Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/255

 REVIEWS.

The Drama of Savage Peoples. By L. Havemever. New- haven : Yale University Press. 1916. 7s. 6d. net.

The author endeavours to show that savage drama is the " hneal antecedent of all modern forms." He finds that there are practi- cally no races so low in the scale of civilization as not to have some kind of drama. He apparently seeks to reduce the develop- ment of drama to three main stages, namely, dramatic narrative, religious ceremonial, and the "pleasure play." "Evidence," he says, "seems to prove that the first practical use to which the savage put imitation (for it was then too simple to come under the head of drama) was to convey to his friends ideas and thoughts for which his inadequate spoken language had no words. This may be called dramatic narrative." In the second stage a religious element has come in, and the purpose of the ceremony is to enable the people to communicate with powerful and mysterious beings, and to gain their favour. A further development results in the decline of the religious element, while the function of the performance, be it dance or play, is merely to amuse.

That the third of these stages tends to supervene on the second, in other words that a purely aesthetic interest develops out of the religious, may be allowed. It is far more open to question, however, whether he is right about his preliminary stage. He seems to think that the magico-religious ritual may be resolved into a sort of gesture-language addressed to a divinity. Thus he states that " in Australia man exerts no eftbrts as far as agriculture is concerned, but still the gods are asked to send an abundance of rain." Surely this is apt to convey an utterly false impression in regard to the nature and function of the so-called Intichiuma