Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/175

 and first condition of humanity, and find once more its divine inspirations. Thus was formed the principle of a new culture, the starting point of a new career for philosophy, poetry and criticism. It is true that it was not particularly easy to represent the Primitive, as thus conceived, by clear cut notions. But ought it not of itself to lend itself better to a shadowy intuition? And for the purpose of appealing to this intuition, the German tongue has a resource all her own, the prefix Ur, which placed before the name of anything signifies its absolutely initial form, its remotest genesis: Ur-anfang, the beginning of the beginning: Ur-grund, the reason anterior to all reasons that can be apprehended: Ur-stimmung, the hidden state of soul underlying the state of soul of which we are conscious. Since Volk means in German "people," the German people was Ur-volk, the type of nationality intended and created by Nature, non-artificial.

With the idea of the primitive were closely associated those of the popular (volkstümlich), the spontaneous (unwillkürlich) and the unconscious (unbewusst). These concepts are practically interchangeable. The creations of culture are aristocratic and deliberate creations. The creations of nature are the work of all, they are produced artlessly, by a collective, unconscious and spontaneous generation. With an extraordinary lack of taste German criticism persisted in finding these common characteristics in poetical compositions matured in stages of civilisation so unequal, and belonging to such different antiquities as the Nibelungen, the Bible, and the poems of Homer. They did so simply on the ground that these works were the most ancient in date that had been trans-