Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/248

 242 Seiberth THE RHYTHMICAL LINE Reasoning about art can be said to turn on two fundamental categories, the substance and the form of the artistic product I intend, in the present study, to deal with the basic principle of outward poetic form, the fundamental technical means of expression. We must begin by asking : Is there any one principle of form which is absolutely essential in poetry. Gummere, in his Hand- book of Poetics, quotes a recent writer to this effect: " Metre is the sole condition absolutely demanded by poetry." Simple observation of the fact that in primitive poetry the rhythmical line is all that we find on the side of art-form, must lead to the conclusion that the rhythmical line is the one essential element of poetic form. This is in itself a patent fact, requiring no fur- ther argument. But in this fact we have our problem, which is the interpretation of the ground of this fact in the nature and history of the human mind, or to show the psychological factors of which the rhythmical line is the expression and result. The problem is, therefore, essentially psychological, a fact of which the literature of poetics has been only imperfectly aware. "Human beliefs and institutions, as well as all the products of art and modes of labor in short all elements of human culture even though subject to natural conditions of various sorts, are essentially mental processes or the expression of psychical activities. Hence no theory, relating to these phenomena, is acceptable that does violence to well-established psychological principles." l I shall take for the basis of my deductions the hexameter line of Homer, as typically representing primitive poetic form within the Aryan family of languages. The term primitive is here, as in all studies of primitive culture, to be taken relatively "According as the phenomena are simpler in character, and require fewer antecedent conditions for their explanation, we 1 E. L. Schaub, Introduction to Wundt's: Elements of Folk Psychology.