by its false conception of the nature of freedom, continually generates the same stale antithesis. The consciousness made possible by the development of society is not by its nature coercive; on the contrary this consciousness, expressed in science and art, is the means whereby man attains freedom. Social consciousness, like social labour, of which it is the product and auxiliary, is the instrument of man’s freedom. And it is not the instincts un-adapted by society which are of their essence free; on the contrary the unmodified instincts deliver man into the slavery of blind necessity and unconscious compulsion.
Yet social consciousness is sometimes telt by men as coercive—why is this? Because it is a consciousness which no longer represents social truth; because it is no longer generated freely in the whole process of social co-operation. Such a consciousness is the product of a class antagonism; it is the consciousness of a class which by the development of the division of labour and absolute property-right has become isolated from economic production, and is therefore maimed and obsolete. This consciousness now becomes the bulwark of privilege instead of the spontaneous expression of social fact, and must therefore be coercively enforced on the rest of society. Durkheim does not see that this coercive type of group consciousness is least common with a primitive people, and most common with a sophisticated civilisation.
We cannot help noticing already the connection of early poetry—poetry which is also tribal wisdom and rude chronology—with a state of society in which economic differentiation due to division of labour hardly exists. In primitive society man’s genetic individuality realises itself simply like a physical trait—a wide forehead or a splay foot. Remembering that there seems in all ages something simple and direct about poetry, that good poetry can be written by the comparatively immature, that it has a more personal and emotional core than other, forms of literary art, we may already guess that poetry expresses in a special manner the genetic instinctive part of the individual, as opposed, say, to the novel, which expresses the individual as an adapted type, as a social character, as the man realised in society. Such an art form as the novel could therefore only arise in a society where economic differentiation gives such scope for the realisation of individual differences that it is useful and valuable to tackle man, the individual, from this angle. There is no essential difference; it is a difference of aspect. But it is an important difference, and one to which we will return again and again. In this sense poetry is the child of Nature, just as the developed novel is the child of the sophistication of modern culture.
We must repeat the warning against mechanically separating genetic individuality from social differentiation. One is a means of realising the other. In tragedy, in dramatic verse, and in the epic they unite, because these flourish at a time of rapidly-changing society, a society in which older class-distinctions are cracking and man’s genetic individuality, his passions, his instincts, his blind desires, are the means by which new economic functions, new differentiations, new standard types, are being idealised and realised. Odysseus, Oedipus and Hamlet are such figures of a social poetry, and the problems these epics and tragedies resolve are the problems peculiar to such a period of change.
All such problems are problems concerning the nature of freedom, and hence tragedy poses with overwhelming poignancy the question of necessity, although in each culture the necessity wears a different aspect, for in each culture necessity presses on men through different channels. The necessity that drives on Oedipus is wholly different from that which torments Hamlet, and this difference expresses the difference between Athenian and Elizabethan cultures The same necessity, but posed in a metaphysical way and with its solution postponed to another world, is the constant theme of religion—the problem it has set itself immediately it begins to talk of good and evil. A religion expresses by its definition of “sin” the stage of development of the society which generated it.
3
All peoples present, to ethnologists who live among them, distinct individualities, as indeed do animals. Among the Australian aborigines, as Gillen and Spencer have observed men acquire reputations for special types of socially useful dexterity and exercise it to an extent which shows that differentiation already exists. Some division of labour has appeared but it is still mainly genetic. It is not produced by a complex which moulds each generation, and leads to the formation of a class.
Thus, as a rough type of the matrix in which poetry was born, we take the average food-gathering or hunting tribe of to-day where poetry is charm, prayer and history. This undifferentiated group shares social functions and therefore thoughts in common, and is bound by that “primitive passive sympathy” which Kohler has observed in anthropoid apes, and which McDougall considers a specific human instinct. With this group appears a heightened language, the common vehicle of all that seems worthy of preservation in the experience of men.
We must think of this language, not as it looks recorded in arid script, but as it was originally born, and as from age to age it lived its group life, accompanied by the rhythmic beating of drums, by dance and gesture, by the violent emotions of the group festival, a fountain of tradition in which not only the living group participated, but also all the ghosts of dead ancestors which are a tribe’s chief strength From this undifferentiated society the class-types proper to the priest, lawyer, administrator and soldier arise by division of labour, and, in the same way, the heightened language of the primitive corroboree splits into science, history, theology law, economics and other appropriate divisions of cultural capital. In doing so each department evolves a special phraseology and method of literary attack which not only differs from those of other departments but also from those of spoken speech But the departments are not watertight compartments Their development affects each other and also spoken speech, mutually and continuously, because all are rooted in the one developing complex of real social life.
For the sake of convenience we talk of heightened language. But at this stage the adjective should not be allowed to carry any tincture of a value-judgment For any given people at any given stage of evolution the precise heightening adopted can be defined in objective terms of prosody, musical or choreographic accompaniment, or the use of special words not permitted for profane purpose. As yet we have found no reason why an imposed rhythm should improve a language. The reading of almost any manual of prosody will give grounds for supposing that poetry is inferior to unhampered speech as a vehicle of expression, but we claim as yet neither superiority nor inferiority for prosody, only a qualitative difference, and if it be asked why the language should be made different, if it was not intended to make it better, an answer can be given. The function of rhythm may be purely mnemonic. This is evidently the case in rhymed wisdom such as:
Red at night,
The shepherd’s delight
Red in the morning,
The shepherd’s warning,
or
Ne’er cast a clout
Till May is out.
It was at one time supposed that the “faculty of attention” was weak in primitive peoples, and that the rhythmic pattern held their wandering attention. Few modern anthropologists would accept this view. Attention is not a “faculty” but an instinctive component of psychic life, and if anything is more powerful where intelligence is less. A cat stalking a bird, or an Eskimo watching a seal blow-hole, show at least as much attention as a modern scientist watching an experiment. On any matter that interests them—a ritual, dramatic performance or a hunt—primitive peoples show greater capacity for sustained attention than more civilised groups. Rivers has recorded how, during his researches among the Melanesians, he found that an interrogation which left him exhausted and mentally dispersed, found his source of information still fresh and ready to keep up the supply. Yet as between two civilised people, it is almost invariably the interrogated, rather than the interrogator, who tires first.
We call the primitive’s heightened
