But we singled out this instinct and discussed it in our last lecture.
No. (6). To construct things—the “constructive instinct.” I quote Mr. Holmes here:
After analysis comes synthesis. The child pulls his toys to pieces in order that he may, if possible, reconstruct them. The ends that he sets before himself are those which Comte set before the human race—savoir pour prévoir, afin de pouvoir: induire pour déduire, afin de construire. The desire to make things, to build things up, to control ways and means, to master the resources of nature, to put his knowledge of her laws and facts to practical use, is strong in his soul. Give him a box of bricks, and he will spend hours in building and rebuilding houses, churches. … Set him on a sandy shore with a spade and a pail, and he will spend hours in constructing fortified castles with deep encircling moats.
Again obviously this constructive instinct overlaps with the imitative ones. Construction, for example, enters into the art of making mud-pies and has also been applied in the past to great poetry. If you don’t keep a sharp eye in directing this instinct, it may conceivably end in an Othello or in a Divina Commedia.
II
Without preaching on any of the others, however, I take three of the six instincts scheduled by Mr. Holmes—the three which you will allow to be almost purely imitative.
They are:
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Acting,
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Drawing, painting, modelling,
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Dancing and singing.
Now let us turn to the very first page of Aristotle’s Poetics, and what do we read?
Epic poetry and tragedy, comedy also and dithyrambic poetry, and the greater part of the music of the flute and of the lyre, are all, in general, modes of imitation. …
For as there are persons who represent a number of things by colours and drawings, and others vocally, so it is with the arts above mentioned. They all imitate by rhythm, language, harmony, singly or combined.
Even dancing (he goes on)
imitates character, emotion and action, by rhythmical movement.
Now, having touched on mud-pies, let me say a few words upon these aesthetic imitative instincts of acting, dancing, singing before I follow Aristotle into his explanation of the origin of Poetry, which I think we may agree to be the highest subject of our Art of Reading and to hold promise of its highest reward.
Every wise mother sings or croons to her child and dances him on her knee. She does so by sure instinct, long before the small body can respond or his eyes—always blue at first and unfathomably aged—return her any answer. It lulls him into the long spells of sleep so necessary for his first growth. By and by, when he has found his legs, he begins to skip, and even before he has found articulate speech, to croon for himself. Pass a stage, and you find him importing speech, drama, dance, incantation, into his games with his playmates. Watch a cluster of children as they enact “Here We Go Gathering Nuts in May”—eloquent line: it is just what they are doing!—or “Here Come Three Dukes A-Riding,” or “Fetch a Pail of Water,” or “Sally, Sally Waters”:
Sally, Sally Waters,
Sitting in the sand,
Rise, Sally—rise, Sally,
For a young man.
Suitor presented, accepted [I have noted, by the way, that this game is more popular with girls than with boys]; wedding ceremony hastily performed—so hastily, it were more descriptive to say “taken for granted”—within the circle; the dancers, who join hands and resume the measure, chanting
Now you are married, we wish you joy—
First a girl and then a boy
—the order, I suspect, dictated by exigencies of rhyme rather than of Eugenics, as Dryden confessed that a rhyme had often helped him to a thought. And yet I don’t know; for the incantation goes on to redress the balance in a way that looks scientific:
Ten years after, son and daughter,
And now—
[Practically!]
And now, Miss Sally, come out of the water.
The players end by supplying the applause which, in these days of division of labour, is commonly left to the audience.
III
Well, there you have it all: acting, singing, dancing, choral movement—enlisted ancillary to the domestic drama: and, when you start collecting evidence of these imitative instincts blent in childhood the mass will soon amaze you and leave you no room to be surprised that many learned scholars, on the supposition that uncivilised man is a child more or less—and at least so much of child that one can argue through children’s practice to his—have found the historical origin of Poetry itself in these primitive performances: “communal poetry” as they call it. I propose to discuss with you (may be neat term) in a lecture not belonging to this “course” the likelihood that what we call specifically “the Ballad,” or “Ballad Poetry,” originated thus. Here is a wider question. Did all Poetry develop out of this, historically, as a process in time and in fact? These scholars (among whom I will instance one of the most learned—Dr. Gummere) hold that it did: and I may take a passage from Dr. Gummere’s Beginnings of Poetry (p. 95) to show you how they call in the practice of savage races to support their theory. The Botocudos of South America are—according to Dr. Paul Ehrenreich who has observed them4—an ungentlemanly tribe, “very low in the social scale.”
The Botocudos are little better than a leaderless horde, and pay scant respect to their chieftain; they live only for their immediate bodily needs, and take small thought for the morrow, still less for the past. No traditions, no legends, are abroad to tell them of their forbears. They still use gestures to express feeling and ideas; while the number of words which imitate a given sound “is extraordinarily great.” An action or an object is named by imitating the sound peculiar to it; and sounds are doubled to express greater intensity. … To speak
