satisfaction which the poet feels with his work in
and for the guild, and how he passes the time of day with a brother
craftsman; then one will find in it not only a touch of artlessness, of
what is called, rightly or wrongly, the mediæval, the communal, but
an effacement of personality in the very act of asserting it. He
shows, as it were, his diploma from the guild of poets. To bring this
artlessness into clear relief, one has only to compare the thirty-
second of Hugo’s Chants du Crépuscule, where the poet, alone in an
old tower, addresses the bell which hangs there, its pious inscription
insulted by the obscenities, blasphemies, and futilities written over
it; he is no exile, this poet, but proudly and contemptuously isolated
from his kind, whose brutishness he has just deplored; and he
speaks thus to the bell,—of all survivals the most characteristic of
mediæval thought, the veriest symbol of communal religious life:—
Sens-tu, par cette instinct vague et plein de douceur,
Qui révèle toujours une sœur à la sœur,
Qu’à cette heure où s’endort la soirée expirante,[305]

Une âme est près de toi, non moins que toi vibrante,
Qui bien souvent aussi jette un bruit solennel,
Et se plaint dans l’amour comme toi dans le ciel?
Then the superb lines of comparison: life has written on the poet’s
soul base and irreverent inscriptions, like those on the bell; but a
touch of the divine, a message, and like the bell, so his soul breaks
out into harmonies in which even the audacities and futilities
perforce take part. Compare all this introspection, this immense
assumption of individual importance, with the objective, communal
tone of Dante, despite that “I am one who sings whenever love
inspires me,”—so like Hugo’s assertion, and yet so different. In each
of these passages one can see artistic individuality; but between
them stretches a long chain of development in which each link is a
new emphasis on the individual in art. One of the earliest and
strongest of these links was forged by the renaissance; although it
must be borne in mind that Dante represents not simply his guild of
singers, but behind them a singing community of peasants, the
songs of field, spinning-room, and village dance, still dominant
among unlettered folk and not yet shamed into silence by print and
the schoolmaster.
The change, however, was there; the tide had turned against
communal sentiment, and individuals were feeling a new power. Not
only fame and glory fled from the guild to the great man; individual
disgrace, the lapse, the shortcoming, find a record. Once the flyting
was carried out before the folk, rose and fell with the occasion, and
was a thing of festal origin, like the Eskimo poem-duel, or the
earliest amœbean verse, or the German schnaderhüpfl; but Aretino
now appears as the father of journalism in our pleasant modern
sense, as the arch reporter, the discoverer and publisher of personal
scandal.[306] In painting, too, one notes the sudden rage for portraits;
and it is the portrait of the individual for himself, not simply of pope,
or of abbot, or of prince, as the head and type of a corporation,
although a trace of this influence lingers in the setting of the picture,
witness one of Holbein’s merchants, with his bills, pens, memoranda,
and a dozen mercantile suggestions scattered about him. Poetry, of
course, felt the change first of all, both in subject-matter and in
form. For the latter, there is the founding of the sonnet, that
apartment for a single gentleman in verse. One thinks at once of
Petrarch, rightly called “the first modern man,” and deserving the
title better than Dante, who was quite as mediæval as he was
modern,[307] while Petrarch belonged to the new world; besides his
sonnets, his correspondence and his confessions show that he not
only felt the need, as none of his predecessors had felt it, to reveal
and analyze his personality, but also recognized an interest on the
part of the public to which these revelations could respond. The
mediæval poet sought his public, did not call the public to himself;
and the artistic form of his poetry is the utterance of common feeling
in a common and often conventional phrase. The May morning, the
vision,[308] the garden and the roses and the blindingly beautiful
young person, the allegorical birds and beasts,—this was the late
mediæval tether; although allegory helped the poet to escape the
throng and hedge his personality with some importance, even
allegory is in the service if not of the throng, at least of the guild.
Allegory as a poetical form mediates between the old communal
ballad, or the chanson de geste, and the new lyric of confidences.
The modern poet cut loose from it all, and cast about for the gentle
reader, soon to be his portion by the happy intervention of print.
Ronsard strikes this note of separation from an unappreciative
throng, and so does many another humanist; while Chaucer’s
contempt for the masses is not so much artistic as mediæval and
aristocratic. Dunbar, our first really modern poet, the first to take
that purely individual attitude, was also first of our poets to see his
work in printer’s ink. Even when the form of literature demanded
objective treatment, the interest began to be individual. We now
laud our poet or playwright for the fine individuality of his folk, and
flout those masterless tales, songs, ballads, where even the hero is a
mere type, or, worse, a mere doer of deeds. This doer of deeds
answered the desire for poetic expression at a time when an
individual was merged in his clan; the excess of interest in action is
proportioned to the excess of communal over individual importance.
As the artist develops, as he begins to feel his way toward
individualism, his genius is spent first upon allegory, and then, as
real life grows more imperious, upon the type, a compromise
between individual and community. Here stands Chaucer. Like Dante
he looks both ways; his squire, for example, deliciously clear and
individual as he seems, has as much reminiscence of Childe Waters
as prophecy of Romeo. It is characteristic of the two periods in
which Chaucer and Shakspere respectively worked, that while one
named his masterpiece, the study of a vulgar woman, “a wife of
Bath,” the other called a like masterpiece “Mrs. Quickly of
Eastcheap,”—a very pretty little curve of evolution in itself; and when
the portrait of the merchant is drawn,—and what a portrait!—that
careless “sooth to sayn, I noot how men hym calle,” as compared
with Shakspere’s treatment of Antonio, is suggestive not only of the
aristocrat, but also of the mediæval point of view. Even the setting
of the Prologue is in point,—these pilgrims, each a representative of
his class or corporation, their common lodging, their association,
even if temporary, as in a guild, their jests, courtesies, and quarrels,
all in the open air. A century later, people had come indoors.
Professor Patten,[309] alert to note the connection between æsthetic
change and a change in economic conditions, points out the
alteration thus wrought in the passage from communal to individual
life. Window-glass, the chimney, bricks, all improvements of the
home, changed this home from a prison to a palace, from something
shunned and undesired to the focal point of happiness. Outdoor
communal amusements yielded to indoor pleasures shared by a few.
The dances and the license of May-day, uproarious and often
questionable rejoicings once common to all, were now left to the
baser sort, while quiet, reputable folk turned to their homes. Knight
and prioress, too, no longer rode beside the miller and put up with
his gros rire, his drunken antics, and his tale.
The main expression in poetry brought about by that new power of
the individual is the confidential note, the assumption of a reader’s
interest in the poet’s experience, what J. A. Symonds called “the lyric
cry,” begetting on the part of this reader or hearer a sense at first
confined to such mutual relations of the poet and the sympathetic
soul to which he spoke, but spreading little by little until it is now
fairly to be called the medium, the atmosphere, of poetry at large;
one names it sentiment. The history of modern verse, with epic and
drama in decay, is mainly the history of lyrical sentiment. Where
does this first appear in European poetry?[310] Answers to such a
question are made with melancholy forebodings, seeing that a first
appearance in literary annals is as unstable as the positively last
appearance of a favourite singer; but French criticism has pitched,
with considerable show of right, upon that amiable vagabond, Villon.
Certainly the Grand Testament is as familiar in its tone to the
modern reader as it is difficult and obsolete in its speech; and
Sainte-Beuve, in a pretty bit of criticism, has undertaken to show
why Villon’s most famous ballade touches this modern sense, while
verses seemingly like it are scorned as monkish prattle.[311]
Throughout the Middle Ages a favourite form of communal
sentiment, or rather of theological and professional reflection, was to
ask where this and that famous person might now be found. The
mediæval poet could string together interminable rimed queries like
these of St. Bernard:—
Dic ubi Salomon, olim tam nobilis?
Vel ubi Samson est, dux invincibilis?
Vel pulcher Absolon, vultu mirabilis?
Vel dulcis Jonathas, multum amabilis?

and so on, with pagans like Cæsar, Tully, Aristotle. A capable

Frenchman traced this sort of poem far back, and on his heels came
a tireless, not to say superfluous, German;[312] but it was Sainte-
Beuve who did the one important thing. He sees in Villon’s queries
about those fair ladies dead and gone little more than the old
conventional question, and finds Villon’s originality in the exquisite
refrain, with its light, half-mocking pathos: But where are the snows
of yester year? The Latin simply failed to add:—
Ast ubi nix vetus, tam effusibilis?

Yet Sainte-Beuve did not quite touch the quick. Even this refrain is
no more original than the queries; for it not only echoes a popular
phrase, and perhaps is itself nothing more than a communal refrain,
[313]
but it continues a theme of the mediæval poet even better
known than the ubi sunt. The real change is not in words or phrase,
but in a shifting from the professional to the personal point of view.
The poet of the sacred guild could put this fact of mortality either as
a question or as an “example,”—witness a thirteenth-century poem,
[314]
where the prospect of dissolution is fortified by the roasting of
St. Lawrence, the beheading of John the Baptist, and the stabbing of
Thomas à Becket; while the same manuscript which holds this
“example” has a charming little poem of questions, the Luve Ron of
Thomas de Hales, often quoted as forerunner of Villon’s ballade. “A
maid of Christ,”—and we note this touch of the guild,—“asks me to
make her a love-song. I will do it. But the love of this world is a
cheat; lovers must die, and men fade all as leaf from bough. Lovers,
quotha? Where, indeed, are Paris and Helen; where Tristram, Ysolde,
and the rest; where, too, are Hector and Cæsar? As if they had
never lived at all!” At first sight this lyric of the guild seems a
counterpart to the pagan cry of Villon, as if the latter were a parody
of the old formula without the piety and with a vague touch of
genius in the refrain; but the difference is more than this. Villon
transfers sentiment from the guild to the individual.[315] It is a
supreme and triumphant and epoch-making attempt to do what the
individual poet had always essayed to do and found impossible,—to
leap communal barriers entirely, and tear himself free from the guild.
The monk could not doff his cowl; his face is hidden; his song asks
the organ, the choir, the general confession, the litany, for a
background, even when it seems fairly Wordsworthian:—
Winter wakens all my care!
Now these trees are waxing bare,
Oft I sigh and mourn full “sair,”
When it cometh in my thought
Of this earthly joy, how it all goeth to naught.[316]

Not so with Villon. He knows no guild, save that of the jolly beggars;
and he can do with ease what even Ronsard does only with difficulty,
and leaning on a classical staff:—
Sous le tombeau tout Ronsard n’ira pas,—
paraphrase of Horace. But these ladies pass in line before Villon for
his own whim;[317] they are there to throw a more intense light upon
his own personality; and the cry of the refrain, subtle but absolute
touch of individual sentiment, is the new lyric cry.[318] Across the
channel this cry is echoed in what at first hearing sounds like the
veriest poem of a guild, Dunbar’s Lament for the Poets,[319] and in its
refrain, superficially so mediæval, Timor mortis conturbat me! But
for English lyric, Dunbar is the first poet of sentiment, in its modern
meaning, as Villon is for the French. In brief, the more one studies
these changes, which could be detailed to the limits of a book, the
clearer one sees that Europe learned from Villon, Dunbar, and their
fellows, to take sentiment[320] instead of the old morality, and to
regard lyric verse as the bidding to a private view of the poet’s mind.
The poet now makes himself the central point of all that he says and
sees; he lays all history, all romance, under tribute to support the
burden of his own fate and frame his proper picture; he is the sun of
the system; he serves no clan or guild, and admits his readers only
one by one to an audience. The advance from Villon’s time is chiefly
to add the intellectual to the individual, an obvious process. Emotion
has come so thoroughly under individual control that the art is now
conscious and the artist supreme, and so thoroughly under
intellectual control that the feelings, however common and widely
human their appeal, must own the mastery of thought. The one
involves the other; for consent of emotions is a far easier affair than
consent of opinions and agreement of reasoning. Emotion is the
solvent of early superstition, traditional beliefs and affections, in a
community, as it is in an individual. “I felt,” says Rousseau, “before I
thought; it is the common lot of humanity.”[321] In societies custom is
a consent of instincts, an unconscious law; legislation, definite and
conscious, is a consent of thinking individuals. A creed has always
been easy to change, for it is matter of thought; a cult, a form, a
superstition, communal instincts, in a word, go not out even with
prayer and fasting.
Objections against all this have little weight. One is told that the
renaissance brought uniformity and not diversity of poetic form and
thought. But that rationalism, so called, which then came in, and
which made reason superior to emotion, worked for the individual
and not, as critics say, for the social forces in art.[322] It is true that
all this rational activity, this intelligent study and discussion of the
classics, led to a certain uniformity in poetic work; but every
advance in rationalism really accents the individuality, the artistry,
the intellectual power of the poet, and leads him further from the
communal and instinctive emotional level. Keen emotion brings men
closer; keen thinking separates their paths, even if it leads them to
one destination. Communal emotion is still the mine whence a poet
gets his gold; but where the gold was once current in mere bulk, or
at best in weight, it must now be stamped with the sharpest possible
impression of artistic thought. Or, again, one may be more precise in
one’s objection. Attacking this idea that emotion, or the mass, rules
in one age, and the individual, or thought, in another, as something
akin to Comte’s discredited evolutionary drama in three great acts,—
feeling, fancy, reason,—one may insist on the piercing emotional
individualism and subtle thinking of the church at a time when the
communal note is assumed as dominant in mediæval life. Here again
we must protest against the tyranny of terms. What does Haym
mean by the individualism of the Middle Ages, and precisely what
was this individualism of the church? According as one looks at the
church, one may say that it was individual or that it was communal
in its influence. There are really three elements in the case. The
people of the Middle Ages in Europe were to a great extent
organized in a communal system, for the unlettered community kept
many features of the clan, not to say of the horde, and social growth
itself was a matter of the guild. In such relations the individual had
little to say; and it was out of these conditions that the renaissance,
working first through the Italian commonwealths, began to draw the
individual into his new career. Here, then, was the communal life of
the Middle Ages. The second element in the case is the church as a
huge guild, organized for the communal life out of which it grew,
and subordinating individual thought, emotion, will, to the thought,
emotion, and will of this whole body. These two elements, long in
undisputed power, slowly yielded to a third. Within the church itself,
and at first unable to exist outside of it, lay this intellectualized and
individualized emotion which in later times found the church to be its
implacable foe; whether the Hebrew psalms be congregational or
personal,[323] it is certain that the monk in his cell felt them to be
intensely individual, and in the hymns which he wrote, largely by
inspiration of these psalms, one finds much of that spirit which fills a
modern lyric. A hymn has two meanings for the Christian. One is its
communal meaning, as the Scottish kirk could prove; and probably
no one but a Scot, with “the graves of the martyrs” in mind, can fully
appreciate this meaning of a congregational hymn. But to most
people a hymn has the individual note of Jesus, Lover of my Soul;
this is the note of early Christian hymns, and is due to a protest
against communal conditions[324] made by that spirit of Christianity
which has been its chief force in modern times, that certification of
value given to the humblest single life, that lifting of the chattel serf
into a soul; a spirit which began and fought the long battle against
tradition of race and clan and guild. De Vigny, in his exquisite Journal
of a Poet,[325] points out the importance of the confessional in literary
growth, and derives from this source the “romance of analysis,” with
its exaggeration of the value of a single soul. This new accent upon
the individual, due to the spirit of a new faith, was strengthened in
the Middle Ages by what one understood of the spirit of classic
poets; and when the two forces had worked into the heart of
mediæval life, mediæval life ceased to be; modern life stood in its
place, modern art, letters, statecraft even, all inspired by the
individual principle.[326] Now the mistake made by men who talk of
the individualism of the Middle Ages is that they confuse this germ
of intense personal emotion, mainly confined to the cell of the
mediæval monk, with the conditions of mediæval life at large,
conditions, by the way, which had little record in documents. One
forgets that the records, mainly made by studious monks, would
give an exaggerated importance to this personal element, this inner
life, and would ignore to a great extent the life without. Müllenhoff
did well to insist that the Middle Ages neither spoke the speech nor
wore the garb of a monkish chronicle,—still less, it may be added, of
a monkish hymn. With Christianity emphasizing the value of a single
soul, with the emancipation of the individual from state, guild,
church, and with the secularization of letters and art, this habit of
referring wide issues of life to the narrow fortunes of an individual
made itself master of poetry. The emotion of a clan yielded to the
emotion of a single soul. A progress of this sort is seen in Sir Patrick
Spens, Macbeth, and Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach. Chronology in
its higher form makes the ballad a mediæval and communal affair,
the play a thing of art. Each deals with a Scot as centre of tragedy.
In the ballad not a syllable diverts one from a group made up of the
sailor, his comrades, and their kin. The men put to sea and are
drowned; the ladies who will sit vainly waiting, the wives who will
stand “lang, lang, wi’ their gold kaims in their hair,” give one in
belated, unconscious, and imperfect form a survival of the old clan
sorrow, a coronach in gloss. The men are dead, the women wail,
and that is all. But Macbeth, as the crisis draws near, bewails along
with his own case the general lot of man;[327] “der Menschheit ganzer
Jammer fasst ihn an.” Finally, in Dover Beach, modern subjectivity
wails and cries out on fate from no stress of misfortune, but quite à
propos de bottes and on general principles. Subtract now the
changes due to epic, dramatic, lyric form; the progress and the
curve are there. The constancy of human nature, yes; but there are
two worlds in which this constant human nature finds varying
expressions: one is the mediæval, where St. Francis can say
“laudato sia Dio mio signore con tutte le creature, specialmente
messer lo frate sole” ... and so on, with his joy in nature; and one is
the modern, where Wordsworth must strike that other note, my
heart leaps up, or whatever else. Here, indeed, are two distinct
worlds, even if it is the same human heart.
So, too, what one calls objective in modern poetry is not objective in
the communal, mediæval sense; and what one thinks to be
sentimental or even subjective in the ballads or other communal
song is not subjective or sentimental in any modern way. A throng in
those homogeneous conditions was unsentimental in its poetical
expression for the good reason that a throng has emotions distinct
from the emotions of an individual; this, too, is why sentiment and
individualism have kept step in the progress of poetry. Tennyson is
objective enough in his verses about the widow of a slain warrior
and her rescuing tears when her child is brought to her. But this is
not really objective, not communal; it is sentiment, of a high order to
be sure, but sentiment. What a different point of view in the
commonplace of the ballads! Was the head of the house slain and
the widow left lamenting, invariably,—
Up spake the son on the nourice’s knee,
“Gin I live to be a man, revenged I’ll be;”

that is true communal and objective emotion. Scott, who was

saturated with ballads and ballad lore, was the last of English poets
who could write in an impersonal and communal way. After him
always, as mostly before him, the subjective and sentimental note
came canting in even where severest objectivity is supposed to
reign. If one wishes to feel this in Scott,—for it is a thing to feel and
not to prove by syllogisms,—one has only to read the final stanza of
Bonnie Dundee; not great verse, indeed, but full of a certain
unforced simplicity, a large air, a communal vigour, an echo of
unpremeditated, impersonal, roundly objective song.[328]
There is another process in the poetry of art which serves to
disguise the real tendency toward individual instead of communal
emotion. Communal poetry had a wide, free, outdoor life; the
modern poet is bounded in a nutshell,—but he has his dreams. With
intense subjectivity comes the need to cover a vast range of space
and time; in place of the clan or the community, its grief and joy, set
forth by the communal song, one finds a solitary poet, a sort of sick
king in Bokhara, dealing with the universe, and putting into his lines
that quality which is best expressed in general by the often abused
name of weltschmerz, and in particular by those countless passages
in modern lyric like the poem which Shelley wrote “in dejection,” or
that verse of Keats which expresses so admirably the modern lyric
attitude in contrast with a singing and dancing throng:—
 On the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone and think.

For this lyric daring, this voyaging through strange seas of thought
alone, this blending of personal reflection with the whole range of
human thought and human emotion, makes poetry cosmic, but does
not make it communal or even objective. The sudden interest in
savages, and the glorification of primitive virtues, even the reasoning
against reason and the emotion for emotion, are part of the
subjective process. Jean-Jacques, Ossian, the bésoin de réverie,
cosmopolitan sentiment and sensibility set in vogue by Sterne,[329]—
all these details of the romantic movement need no emphasis; but it
is significant that this subjective search for the objective brought
genuine communal poetry into view, and it is by no means to the
glory of the critic that he so often puts romantic zeal and poetry of
the people upon the same plane of origins. The scientific triumphs of
a century and more have added external nature to the poet’s
province; they have put a new sympathy for natural things along
with zeal for humanity and that sense of the individual and the artist
which were due to the renaissance, justifying to the full Bacon’s
definition of art as homo additus naturae. Poetry now means the
emotional mood of a thinker alone with his world; we forget that it
ever meant anything else.
The subjective and the sentimental in such excess must each beget
a reaction; they roll back upon themselves, and the shock has two
results, which the critic is tempted at first sight to call objective. One
is the sharp dramatic study, where the poet puts himself into the
place of another person. The second is that great reaction of
sentiment which is called humour. As for the dramatic element, there
is no question that a would-be communal reaction, “the need of a
world of men,” follows naturally upon excess of the subjective note.
But the communal reaction cannot restore communal conditions. The
we of throng poetry has yielded little by little to the lyrical I-and-
Thou, and finally to the I, pure and simple. An obvious reaction is to
put the I into the personality of another. This device, now so
common, began in the early renaissance by the identification of the
poet, not with another person, but with another class of persons.
Burckhardt notes the Canzone Zingaresca of Lorenzo as “one of the
earliest products of the purely modern impulse to put one’s self, in a
poetic and conscious manner, into the situation of a given class of
people.”[330] The “objectivity” of later poets runs into this mould; it is
a conscious process, however well done, and is quite different from
the lack of all subjective interest which marks early song. One is
reminded of the splendid efforts of Horace to bring back the courage
and simplicity and austerity of old Roman life to the Rome of
Augustus. Nietzsche may bid us build our cities on Vesuvius, and
Stevenson may revive that old love for “the bright eyes of danger”;
but it is not the old lover that the Scot revives, and the silva antiqua
is of modern planting. The transfer of persons brings one no nearer
to communal objectivity; it is a reaction against individual sentiment,
which only throws into stronger relief the prevailing tone of a poetry
overwhelmingly lyric, individual, and sentimental.
Again, growing out of the same change of heart from the communal
to the personal and artistic, is that essentially modern quality of
humour, which really springs from an intensely subjective, not to say
introspective, state; it is sentiment in disguise. One of the surest
tests of communal poetry is the lack of conscious sentiment and of
conscious humour. When we say that a ballad is pathetic, either the
pathos and sentiment are in solution with the material of the ballad,
or else we read them into the ballad outright.[331] So, or nearly so,
with the humour. Communal humour is cruel; as religion, now a
matter of love, began with abject fear, laughter, so unkind scientific
folk assert, began as exultation over the torture of a conquered foe,
just as children are often amused at the suffering of man and beast,
until they take the cue of pity from their elders. Fielding, in his
reaction against overdone sentiment, also went back to the
communal idea of humour. Parson Adams is cudgelled and abused
within an inch of his life, and in Tom Jones bloody heads and broken
bones make for merriment on all occasions. The squire of the
picaresque novel,—Lazarillo de Tormes for an early case, or for a late
and trivial example of tremendous adventures of this sort, Trufaldin
in Pigault-Lebrun’s Folie Espagnole—like the poor hero of Cervantes,
even like Mr. Pickwick, like all the breed, may look to bear unmerciful
beatings by way of contributing to the fun. In the later ballads of
Robin Hood, tinkers and beggars trounce the hero again and again;
and it is a concession to the yokel’s point of view when the subtle
humour of Falstaff in Henry IV yields to those indignities of pinchings
and the buck-basket at which modern readers boggle in the Merry
Wives. Burckhardt again lays under obligation the historian of
literature in general, and the champion of this antithesis in particular,
when he points out[332] the clannish and communal note of what in
the Middle Ages passed for humour. It was a thing not of individuals
but of classes, guilds, cities, towns, villages,[333] countries,—collective
altogether. Jests at Scotchmen or at our own Jerseymen, and the
exchange of civilities between rival colleges, are jaded survivals of
this honest but obvious merriment. Scholars, chiefly Teutonic by
birth,[334] have a way of praising this sort of thing as sound, old,
wholesome fun, derber humor; but it is an acquired scholastic taste,
and, as a rule, one does not lay down his Uncle Toby to listen to
mediæval banter. If modern humour is an antidote against modern
sentiment, both come from the same source, and similia similibus
was never more true than here; sentiment is individualized emotion
in excess, and humour is the recoil. Walpole had this in mind when
he said that life is a tragedy to one who feels, but a comedy to one
who thinks. The humour which springs from excessive thought, from
sentiment in reaction, is at the world’s end from that rough and
boisterous communal fun; it is equally removed from delight in
tragedy, itself a sign of youth.[335] To trace the course of modern
poetic humour from Chaucer, Villon, Dunbar, down to Heine, who
does in verse what Sterne did in prose, would be “a journey like the
path to heaven,” in whichever sense one chooses to take the
comparison,—delightful or difficult; enough in this place to point out
the flickering humour that plays across the subjectivity and
sentiment of Heine’s Death Bed,[336] with its parody of Homer, its
scorn for the public, and all the rest.
Such are the chief differencing factors of the poetry of art as they
appear in process of evolution from the Middle Ages to the present
time. They belong to poetic material; a further result of the process
appears in poetic style. Individual and sentimental poetry has
developed a poetic dialect and widened the gap between the speech
of a poet and the speech of common life. This goes deeper than
conventional phrases and epic repetitions, which at first sight induce
one to assert precisely the opposite view and call modern poetry a
return from the conventional to the simple in expression. Emotion,
however, that is spontaneous, communal, direct, and without taint of
reflection, will catch the nearest way and avoid deliberate or
conscious figures of speech, the trope or “turning” peculiar to our
verse; and there is a steady progress in poetry from the simple or
natural[337]—which does not exclude the metaphorical, if only
metaphor be the outcome of unconscious processes of speech—to
the tropical; poetry little by little makes its own dialect.[338] Of course
there are excesses and subsequent returns to simplicity, witness the
metaphysical school of poets in England; but the tendency is always
to the individual, which is the unusual and unexpected, and hence to
the metaphorical. Precisely, too, as sentiment turned upon itself, so
the metaphorical turns upon itself and makes a metaphor out of the
literal; for example, Professor Woodberry in his sonnet on a portrait
of Columbus:—
Is this the face, and these the finding eyes?

But this simplicity and objective force of poetic language, rarely so

successful as here, and rare in any case, is itself subjective and the
outcome of individual assertion.
It is now in order to look at survivals of communal and primitive
verse, and to learn from a study of their differencing factors no
longer what the beginnings of poetry were not, but what they really
were.
 CHAPTER V

THE DIFFERENCING ELEMENTS OF COMMUNAL

POETRY

Survival of primitive and communal poetry as it can be detected in

the ballads and the popular rimes of Europe, in the songs of those
savage tribes which seem to come nearest to conditions of
prehistoric life, and in the beginnings of national literatures so far as
any trustworthy record remains, must now be studied analytically,
not as poems, but rather with a view to the elements which
difference poetry of the people from the poetry of individual art.
That a considerable body of verse, European as well as savage,
represents the community in mass rather than the solitary poet, is
universally conceded; it is generally but not universally conceded
that the making of such communal poetry is under modern
conditions a closed account. If this view is correct, a curve of decline
and extinction can be drawn corresponding to that curve of the
developing artistic and individual type considered above. With this
assertion of a closed account, however, must go a caution of great
weight; the actual traditional ballad of Europe is not to be carried
back into prehistoric conditions. A process of this sort brings ridicule
upon arguments which ought to be made in rational terms; and it is
to the elements of prehistoric poetry surviving in a ballad, and in
kindred verse, that one must look, not to the whole poem, which is a
complex of communal and artistic materials. One may say without
fear of a contradiction in terms that the ballad has in it elements
which go back to certain conditions of poetic production utterly
unknown to the modern poem of art. These elements also occur as
fragments in popular rimes; but the ballad has drawn chief attention
because it is a complete and readable poem in itself.
These ballads of Europe have a large literature both of collection and
of criticism;[339] and in some cases, notably the English, collection of
material has the melancholy advantage of being final. Despite
arguments of Mr. Joseph Jacobs and Dr. John Meier,[340] the making
of ballads is a closed account; that is, a popular ballad of to-day,
even if one allows the term to pass, is essentially different from a
ballad such as one finds in the collection of Professor Child.
Conditions of production in the street, the concert, the café-
chantant, even in the rural gatherings[341] controlled by that “bucolic
wit,” are different from the conditions of production which prevailed
in a homogeneous and unlettered community of mediæval Europe.
A. E. Berger, in a popular essay[342] which may go with that of Dr.
John Meier as representing an extravagant rationalism now in vogue
about poetry of the people quite as extreme as the extravagant
romanticism of Grimm, limits the difference between this poetry and
the poetry of art to the difference of oral and of written record; but
he quite concedes the closed account. Here, however, the two
rationalists get into a deadlock. Dr. Meier will not allow the closed
account, goes back to Steinthal, and against the modern view
asserts that dichten des volks, the ownership of a poem by the folk
at large, who sing it into a thousand changing forms. The process
according to Meier is now what it always has been, first an individual
composition, then oblivion of the individual and popularity for the
song, which is felt by the people—“a necessary condition of folk-
poetry”—to be their own, with manifold changes due in no case to
any artistic purpose or deliberation. Now in all this Dr. Meier puts
himself at odds with the defenders of oral poetry as held apart from
written and printed verse, a distinction which he ignores. He agrees
with them that, in the words of Berger, “there is no organic
difference between poetry of the people and the poetry of art;” but
the difference that does exist for Meier prettily contradicts the
difference assumed by the others, Berger and the rest regarding the
ballad, a thing of oral tradition, as now out of date. Not only does
one test neutralize the other test, but both parties to this deadlock
take a point of view fatal to any real mastery of the subject. They
fail to look at the conditions under which communal poetry was
produced, and they fail to study it in its essential elements. From
this proper point of view, however, it is clear that traditional ballads
were not made as a song of the street or the concert-hall is now
made, and it is clear that ballads of that communal kind are not
made under modern conditions. It has just been shown that the
difference between mediæval poetry at large and poetry of the day
may be best expressed in terms of the guild and the community as
against the individual and subjective note. Poetry of the guild, if the
phrase will pass, was composed by poets of the guild and found a
record; we are wont to think that sort of thing made up all mediæval
poetry; but the community itself had a vast amount of song which
was composed in public and for the occasion, found no written
record, and is recovered only in varying traditional forms. The
conditions of modern life forbid the old communal expression, free
and direct; but of course the throng is still bound to voice its
feelings, and takes the poetry of art, masters it, owns it, changes it,
precisely as Dr. Meier contends, but with no very edifying results.
Every collection of ballads, even of folksongs, with their dignity, their
note of distinction, compared with sorry stuff of the streets, bears
witness to this difference between old and new. Landstad[343] in 1848
noted that ballads were fast vanishing from Norway. Bujeaud[344]
complains that in France “new” and fatuous verses supplant
traditional song; and he gives as example a “chanson nouvelle
dédiée à une jeune fille.” Ralston,[345] for Russia, comments on the
new popular verse “laboriously produced in the towns and
unblushingly fathered upon soldiers and gypsies.” Save in a few
dialects, the old runes, and with them the power to make popular
song, are dying out in Finland; communal poetry there is going to
pieces, and the process confirms what was said above about the
relations of feeling and thought in verse.[346] Throughout
Germany[347] the current ballads and folksongs are seldom even
traditional; hardly anywhere are they made in field and spinning-
room as they were made half a century ago. At the annual dinner of
the border shepherds, held at Yetholm in the Cheviots, so Sir George
Douglas[348] relates, “there is no longer any thought of native
inspiration; the songs sung after dinner are of the type familiar in
more vulgar localities, and known as ‘songs of the day.’ Even the old
ballads are neglected.” Traditional native songs of the countryside
have vanished from the fields and villages of Europe, and are
replaced by opera airs, sentimental ditties, and the like; Loquin’s
attempt[349] to refer the old songs to similar sources is anything but a
success; indeed, as one hears the new and thinks of the old, one is
reminded of an ignoble analogy in the habit of many farmers here in
eastern America, who sell their fresh fruit and vegetables, or neglect
to raise any, and use with relish and a kind of pride the inevitable
“canned goods.” On many farms the kitchen-garden has vanished
like the old songs.[350] Apart from these base respects, however, it is
clear that the throng is powerless to revive even mediæval
conditions; and the traditional ballad, as every competent editor
either asserts or implies, is no longer to be made. Ferdinand Wolf,
Grundtvig,[351] Talvj, and a number of others, declare that the
homogeneous and unlettered community, now no longer with us, is
the only source of a genuine ballad. True, communities can still be
found which have something of the old conditions and of the old
power. Mr. Baring-Gould notes that in divers places English folk still
sing, perhaps even make, the good and genuine song. A
correspondent of the New York Evening Post, in a pleasant letter[352]
describing the Magyar dance and song, notes that these people
prefer singing to talking, and makes the statement that “there is
scarcely a stable-boy or a kitchen-maid who has not, at some time,
been the creator of at least one song—both words and music. The
favourite time for launching these ventures on the part of the young
women is when they gather to spin in the evenings.” Sir George
Douglas, in the note already quoted, says that ballads of tradition
have retreated from shepherds to “a yet shyer and less sophisticated
set of men, to wit, the fishermen of the smaller fishing towns.” It is
said, too, that conditions quite analogous to those of the old Scottish
border, and ballads of corresponding quality, some of them, indeed,
very ancient ballads of tradition, may be found in the mountains of
Kentucky. But this is all sporadic and dying activity. In favoured
places it is still true, as Professor E. H. Meyer says of Germany, that
communal singing lingers,[353] but even this is moribund; and
communal making, so he admits, is dead.[354] More than this: no
modern poet, however great, has yet succeeded in reviving the
ballad in imitation. Scott, not to speak of the failures of Leyden and
Sharpe, made poems in some respects as good as the old ballads,
and made a beautiful bit of verse—Proud Maisie is in the Wood—very
like a folksong; but they are not the real ballad, the real folksong,
and Scott would have been first to deny the identity. As for the
street songs and that sort of verse, from the wheezing sentimental
ditties down,[355] one has only to compare them with genuine old
ballads to see how utterly they fail to meet any test of really
communal poetry. Even three centuries ago, when earth was nearer
the ballad heaven than now, broadsides, “garlands,” trash of the
street and the hawker’s basket, all balladry of trade, were sharply
sundered from the good old songs. One knows what Ben Jonson
thought of “ballading silk-weavers” and the rest; one also knows the
saying attributed to him by Addison that he would rather have been
author of Chevy Chace than of all his own works.[356]
A word is needed, however, before one passes from this matter of
the closed account, in regard to a notion that people hold about
modern communal song. It is still made, they say, by the lower
classes, but it is too indecent for currency, and is conventionally
unknown. Now it is a fact which may well get emphasis here, that
the real ballad of tradition, while it never boggles at a plain name for
things now rather understood than expressed, is at a vast remove
from the obscene, and from those hulking indecencies which, along
with the vapid and the sentimental, make up the bulk of modern
unprinted and unmentioned song. Herd printed a few high-kilted
ballads,[357] but even age refuses to lend them the appearance of
communal and traditional; and the chasm grows wider when one
deals with an audacious collection like that of Mr. Farmer,[358] where
“high-kilted” is a mild name for nearly all the specimens. Here, now,
are those “songs of Burns”—to which Blémont appealed for proof
that the popular muse is still prolific—running to a favourite tune,
but on the forbidden ground; here are obscenities, drolleries,
facetiae, such as grooms and the baser sort still sing everywhere,
and such as the Roman scratched on a wall. Here are the songs in
cold print, and with the label “national”; it is no answer to ignore
them. But when some one nods his head shrewdly, and stands with
arms encumbered, and says one could, if one would, show this same
old ballad still made by bards of the people and sung up and down
the land as aforetime, only it is not fit for ears foolishly polite, and all
the rest,—then, indeed, it is well to bring the matter to book. For
these songs are not really traditional ballads, and never belonged to
the community as a whole; the ballad of old oral tradition did belong
to the community as a whole. Quite apart from ethics, with no rant
after the manner of Vilmar, it is to be remembered that communal
poetry, sung in a representative throng, cannot well be obscene;
made by the public and in public, it cannot conceivably run against
the public standard of morality. Australian songs such as Scherer
studied shock the European; maypole songs of older England were
an offence to the Puritan; mediæval doings on Shrove-Tuesday night
were not to edification; crowds as well as individuals even now like
at times to give voice to their belief in cakes and ale; but
notwithstanding all these allowances, it is clear that a song made
and sung by a really communal crowd will give no room to private
vices and to those events and situations which get their main charm
from a centrifugal tendency with regard to public morals. This hole-
and-corner minstrelsy is no part of communal song; for further
proof, one may note the few genuine old ballads, quite free from
indecencies, which Mr. Farmer prints, and which are such a foil to
the superfluity of naughtiness before and after. They are of a
different world. In short, the main thing is to remember the protest
made so strongly by Herder and by Richard Wagner. “Folk,—that
does not mean the rabble of the street,” ran Herder’s formula[359] for
the past; while Wagner[360] describes the united “folk” of the future
for whom and from whom alone art of a high order may be
expected. But Wagner’s folk of the future can never be that
homogeneous, unlettered folk of a mediæval community from which
sprang our communal verse of tradition. “Many epochs,” says
Bruchmann,[361] “give one the impression as if in old times singing
and the making of poetry were universal gifts. This is psychologically
conceivable. The more uniform the intellectual life of individuals ...
the more we may expect uniform utterance of that life. So the
poetry of such a time would be entirely poetry of the people.” It is
clear that such conditions are far removed from the present,[362] and
that the making of communal poetry in any appreciable quantity or
quality must now be a closed account.
So much for the curve of evolution by which these communal
elements of poetry decline as they approach our time, and increase
as one retraces the path of poetry and song. But one is by no means
to suppose that the ballad of tradition, as it lies before one now, can
be taken as an accurate type of earliest communal song. Sir Patrick
Spens and Innsprück, ich muss dich lassen are not perfect examples
of the songs which primitive man used to sing, not even of the
original mediæval ballad such as the women made about St. Faro in
France or as those islanders made a hundred years ago about the
frustrated fisherman. Improvisation in a throng cannot give the unity
of purpose and the touch of art which one finds in Spens; that
comes partly from individual and artistic strands woven in with the
communal stuff, and partly from the process by which a ballad
constantly sung in many places, and handed down by oral tradition
alone, selects as if by its own will the stanzas and phrases which
best suit its public. What one asserts, however, is that in this ballad
of Spens, although in less degree than with other ballads, the
presence of artistic elements is overcome by the preponderating
influence of certain communal elements. These communal elements
are to be studied in all available material, and consist, taken in the
mass, of repetitions of word and phrase, chorus, refrain, singing,
dancing, and traces of general improvisation; and all these elements,
except for imitative purposes, are lacking in the poem of art, or if
present, are overwhelmed by the artistic elements. Even in the
ballads which have gone on record, and are made artistic to some
degree by this very act,—killed with kindness,—there are still more
traces of the throng than of the individual artist; this transfer from
conditions of communal making and tradition to conditions of artistic
record must always be taken into account. The collector of oral
tradition, particularly ballads, finds it nigh impossible to write them
down in their uncontaminated state; he gathers flowers, but what he
puts into his book is only a hortus siccus. Anecdotes in proof of this
abound; one may be quoted from the account given by Hogg[363] of
a visit from Scott in 1802, soon after the publication of the Border
Minstrelsy, where Scott printed some ballads which the Ettrick
shepherd had taken down from his mother’s singing. Now the
mother was face to face with Scott, and sang him the ballad of Old
Maitlan’; delighted, Scott asked her if it had ever been in print. No,
she said; never one of her songs had been printed till Scott had
printed them, and in doing so he had entirely spoiled them. “They
were made for singing an’ no for reading; but ye hae broken the
charm now, an’ they’ll never be sung mair.” And Hogg adds: “My
mother has been too true a prophetess, for from that day to this,
these songs, which were the amusement of every winter evening,
have never been sung more.”—And now to these vanishing or
vanished songs themselves.
We are to examine the European ballad or traditional narrative song,
and compare its elements with such shards of communal verse as
are still found here and there, and with ethnological material; lyric of
the people and refrains for the dance will be studied in another
place. The lyric, though simple and “popular” enough, is mainly an
affair of the lover and his lass, and has the centrifugal more than the
communal tendency even in that jolly little song, now six or seven
hundred years old, which jumps so easily into English, the Du bist
mîn:[364]—
Thou art mine, I am thine,
Of that right certain be!
Locked thou art within my heart,
And I have lost the key:
There must thou ever be!
Refrains for the dance,[365] of course, are communal and express
communal joy; one of them, with both the interjectional and the full
refrain, leaves no doubt at all; it is a song for the dance of May:[366]
—
A l’entrada del tems clar,—eya,
per joja recomensar,—eya,
e per jelos irritar,—eya,
vol la regina mostrar
qu’el’ est si amoroza.
Alavi’ alavia, jelos,
laissaz nos, laissaz nos,
ballar entre nos, entre nos.

To these refrains of the dance we shall return in due time; the bulk
of popular lyric is simple, rural, but not communal. There remain the
epic survival, the ballad, and popular rimes. Epic in the larger sense
is not to be considered here; for it comes down to us at the hands of
art, communal as it may have been in its beginnings, and it is not a
simple contemporary note of deeds which have a merely local and
social interest, a stage of development common to most traditional
ballads.[367] One sees, if one will glance at the actual ballad, why
theories of Niebuhr and of Buckle about the foundation of history in
artless chronicles of this communal type must be taken with great
reserve[368] and reduced to very slender assertion. Not in early
history, not even in the great epics, not even by help of the Homeric
question, can one study communal elements to the best advantage,
but rather in simple ballads of tradition, in the communal narrative
song.[369] It is sung, danced,—hence the rhythm of it; it tells of some
communal happening—“the germ of folksong is an event,” says
Böckel,[370]—hence the narrative.
What, now, are the tests and characteristics about which writers on
the ballad are agreed? All agree that it is a narrative song usually
preserved by oral tradition of the people. With few and unimportant
exceptions, it is agreed that a ballad must be the expression and
outcome of a homogeneous and unlettered community;[371] the
dispute is about origins. Grimm and sundry of his day declared that
the community itself made the ballad; Grundtvig said the same
thing, and Ten Brink, following certain modifications of Steinthal,
held the people, and not an individual poet, responsible for the
making as well as the singing. Ferdinand Wolf[372] was sturdy enough
in his scorn for the “nebulous poet-aggregate called folk,” although
he clung to the homogeneous community as absolute condition; and
his task was to find a representative who could make the ballad to
express such a community. Since ballads deal mainly with knights
and persons of rank, he concluded, as Geijer had done, that they
were due to “a person of quality”; Prior, the translator,[373] went even
a step farther and was inclined to think that for Scandinavian
ballads, and presumably other poems of the class, one is indebted
“to the ladies.” Prior is negligible. But Wolf was careful in his
statement; and when he noted the predominance of aristocratic
persons in the deeds which these ballads sing, he knew that it was a
common trait in all heroic and early epic. Germanic poems of this
class, the Béowulf, the Hildebrand Lay, what not, regard only such
characters and not the common man. As Dr. R. M. Meyer points out,
this is even carried into the lifeless world, and all things are in
superlative; all is splendid, unusual, extreme.[374] Even Icelandic
sagas deal only with the representative man, with distinguished and
notable folk.[375] So Wolf simply said that the ballad was made in this
class of society, in a homogeneous class, a volk von rittern as he
calls it,[376] who mainly “sang their own deeds,”—an important
concession. Even if one granted this, and allowed the court poet
himself to appear in an impersonal way as deputy of the knights in
singing about their deeds, it would still be far from individual and
deliberate poetry of art, but rather poetry of the guild with a definite
theme, traditional form, and recurrent phrases from the common
poetic stock.[377] However, the homogeneous and unlettered
conditions of a ballad-making community are in themselves enough
to account for this preference of rank; the knight, chieftain, warrior,
represented his folk, and was hardly raised above them in any
intellectual way. Not only were all the members of a community
consolidated, at first, against hunger, cold, and hostile tribes, the
primitive homogeneity of the horde, but even later, in mediæval
civilization, the same roof often covered the knight and his humblest
retainer, the same food fed them, and both were marked by the
same standards of action, the same habit of thought, the same
sentiments, the same lack of letters,[378] of introspection, of
diversified mental employment. Even in rural England such
conditions lingered long; Overbury’s franklin[379] “says not to his
servants, Goe to field, but Let us goe;” and at the harvest home,
where old songs prevail even in modern times, there is “no
distinction of persons, but master and servant sit at the same table,
converse freely together, and spend the remainder of the night in
dancing and singing, on terms of easy familiarity.”[380] How this state
of things is intensified in the Highland clan, every one knows; and in
going back to the horde there can be no doubt in regard to the
sharp curve toward communal conditions and communal expression.
Now as to those aristocratic personages of the ballad, the canticles
of love and woe which come from such a community would of
course put in the foreground of action persons who actually filled the
foreground of its life. The ballad represented a compact communal
life, and this passed into song in the person of its best
representative; hence the panegyric found in all early poetry, the
praise of great men who are made one with “the fathers who begat
us,” not to be explained away as work of Scherer’s primitive minstrel,
liar and entertainer passing about his hat for primitive pence. It is
with modern conditions of life, and with the diversity of modern
thought, that art comes down to the middle classes,—what throes
were needed to bring the domestic or citizen tragedy to light!—then
to the artisan, to peasants, and finally to the outcast, the criminal,
the degenerate, as in sundry clever sketches of Alexander Kielland.
Homogeneous conditions are first broken by cities, and linger
longest in the country; they were particularly strong in primitive
agricultural life;[381] and it is in communities of this sort, remote,
islanded in the sea of civilization, that most of the traditional ballads
have been found. When one thinks of this poetry at its best estate,
one must have the old continent and not these sinking islands before
one’s thought. Nor is the lowest form of culture, degraded and
sordid, even when of this homogeneous kind, to be taken as model
for the past. One is loath to think of the old ballad community in
terms of Zola’s Terre.
There is, however, another way by which one could account for
aristocratic personages and doings of the ballad; this wayside
strolling muse may be dressed in the clothes cast off by her high-
born sisters of epic and romance. This, as was said above, F.
Wolf[382] denied; but J. F. Campbell[383] defines the ballad somewhat
in such terms. Mr. Newell[384] thinks the folk-tale a degenerate form,
in low levels of culture, of something composed on higher levels and
at an earlier time; as if once D’Urberville, now Durbeyfield. Often
true for the material of an individual ballad, this is not true of its real
elements, of the ballad qua ballad, and of its form and vital
characteristics. The pattern of ballads whence one will;[385] the stuff
of the ballad is communal. If the ballad as a form of poetry were a
mere ragbag of romance, one would find in it tags of old phrases,
ambitious figures, tricks and turns of speech, change in metrical
structure, and all manner of crumbs from the literary table; but
these are conspicuous by their absence. The ballad as ballad is
original. Count Nigra[386] gives an important reason for this point of
view when he notes that the materials of a ballad go anywhere, pass
all borders, while metre, rime, and form in general, are borrowed
only from popoli omoglotti. The ballads employ speech at first hand,
no borrowed phrases, a simple, living language; and always the
feeling and the expression are coördinate. The ballad is no foul and
spent stream that has turned millwheels, run through barnyards, and
at last found its way to a ditch; it is wild water, and not far from its
source in the mountains. One proof lies in the drinking of it. Ballads
still hold their own as the nearest approach to primitive poetry
preserved among civilized nations, scanty as the records are; and
after infinite discussion of Homeric and other theories, the ballad
remains in its old position at the gates of every national literature.
[387]
The farther one comes into the conditions which made for the
ballad, this homogeneous community, this unlettered and
undeliberative habit of mind, so much wider one finds diffused the
power of improvising and singing verses in a style which is easy to