اولین سایت نشانه شناسی شوهر آهو خانم

Chapter Nine

The Poetic Art and Its Hero

I raised myself to be a singer and made myself to be a speaker of magic.

Kalevala

The purely creative side of poetry, as we have found from our study of speech, is concerned chiefly with that subjective expressive capacity which we have called the language of the soul. By this we understood, in contrast to the mother tongue which serves as a medium of communication, the self-creative function of sound-forming which serves as an éxpression of inner processes, their pictorial shaping in word and sentence. Before we follow the development of this originally physioplastic faculty into the ideoplastic expression-art of the poet and its esthetic remoulding in the generally intelligible collective language, we will illustrate the ideological character of languagecreation from the example of the soul-concept itself. There is no doubt that the soul, this thing abstract in itself, was once connected with certain parts and functions of the body like the breath, which was always associated with the mouth, which is also the source of language. Berny (op. cit., p. 549) gives a short account of the linguistic development of the idea of the soul, from which for our purpose we may quote the following: “ At the first stage the sound-figure 4w denotes the wind, being an onomatopoetic copy of its soughing; a bird’s feather blown in the wind and the moving air are regarded as independent phenomena. At the second stage there follows differentiation by short forms (rustling, blowing, spirare). The moving feather, because it moves, is regarded as animate. The feather is the god of the wind (Egyptian sw), whose name is therefore written hieroglyphically with the sign of an ostrich feather, and the wind is his breath in nature. At the third stage the causal connexion between the waving of the feather and the wind is established. Man has learned to think sufficiently abstractly to infer a soul in other things than a body: the wind has an indwelling force which blows the feather to and fro (soul, seele, from sila= force, strength). The wind is soul, and the soul takes its name from it: anima, Ouyds, rwch.” If we complete these linguistic observations with the results of our psychological and cultural studies (and in particular those set forth in Seelenglaube und Psychologie), we have a typical picture of the development of ideologies that is special to the higher cultures as distinct from the primitive. First, the assumption that the syllable “sw” is an onomatopoetic imitation of the wind may be countered by the physioplastic view accepted by Berny himself, which would lead us to believe that man compared the wind to the breath of his mouth rather than vice versa; in other words, that we have here a first stage of anthropomorphism, which indeed comes more and more into evidence as time goes on. In macrocosmic terms, we should say that the world breathes as man breathes — not that man rustles like the wind. For that matter, a feather is moved, and moved deliberately, by the human breath —in fact, many people use this as a test of death —and here there discloses itself another motive for the anthropomorphic identification of breath and the wind: namely, his intellectual control over the stronger powers of nature—a motive still potent at the most fully developed stages of belief in the soul, as is manifest from the idea that only the right pronunciation of a god’s name can ensure the influencing of its owner. Think for instance of the intense meditation on the holy syllable Om which plays so great a part in Indian Yoga, or of the corresponding passages of the Upanishads, to the translation of which Deussen adds an explanation: “This Khanda places the letters of the text under the protection of certain gods, showing how they are to be pronounced in order to give proper expression to the being of the gods.” * Similarly the cabbalist Abraham Samuel Abulafia gives hints on the pronunciation of the Old Testament name of God, the so-called Tetragrammaton, and on the mystical union with God that is to be attained in this way: “The many-lettered name of God is to be spoken not only with certain modulations of the voice by pauses, long or short, but with energetic movements and bowing of the body. This leads to an ecstasy from which one sinks exhausted into a sleep, wherein there comes over one a feeling as though the soul were separating from the body. The universal spirit then unites itself with the upward-striving soul in a kiss and streams over it. At this moment man receives his highest revelation.” * This ecstatic condition, which is also found in the Christian “ speakers with tongues,” is thus more than an expression of the divine name; it is an actual creation, through words, of the soul, which is therefore separated from the body and for a moment made independent. In these conditions all that macrocosmization is called upon to do is to make the temporary blessedness permanent. Similar temporary and momentary conditions are found also in the fast-ceremonies of primitive peoples — for example, American Indians — wherein also a union with powerful spirits is sought.’ In these cases, though, the soul-concept, imagined abstractly as a spirit, is bound still more closely to the body —sleep, dream, fasting —a relation which, for that matter, is never wholly lost, as is shown not only by the breath-wind etymologies but by the fact (adduced by Holma) that the soul as life-giving principle has a name common with the throat (Kehle), both of which have the root of blowing and breathing behind them. It would take us too far afield to discuss the primitive ideas of the lifeprinciple — how it has developed from purely corporeal speechsymbols to those of a psychic kind —for this a discussion of the whole spiritual culture of the primitive would be necessary.

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1Chandoja Upanishad, 1, 22, 3-5: “All vowels are embodiments of Indra, all sibilants and aspirates of Prajapati, all mutes of Mrtjus (Death).”’

2 Art. ‘‘Kabbala’”’ in Protestantischen Realenzyklopadie (third edition, IX, 682). 3 Material in my Seelenglaube und Psychologie.

We will therefore only give a characteristic example, which is taken from Lévy-Bruhl’s work: L’Ame primitive (Paris, 1927). He is dealing with the Maori’s conception of the lifeprinciple as exemplified in his language. Elston Best (The Maori), on whose investigations Lévy-Bruhl bases himself, calls the Maori a people of metaphysicians and theologians, since in their language they make distinctions of the subtlest sort between the various life-principles — which Europeans find difficult to understand, and for more than linguistic reasons. Since I am presenting the material at second hand, which means in a third language, a false interpretation may easily slip in. Still I think that even a rough conception of the essentials will do for our purpose. The Maoris have three words to describe different kinds of life-principles. The first, wairua, which signifies shadow or nonmaterial copy, is not situated in the bodily organs and therefore leaves the body during sleep and, in its immaterial quality, survives the body. But though as “animating spirit” it is independent of the body, its secondary meaning as a designation for intellectual properties again relates it to the bodily organs which are conceived to be the seat of those qualities. The second word, mauri, denotes the physical life-principle which leaves the body at death, but, according to Lévy-Bruhl, should be translated not by “ soul,” but by life-energy or activity, since It corresponds to the Greek @uuéds; a secondary meaning of mauri is that of the sacred life-principle, which is, however, material and may thus be given concrete form as a talisman. Finally, by the third word, Aau, the living personality seems to be denoted, and in a highly concrete bodily form, since everything belonging to the body (such as the saliva, the hair, even clothes) is called haw. As this hau is often used synonymously with mauri, we have in essence two life-principles, of which the one is more material, the other more spiritual. This is in line with the view taken by modern ethnologists of the ideas of primitive peoples, almost all of whom distinguish two such life-principles, which we can perhaps best comprehend if we think of them as the mortal and the immortal soul, though the concepts of the primitive himself have not quite this distinct meaning. As J. Bohme* has been able to show, in a work based very largely on W. Otto * and Arbmann,_’ it is pretty clear nowadays that the conception of an “ animistic” soul, first devised by Taylor, which is the condition of life and constitutes the unity of all the spiritual faculties, is by no means the rule with primitive peoples. “Far more widespread is a dualistic or even a still further differentiated idea of the soul. Many peoples designate the soul of the living man —as the vehicle of vital and often of the conscious life — and the soul which survives, the spirit of the dead, by quite different names and regard them as two distinct entities. Sometimes the division goes even further; a number of souls are thought of as surviving, while on the other hand there are several life-souls for the vital and in the conscious life” (Bohme, op. cit., p. 115). This multiplicity of souls has, according to Bohme, to be taken in relation to the multi. plicity of concrete experiences, each one of which compels an objectivization of itself in the idea of a soul, yet without correlation or unification of the ideas thus created. These originally separate and concrete localizations of the soul are connected with definite parts of the body, in which the home of the particular soul is placed — originally in the organs necessary to life, injury to which was followed by death. Bohme has established the existence of this set of ideas by a thorough investigation into the Homeric language and we cannot do better here than refer to the book itself, the conclusion of which is that the Homeric idea of the soul corresponds in essence with that of primitive peoples, there being in both a dualistic idea in which dead spirit and life-soul are separate ideas which only later came to be united in a single concept of the soul, the Psyche.

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1 Die Seele und das Ich im Homerischen Epos: appendix: ‘Vergleich mit dem Glauben der Naturvilker’’ (Leipzig, 1929).

2 Die Manen oder von den Urformen des Totenglaubens (Berlin, 1923). 3‘ Zur primitiven Stelenvorstellung mit besonderer Ricksicht auf Indien,’ Le Monde oriental, XX and XXI (1926-7).

This word itself denoted originally only the soul which survives after death, the spirit of the dead, the duplicate soul; and it was later that it was transferred to the living — that is, to describe the spiritual faculties and emotions which had previously been called otherwise.” Whether the breath-soul was the original of all these ideas or not, it certainly holds a special position among them, since it alone has led to our modern idea of the soul, which unites the soul of the living and of the dead in one—that is, has developed the spiritual significance to its utmost without wholly disregarding the bodily. This development, which is important for our whole Western culture, was accomplished in Greece and can still be traced out from the Homeric soulconcept via the popular beliefs into the purely philosophical conception of Plato. The Psyche, which thus changed from a soul of the dead to a living soul, signifies originally “ breathing” (like the Latin “anima’’), and this sensible and concrete meaning is still perceptible in certain expressions of Homer.’ Ernst Bickel says in his afore-mentioned study of the development of the soul-idea: “ The breath-soul has the advantage over other separable souls that it is capable of exhibiting the essential mark of the psychical — spontaneous movement and mutability—at any moment in apprehendable form. Further, it is felt at all times as a soul of life and vitality, and yet, in respiration, it gives us incessantly the picture of a being that vanishes into the infinite. Added to this there is the death-rattle to compel reflection and invite interpretation. . . . Historically the most important instance of the breath-soul profiting by the facility with which the image-soul combines with other forms of the separability belief is in the Greek Psyche” (p. 78).

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1 This rectification of Rohde'’s view of the Greek idea of the soul is due to W. Otto. ® The primitive German saiwalé =soul is related by Kluge (Etymologisches Worterbuch der deutschen Sprache) to the Greek alé\os = mobile (cf. ‘* Zolus”’ —wind). 270

If we add that the breath proceeding from the mouth, both on account of its localization in the head and because of the relative immateriality of the invisible air, was the best possible basis for the representation of the soul-concept in its sublimest form, we shall then have assembled all the elements which from the very beginning knit soul and language—and by which, in our view, the personal utterance of sound was transformed into a language of soul. What interests us particularly in this connexion is not so much the corporeal origin of the soul (in that it was identified with a physical life-principle and placed in an organ vital to life) as the development of the purely spiritual idea which led beyond the concrete bodily nomenclature to something abstract which was to survive the body. This process too is perhaps intelligible as an anthropomorphic projection of the body-soul into the universe or at least the Beyond. Certainly it was made possible only by language and through its formation. In tact, my belief is not that the need to express the abstract idea of soul developed and enriched language, but that the self-creative tendency innate in language led to the idea of soul. Of this assumption, which all my work supports, I find an additional and supporting proof in the language of Homer, which not only displays the development of the oldest idea of the soul among the Greeks, but itself assisted the idea to develop from its original corporeality to a higher spirituality. The seat of the soul was probably at first put inside the lower body, whence man’s life comes; we have seen how then the seat of the soul gradually moved upwards to upper regions of the body, which found expression macrocosmically in the inclusion of heaven and the stars within the sphere of human body-symbolism. This culture of the head found its psychical expression first in language, and it was only later that intellect and reason became the seat of the soul, which finally a materialistic science sought to localize in the brain. But even at the level of the head-culture itself the soul went through a similar dematerialization process: the sound (or a special breath-sound) continuing to be regarded materially as soul, until at last the man-made word was able not only to express the abstract idea of the soul but actually to create the spiritual through language.

Language is therefore not only an artistic creation of man that the poet only uses in order to make his feelings generally intelligible, but is itself creative. We have already indicated this in the case of the myths, in regarding the creation-legends as a macrocosmized language-process, wherein man creates himself again spiritually in the naming of his members and extends this creation to the cosmos. Hence it is, too, that creation by the Word is attributed to the God of the higher cultures of the East — as in the prayers to the Babylonian Marduk, even more in those to the Egyptian Thoth, who calls gods into existence by his words,’ and of whom an inscription at the Chonsu-pylon in Karnak says: “ What flows from his mouth happens, and what he speaks becomes.” It was obvious then to assume that the god used his own name as the mightiest creative word—like the Egyptian Khepera (creator), who says: “T uttered my own name as a word of power from my own mouth, and forthwith I created myself.” * This Logos doctrine of the East then passed by way of Judaism into the New Testament and received its purest expression in the John Gospel. Later Judaism sought to explain the word-creation of Genesis, and the Talmudists knew exactly by what letters or combinations of letters Jahwe had created the world. Thus it is really the formation and creation of language that has produced the religions of civilized peoples, since here, even more than in myth, it is a matter of purely ideal elements, which of course only verbal expression can objectivize.® In this sense it might be truly said that words are gods, for gods are nothing but words.

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1 Already in the Rig Veda we have the gods Indra and Agni springing from the mouth of the prime giant, Purusha. The above material from F. Dornseiff: Das Alphabeth in Mystik und Magie (Leipzig, 1922; where also, Pp. 54, note 1, additional references will be found) and Rob. Eisler: Weltenmantel und Himmelzelt (Munich, 1910). * Herbert Baynes: ‘* History of the Logos,” (J. Royal Asiatic Soc., 1906). See further Maspero: ‘' Sur la toute puissance de la parole" (Rec. de Travaux rel.

2 la phil. et archéol. egypt. e¢ assur., Vol. XXIV), and A. Moret: ‘Le Verbe createur et révelateur en Egypte” (Rew. hist, des relig., LX, 1909).

3 See, for example, Konrad Schmidt: Am Anfang war das Wort. Eine Vorstudie zur Entratselung der griechischen Mythologie (Gleiwitz), and L. Mackensen: Name und Mythus. Sprachliche Untersuchungen zur Religionsgeschichte und Volkskunde (leipzig, 1927).

This creative power of the word has never received grander expression than in the Old Testament account of the Creation, which, as we have already seen, is not a mere presentation of the story, but itself a creation through the word. This may be one of the reasons why the Jews condemned the worship of idols, dumb replicas of God (the Golden Calf, the Beast), for had they not created in Jehovah a speaking God, whose mere speech was in turn creative? The Jewish philosophy of names thus “sees in the divine name by no means a mere label of sorts, an empty sound. On the one side it stands in the closest mystical relation to the being of God, and thus shares in his might; it represents the essence of God as ‘esse’ and ‘ posse.’ On the other hand it has a sort of independent position and meaning apart from God; it is a sort of hypostasis, a shadow-figure of God. Thus to know or call his name, or to use it, means to come into the closest association with his being and power, and to make one’s own his omnipotence.” ¹

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1 W. Heitmiiller: Im Namen Jesu (1903; p. 154). See also Hermann Usener: Gotternamen (1895), and the more recent book of H. Giintert: Von der Sprache der Gotter und Geister (Halle, 1925).

But in this Old Testament idea of a word-creative God, as subsequently spiritualized (by way of the Greek PneumaLogos doctrine) in Christianity, it is the zndividual creative power of language that is exalted: a power of new creation by speech is vouchsafed to every individual. It is only later that the poet comes to perform it for the rest, and he does so by the harmonious fusion of the individual and collective forces, for though it is a language of his own, and therewith a world of his own, that he builds, it is yet such that it conveys something to others and helps them to build a world for themselves. In the most perfect conditions poetry, which came into being in a personal language and for a personal construction, becomes as much a collective possession as the language, equally an individual creation, had already become. Language is, then, not only an individual artistic creation which copies some element of some ideology (and, by objectifying it, dominates it), but is probably the prime form of all artistic activity, which urges us to speech. K. Borinski (Der Ursprun g der Sprache; Halle, 1911) has developed this idea and attributed to the human voice the tendency towards artistic production of sound. He sees in the artificially systematized voice, the music of language, the purest expression of the inner form and the formation of language which as yet has nothing to do with communication-needs but is just self-expressive. Thence he arrives at the self-relatedness of all language-formation, which we ourselves have found to be its essence from another point of view. Yet if language was originally not a means of communication, and if the formation of the voice and of sounds, articulation, and speech are in their truest nature individual objectifications of an artistic sort, it follows of necessity that the poet only becomes understandable at the collective level of languagedevelopment, even though he may have indulged in “ singing and saying” for himself alone, in prayer or song, long before that.

Two peculiarities of the artistic creation of language, which are particularly manifested in the poet, are thus satisfactorily explained by the dual character of language as an individual creation and a collective medium of communication. The one is the much-discussed question of the relative shares of the conscious and of the unconscious in poetic creation, which has often been dealt with by poets and zsthetic philosophers and which psycho-analysts have tried to solve in terms of the content of poetry, and of course in favour of the unconscious. The same process, however, concerns also the linguistic side of poetry, in which language appears on the one hand as something self-creative and on the other as something created by the poet, who is thus its master. For the self-creative urge inherent in language is expressed for the poet himself in the feeling of unconscious creation; but that means the tendency, of language in itself, independent of his conscious will, which threatens to carry him away again and which he can only check by linguistic means of his own, which also are special to himself. Among these, apart from the individual word-formation which harks back to the very creation of language, are not only the personal peculiarities of style, but also the collective forms of rhythm, rhyme, and other laws, which are received by poetry as ideologies. So the poetic process divides more or less clearly into two separate phases, which have been called the conscious and the unconscious, but really correspond to the two processes of language-formation, the individual creative expression of an experience, and the collective communication of it. In the first phase, which might be called roughly that of conception, the poet reacts to an experience which, judged externally, may be very trivial; but his reaction is in the form and manner of language —in the widest sense—which means, and this indeed is the essence of the poet’s gift, that every emotional experience forms itself for him speakably. But in this forming he has not yet mastered, still less finished with, the experience; on the contrary, it probably presses on him more and more, but it does so in a specific way, that of verbal expression, and thenceforward he has to shape consciously — that is, to bring into a form which is collectively intelligible. That is the second, conscious phase of poetic production, the real constructive process, and so at last he comes to the complete mastery and settlement of the experience. These two more or less definitely separated phases of the poetic art were already observed by the Greeks, who could point to indications of it even in Homer. But the dual process, through one-sided emphasis of the conscious and the unconscious respectively, very soon led to two opposing theories, whose champions stretch in sequence from Plato and Aristotle right up to Freud and his opponents. We shall have occasion in our final chapter to discuss the various psychological attitudes of these two schools, which respectively emphasize the conscious or unconscious in poetic activity. At the moment we are concerned with the ways in which each supports its point of view and with the influence this unfruitful dispute has had on the asthetic of poetic production. But since (as I tried to show in the Kiinstler) we have here a progressive extension of consciousness, which affects the actual process of poetic activity as well as the intuition of the process, we must first take the subject purely historically and leave the psychological penetration into the particular theories till later. ~ For Plato, with whom the philosophy of esthetic, as of so much else, really begins, the poet — we should add, the Greek poet —is wholly an instrument of the divine; his faculty is purely instinctive and unconscious. As Wichmann explains, Plato not only neglects the rdle of consciousness, but completely eliminates it, putting in its place mania, a being outside oneself, a divine inspiration. A view like this was, I think, inevitable in the case of the Greek poet, with his collective material and its national echo, though very probably a good deal of Plato’s own artistically creative psychology has passed into his theory of genius. For in the Phedrus he deduces not only poetry but philosophy also, the urge to wisdom, from a condition of unconsciousness and mania — which would thus be the normal mode by which the highest gifts from the god are imparted to man.’ The first gift of divine madness is unconscious prophecy, which is far more perfect than a calculating interpretation of signs in the light of human reason. In the Laws Plato says that the poet, when he seats himself on the tripod of the Muses, “is not in his senses, but, like a fountain, lets flow what comes to him, and often contradicts himself without knowing whether the one or the other thing that he says is the truth.” In the Jon, in which philosopher and artist are contrasted, the idea developed, according to Wichmann, is that in art genius is as against technical ability all-important; and Plato expressly emphasizes here that the activity of the divine, power is only made effective through the elimination of the reason.

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1 O, Wichmann: Platos Lehre vom Instinkt und Genie (Berlin, 1917).

2 take these indications from the work of Paul Plaut (Die Psychologie der produktiven Personlichkeit; Stuttgart, 1929), who (p. 13) cites these views of Plato's with all respect, while . 157) he characterizes my own concordant views as the height of grotesque dilettantism. The reader who examines these two independent passages (when I wrote in 1905, I was unaware of Plato's view) in the originals will be convinced of the identity of the two views, both of which assume the basis of production (whether artistic or scientific) to be an illusion, a mania, or something neurotic.

Here poet, prophet, and seer are regarded as equally the instruments of the god who reveals himself in them; but by the side of this, even if only casually indicated, we have the idea of the poets themselves that they are not mere voices of the god, but also his interpreters. In the Timeus there is a reference to this separation of the function of seer from that of poet and prophet, who are regarded as interpreters, orderers, and critics. This view, which admits the consciousness and the creative will of the poet, nevertheless only made its way gradually, to find its finest expression in the Pauline theory. Paul, too, was not one to underestimate the power of divine inspiration, but he said: “ He that speaketh in tongues edifieth only himself, but he that prophesieth edifieth the church” (1 Corinthians xiv, 4), and it is he that makes the first sharp distinction between the Pneuma or breath from above and the Nous, which can interpret what it is given. Here the original creative power of the Word, as it triumphed in the Old Testament over all lower forms of artistic creation, becomes the conscious control of the demonic force of language by the Logos: in a word, the change of language from an artistic creation into a conscious medium of communication. But before this there had already been in the development of Greek philosophy a gradual strengthening of natural science in the doctrines of the Ionian philosophers. Even Aristotle, Plato’s immediate successor, no longer recognizes the primal divine force as the essence of artistic creation. In place of the demonic and supersensible, it is in reason that Aristotle sees the basis of all giftedness. Artistic creation is set a definite objective, as we see in paraphrase in the Poetics, with its laws and its rules become fossil formule. Aristotle does acknowledge the genius which comes through ecstasy, but for him this is rather a plastic capacity for imitation than a divine state of abnormality. As Plato’s doctrine of genius in poetry underwent a resurrection in the Renaissance in the religion of genius, so did Aristotle’s theory art in the esthetic which arose in the eighteenth century; but even in their new vigour the two streams did not manage to still the dualistic conflict, which has come to a head in modern philosophy and psychology as the problem of the respective parts played by the conscious and the unconscious in poetic productivity. For the discussion of this problem I may refer to my Kinstler and Inzest-Motv, in which, by the side of the unconscious, the increasing extension of consciousness is emphasized; and I now turn to the last stage of the problem before us, which will also link up again with our present theme.’ After Worringer’s important pioneer work in the psychology of zsthetic it was certainly tempting to apply his point of view to a realm which he had neglected, that of poetry. The attempt was made by Albrecht Schaeffer in his Dichter und Dichtung (Leipzig, 1923); but this work seems to me merely to have justified Worringer’s abstention from the inclusion of poetic art. For the subtle essays of Schaeffer, as he seems at times to have observed himself, make the application of the idea of this abstract art-will to poetry seem very inadequate. It is not by chance that his most successful interpretations are those relating to Greek poetry, for this is of a far more collective nature than all later poetic arts. This seems indeed to be one of the reasons why Plato regarded the poet purely as a channel for divine speech, and why Aristotle in his turn believed that from Greek poetry he could deduce laws which should be valid for all poetry. Schaeffer is certainly right in finding a good deal of “ geometry” in Homer and even in Greek tragedy; he is perhaps right in thinking that this impulse to the ordering of chaos survives into modern art, since it is precisely form that has to be and will always have to be abstract.

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1 The path from Plato and Aristotle to the present day is briefly sketched in the Introduction of my Ingest-Motiv; this may be supplemented by reference to the work of Professor Scott-James: The Making of Literature (New York, 1929). The route passes by Longinus, Dante, Ben Jonson, Boileau, Lessing, Goethe, and Coleridge, then by Sainte-Beuve, Taine, and Pater to Dilthey and the modern schools of zsthetic (see also Lange-Eichbaum, op. cit.).

But the personal, individual elements, which are increasingly important in the poet of all men, cannot be neglected. This brings us back to the problem of language, since language represents not only the material in which the poet works but also the form in which he works. In other words, the poet receives his material ready formed, at least as raw material, and has only to give it a second definitive form. But this process, as we have seen, cannot be simply split into two phases, since in each of the two phases the individual and collective elements both mingle and oppose each other. It seems to me to be one of the most complex of all psychological problems to decide in what way this reciprocal action between the individual and the collective, which is inherent in language, comes out in poetic creation; but, in conformity with our earlier discussion, we may suppose the process to be somewhat as follows: In an individual who reacts in language, a personal experience first of all finds its rough form in the traditional language-stock, which is thereby permeated by the personality and individually vitalized. On the other hand, the second stage, the verbal shaping proper, is, as it seems to me, a fresh collectivizing of what was originally expressed personally, with communication and understanding as its object. Put shortly, the first would be the expression of an individual state of feeling in the collective raw material of inherited language, the second a personal infusion into this linguistic raw material, necessitated by the social urge to communication. The two historical phases of languagecreation, as we have found them in the individual copying and mastering of an ideological force and then in the surrender of this word-magic for the sake of general understanding, are thus still at work in the poet, even if no longer in their historical order. For the personal creative force, as affecting languageformation, seems only to become active in the second phase of social understanding, whereas the poet, in the first rush of feeling, gropes instinctively after the collective forms already available to him in the existing stock of language. This almost complete reversal of the historical process in the individual poet comes, however, from the fact that he has at hand a rich, perhaps even a poetically fashioned, vocabulary, and that not only has he to use it as his material and medium of communication, but it turns his creative powers from language to other elements of his productivity. In a word, the poet has no longer to create language; in fact, he can only use his creative energy within certain limits of style and occasional new coinages. On the other hand, language itself has in the course of time gradually lost more and more of its self-creative power, as we have concluded already from a comparison of the Old Testament with the Homeric poems. Now, there is one national epic which, in contrast to the Homeric humanization, still has a clearly marked character of language-myth and whose hero is still a “ speech ”-hero of the type that has degenerated, with the decay of language, into what we call the bombastic fellow. This is the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, which was refashioned out of a collection of old songs at the beginning of the nineteenth century by Elias Lénnrot; his work was translated into German in 1852 by Anton Schiefner and republished in 1914 by Georg Miiller of Munich with notes and an epilogue by Martin Buber. In this epilogue, full of enthusiasm and understanding, a view of epic is developed from this Finnish folk-tradition which is of the utmost importance, not only for the general problem of the popular epic, but in particular for our view of the development of language. In Finnish national poetry we can still distinguish quite clearly the magic runes and the epic runes, the latter being sung publicly everywhere, while the former were preserved as a sacred tradition and kept as a secret to be passed on from the initiate to his disciple — usually from father to son. “In Finland, almost more than among any other people, the belief is rooted in the magic power of the word, of the secret primal word; it is the belief (which lies at the base of all magic) in the power of the bound over the unbound, of rigid knowledge over swarming perils.

The word is the lord of the elements : who possesses it can create and destroy, can banish all evil and impose his will even on the gods. His song can turn his enemies to stone and chain wild beasts; he kills the frost and takes his clothes from him. Kalma — death — 1s his companionin-arms. He knows the origin of all things and thus all things are subject to him; for every turbulent being is put to shame by him who has knowledge and can tell him his origin. When he begins to sing, the mountains melt like butter, the rocks like the meat of pigs, the blue woods like honey; the seas teem with mead, the deeps are raised up, the heights sink to valleys.” * In contrast to the magic runes — which must ‘be used with literal exactitude (on pain of losing their force) — the Finnish folk-singer, for whom verse and measure are sacred, is much freer of the word in the epic runes: “ The word is his kingdom, servant of his power; his right and calling is to change it, make it hard or soft, to raise or clarify it. Thus each Laulaja sings the song of all as well as his own, and some of them alter them many times and say different things at different times” (op. cit.).’ Epic runes aim only at telling a story, magic runes aim at making and transforming. “Recent Finnish research has shown that epic and magic runes arose in different areas and underwent various interlinkages; in Finnish Karelia these interlinkages fused into new songs, which constitute a new kind of magical epic; in Russian Karelia the songs are grouped round a few important characters and motives and grow into cycles. Russian Karelia was the hunting-ground of Elias Lénnrot, who welded the cyclic material into epic” (op. cit., p- 476).

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1 The same is said of the mythical singer Orpheus. The magic runes have been published by Lénnrot (Helsingfors, 1880). ;

2K. Krohne: Wo und wann entstanden die finnischen Zauberlieder? (Helsingfors, 1901). On the other hand, Comparetti (Der Kalewala; Halle, 1892) derives the epic runes from the magic.

This fusion of the imaginative and active elements, which existed separately in the old folk-songs as the magic and the epic runes and only gradually underwent slight interlinkage, not only seems to be characteristic of epic poetry in general, but confirms the views which we have arrived at on other grounds regarding the speech-development which forms its basis. But it seems to me that the epic or epic rune is, more than anything else, the record of the vanished power of the magic: in the same way as we showed above that Homer rather depicts a vanished world than creates one by his words in the Old Testament way. “ The Finnish folk-song,” says Buber, “has to be understood through its faith in the creative power of the rune. The magic song is the document containing the power, the epic poem the record and glorification of it. In it song celebrates itself by telling of its might . . . and so becomes the epic of the creative word” (op. cit.). It is typical that the Laulaja only alluded to the magic runes, whereas Lonnrot actually incorporated them in the epic runes; all the same, it is to this unpoetic confusion that we owe our deepest insight into the essence of folk-poetry and the formation of language. For although, in the epic, words can create the beasts, trees, and stones, kill men and bring them to life, expel and control the frost, just as in the magic runes above mentioned, it is only a tale recounted to a peacefully gathered assembly of things that the mighty magician who spoke and sang the runes had once accomplished — really and by means of the creation of words. When the Laulaja sometimes simply says “I,” instead of naming the hero, and tells his story as if he had done the deeds, it is a naive indication of the line of descent, magicianhero-singer; and we will devote the rest of this chapter to the deeper origins of this psychological development. It would be a fascinating besides being in fact a very necessary task to study the whole of poetry, first from the angle of the hero and his cultural importance, secondly from the egocentric standpoint of the poet, thirdly from that of the human need of communication.’

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1 Freud has some suggestions in this direction; see his essay: Der Dichter und das Phantasieren (1908).

We should then see that the poetry of all times gives us incidentally a history of the poet such as we should never obtain from biography alone; * we should also discover from the history of the hero as reflected in the poetry of the various ages a piece of human cultural history precipitated in hero-formation. A first outline for such a study was attempted in two chapters of my Seelenglaube und Psychologie,’ which I should like to summarize in brief here. I showed there, substantially, that the hero of the Age of the Soul, as displayed particularly in the folk-lore of primitive peoples, differs from the hero of the Age of Sexuality as described in the myths and poesy of civilized peoples. The primitive magical worldoutlook, which rests on the identity of thinking and being, makes the hero, at this stage of development, translate his thoughts, dreams, wishes, and desires into actual practice, whereas the hero of the other age suffers tragic failure in the same effort. The basis for this I felt I had found in a class of epic traditions which portray the passage from soul-beliefs to sex-beliefs, together with the psychical and social conflicts involved, as, for example, in the Gilgamesh epic, etc. At both stages the problem is fundamentally similar: namely, to attain personal immortality. Neither in primitive nor in Classical times does he actually achieve it. But he finds it ideologically in that his deeds, which have subserved his attempt to gain a real immortality, have made him a hero whose fame lives on in the song of later generations. In that work my object was to show how the will to immortality makes the hero— whose successor is the singer — actually and historically immortal, quite apart from the fact whether he solves his problems with the simplicity of a fairystory or tragically fails in them. At present I want to emphasize another side of the heroic character: this is the relation of word and deed, of action and narrative, which, as we all know, distinguishes also the two poetic forms of drama and epic.

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1 This idea is put forth in the Introduction to the Inzest-Motiv and developed to some extent in the course of that work.

2 Namely those entitled ‘‘The Age of Sexuality’’ and “Dream and Actuality.”’

As I showed in Seelenglaube (p. 113), the dream-activity, which serves as evidence of immortality, is first described in storyform as having really happened; and in the primitive worldoutlook this causes no difficulty, since its whole ideology is built up on the identity of thinking and doing. Out of this narrated dream-action (in the form of the animistic legend) the age of sexuality develops the heroic myth, in which the hero tries to transform the events into reality by accomplishing what are called heroic deeds. Now, in this process language or, better, the word performs the same magic role which formerly fell to the dream-thought; everything has to be carried out just as it is narrated —a principle of realization, which underlies all religious art, painting, and sculpture, but also all “illustrative,” historical art as well. In short, the creative word not only brings forth the mythical or legendary story — myth means simply story — but leads also to the proper action by which what has been said is carried out in deeds. In this sense not only the world, as we saw, but man also is created by the word; and he now seeks to do everything which he can say, as formerly he had to do all that he thought. Thus, merely to give one example for the moment, it is probable that the triple undertaking of the same deed in a story arose from a repetition of the original magical words, which were to give effect to the action in a magical way and so had to be repeated. Taking Hamlet as the type of the passive, inactive hero, whose indecisiveness has led to so many discussions and commentaries, what he really expresses is just this characteristic word-magic of the hero. Though he does occasionally despise himself for venting himself only in words, the whole play is substantially built up on a faith in words which are imagined capable of improving men and altering circumstances. Indeed, what Hamlet expected from his “ play” and from his tirades against his mother or Ophelia, the poet himself also apparently hoped would be the effect of his play on the English court, whose corruptness he lashed with words. It was only when words proved ineffective that Hamlet was driven to action; since his words could not kill like daggers, he had to turn to real weapons. The demand for action in a drama is satisfied by very few plays which can lay claim to any artistic form, and finds itself fulfilled far more on the films, or in their predecessor the melodrama, than in Classical tragedy and its imitations. Even Greek tragedy was far more a matter of speaking than of doing, of philosophizing about action and its conditions than of action itself: only the actions are so vividly depicted and so well supported by the actors that we have an impression of actual events even where we are dealing with accounts of long-past incidents and reflecting thought about them. The same is still truer of the classicist drama of a Racine or a Schiller, whose qualities of language and thought we admire, as well as of Ibsen, in whom there is nothing but talk. Shakspere, here too, holds a peculiar position. He took a number of subjects which had hitherto been treated, if at all, only novelistically in narrative, and brought them on the stage in the fullness of their action and actuality." But he accompanies the action with words, and interprets it in a way which is characteristic of our view of the drama. Just as Hamlet regrets that words can no longer kill, so Macbeth is a hero rather of words and thoughts; he is no murderer who rushes to his aim, but a dreamer of glory and kingship, driven to action by his fancies, which the witches put into words for him. He also, like Hamlet, at first kills in words and thoughts, before he has recourse to the dagger; to which he is driven as much by the witches of his fancy as by the concrete Lady Macbeth, who rebukes him as a mere mouth-hero. Shakspere’s drama represents, then, at once the beginning

and the culmination of heroic action as opposed to dramatic narrative; and we find, the further we go back in history, that the drama is proportionately less rich in action — as is shown even by Greek tragedy, which really amounts to a philosophical discussion between the hero and the chorus.

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1 The Shaksperian drama represents the liberation of the theatre from the Classical and the religious “‘play’’ in that he humanizes and actualizes the action (see Seelenglaube und Psychologie, pp. 63-74).

But Greek tragedy itself, in this poetic form, grew from the narrative epic, though it apparently included some elements of the cult of Dionysus (the goat-song). But between the goat-dances of the ecstatic worshipper of Dionysus and the drama of Aeschylus there is a vast development, not only of Greek culture, but of that art of poetry which culminated in the Homeric epic. Tragedy takes not only its subjects, but its language as well from epic and not cult tradition; without the splendid achievement of that language in epic, tragedy would have been impossible." In the Homeric epic, however, as I already showed in my Seelenglaube, we have on the one hand the legendary story of a dream — in the naive Odyssey — and on the other the first stage of its heroization —in the warlike Iliad, in which the hero is no longer content to describe his fancied adventures as actual happenings, but is compelled to transform them, at least partially, into action. In the Odyssey the plain telling of thoughts, dreams, and longings is itself a lived experience for the hero, so obviously so that we need do no more than allude to it, though the detailed expansion of this view by an analysis of the poem would give us valuable insight into the essence of the poetic art. But in the Iliad also— just as in the rhetorical drama, which is a running commentary on tragic doings — we allow ourselves to be deluded by the warlike subject and the realistic scenes into neglect of the speeches, which are the real content of the epic. This is more than merely a consequence of the fact that epic must of necessity narrate; the heroes themselves talk much more than they act — just as they are made to do so grotesquely in Offenbach’s travesties. More, not only does the hero Achilles, like Hamlet, pour out his heart in words; but there is far more battling in words than in deeds in the whole poem — and the very theme of the poet’s song is the anger of Achilles, together with the effects of this passion on his fellows and on the whole undertaking.

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1 The dramatic character of Greek epic has been brought out lately in Victor Bérard 8 book: Le Drame épique (Paris, 1930). This author’s second volume, La Résurrection d'Hombre, only came to my knowledge during the writing of this book.

The real theme, then, is not the fight against Troy, but only one episode, of which the subject-matter is a quarrel of the Greek leaders among themselves; a quarrel too which is carried on with words and not with weapons. It is this disunity among individuals, who represent the several Greek tribes, and peoples, that in the Homeric picture brings the undertaking to grief. But here it is no longer the languages which cause confusion among the peoples, as in the Tower of Babel, but the passions and emotions, which already the poet is treating psychologically, even though he still localizes them in particular parts of the body. But behind these individual passions there are at bottom national prejudices and motives, and these too seem in the Iliad to express themselves by way of words. At any rate I cannot regard the mixing of dialects in the artificial language of Homer as a matter of chance, for on the one hand it serves admirably to indicate the lack of national unity, and on the other it seems as though the poet wished in his collective language to symbolize the unity of the Greek race. This mingling of different dialects is in conformity with the wellknown mingling of temporally separate cultures that, as we have seen, is characteristic of the metaphorical revitalizing of the past in poetry. And this latter is just as much an immortalitysymbol as the mixing of the language is a collective symbol. This brings us from the hero to the poet, who in this sense is not only a prolongation of the identity of the hero, but actually carries on his social function at a later stage of development. The original epic form of narrative poetry was probably in the first person: that is, the man who described the action or the adventure had lived it, at least in his soul; he transformed his psychical experience through the story into a true activity, he created reality by the magic of language. This word-created reality would be taken by the audience also as truth, for, after all, it rested ultimately on the same magic ideology of striving for the achievement of immortality. This was achieved first of all by the transformation of the dream-experiences which proved the immortality of the soul into real actions that we of today would call magical, but which for primitive men were perfectly harmonious with his whole outlook on the world. At a later stage it was verbal description that was transformed into deed, and those who tried or managed to achieve this were the heroes, who had preserved a bit of the magic world. Later again, someone would tell of the hero and his deeds in the past, but these he now only brings to life by the word and does not create. In this sense the poet is a mouth-hero, a liar — as he is already called in Plato —but the reproach is only fair in relation to the content and not to the form, which, as language, was still to a certain extent creative. This creative faculty shows the poet to be the successor of the hero himself, who in one sense had been socially creative and effective, in that he had changed ideas into realities, but in another was already a liar, or even a swindler, since he denied the descent of the deed from the word, while at a still later stage of poetry he refuses to translate his words into deeds (Hamlet). Now, since the original narrator of his own experiences, and also the later hero and the still later poet, were at bottom telling of the lost magical world of the human will and of speech as its creative expression, it is not surprising that the content of their stories often betrays what it was in last analysis that man had lost with the loss of magical power. From a study of the various traditions of primitive and civilized peoples on the lines indicated in my Seelenglaube und Psychologie, it seems to me quite certain that the original power of this magic lay in the immortality-idea, that this faded out with the decreasing intensity of the magical belief in personal creative will-power, and that the hero had tried actively and the poet passively to make good the loss. The result of this social and artistic effort to regain the lost faith in immortality — or the symbol which represented it in the form of animal, plant (herb), or human being (woman) —is that the hero, and with him the poet, find, in lieu of the personal immortality of the magic age, an ideological immortality in the work. Ultimately this activity, whether social as with the hero, or artistic as with the poet, is a magical attempt not only to evidence but to attain to the immortality-belief by actualizing their thought, their wish, or their word. The hero and the poet do not find the way to personal immortality, but the mere effort to do so, as displayed in their work, endows them with an ideological immortality. Actually, as I showed in my Seelenglaube, from a study of the material, they suffer tragic collapse in this effort after personal immortality, and it is this tragic collapse which by a sort of irony of fate makes them immortal. This is obvious in the hero and his typical destiny, and we have emphasized in various passages of this book to what extent the poet also, and the artist in general, sacrifices his life to gain immortality. How far this is a necessary precondition of artistic production, for whose purposes life must be spent, and how far it is a more or less conscious self-sacrifice of the man to his work, is one of the deepest problems in the whole psychology of productivity. And that is why we have found the problem expressed as early as the creation-myths from the double point of view — on the one hand the world made by a violent, on the other by a voluntary, sacrifice of man. The discussion of this problem from the individual psychological point of view we will postpone to our last chapter, and we shall discuss here the ways in which it is displayed in poetry itself, regarded as a revelation of collective ideologies. The belief in immortality which man seeks, first religiously, then heroically, and finally artistically, to save passes through a development in human history which I have described in my Seelen glaube and which is also manifested in art as a whole and in poetry especially. It is a long journey from the naive self-assurance of the legendary hero, who suffers nothing and succeeds in everything — since, after all, he does nothing but accomplish by the magic of language all that his wishes drive him to—to the tragic hero who is destroyed by the fate he has created for himself. In tragedy man not only accepts mortality, but assists the death which is forced upon him as something that he has himself willed and for which he takes responsibility. Though the heroic was seen at first in the birth ’* (or, better, the liberation) of man from an established dependence through his personal heroism, it becomes in the end the acceptance of death as a fate selfwilled and tragically accepted. This spiritual development found its cultural expression in Christianity, although the idea of the sacrifice or self-sacrifice of a man or divine hero had been prepared in Classical religion and mythology, as witness the partition of Osiris, the mangling of Bacchus, the mutilation of Aittis. The Oriental mysteryreligions which lived on in the Eleusinian and Orphic cults of Greece all have the death and resurrection of a god as their subject. But in the mysteries the god becomes man and suffers the fate of mortality, while in Christianity man again becomes god — that is, achieves psychical immortality. In the late Roman Mithras cult, which Cumont has studied so thoroughly,” we have an immediate predecessor of Christianity, with its strong democratic cast. A close bond of intimacy united all members of the cult into an allembracing brotherhood in which the lowest slave could receive the highest initiation. In the development of this democratic principle which allows every individual to become god — to attain the immortality which had till then been reserved for the divine hero—lies the worldhistorical significance of Christianity, but at the same time its difference from the collective soul-beliefs of the primitives. These also allow all to share in the immortality of the tribe, as members of the whole. But thereafter man had passed through a period of individualization which culminated in the Greek hero and his tragic death, and so at last Christianity came with its theory of individual immortality according to which everyone could, by living in a certain way, become hero and god and thus participate in resurrection after death. This change — not produced, but only clothed in religious symbolism by Christianity — from the active wilful man represented in the ancient hero, to the passive sinful mankind that Christ symbolized, brought about a change also in the general ideology of art.

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1 See The Myth of the Birth of the Hero.

2 F. Cumont: Les Mystires de Mythra (4899) and Les Religions orientales dans le paganisme roman (1906).

All productivity thenceforth was consciously set to the service of religion, just as originally it had been an unconscious expression of the religious belief in the collective soul. The artist became God’s servant and no longer, as he had been in Greece, his rival. And so he remained till the Renaissance, which was a rebirth, not merely of Classical art-style, but of Classical man, or, more correctly, of his heroic ideal, the strong man of will. What the Classical artist had represented in poetry and sculpture — namely, the heroic idea of the individual as such — was actually lived by men of the Renaissance, whereas it was only a brief life to which its art reawakened the Classical art-ideology and its individualism of personalities. Thus, as we have seen, the Renaissance produced the individual artist-type who sought to express in Classical form, no longer the religious content of, but the pure humanity induced by, Christianity. In this Michelangelo was the most successful, and he, too, was physically and spiritually worn down by this conflict of ideas, even though able, at that price, to harmonize them in his work.’ He is still Christian and already pagan; but his Christianity is no longer religious, but human; that is, he crucifies himself on his human sufferings because of the inner, individualist apostasy from Christianity involved in his humanizing it. In this sense all the great artists of the Renaissance are in their lives Christian sufferers, sacrificed and crucified for their art. What Karl Scheffler * says of Rembrandt is true of them too: “ He lived, was crucified, died, descended into hell, and rose again, this first heretic among painters.” In this sense, however, Christianity was itself a vast dramatized tragedy of the heretic individual, and it not only fixed the artistic ideologies of nearly two thousand years, but was also itself an ideology, transformed into action, of the tragic man, the prototype of the drama whose weak echo is all that was achieved by the religious plays, religious painting, and religious sculpture right down to the Gothic.

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1 See Emil Lucka: Michelangelo; ein Buch sber den Genius (Berlin, 1930).

2 Karl Scheffler: Holland (Leipzig, 1930; English translation, New York, 1932).

Only then did man rediscover his self-creative power. Though his activity was still for the honour and service of God, yet here for the first time he was able with his heavenwardstriving cathedral to accomplish the bold enterprise of the Tower of Babel, and that because artists were united by a universal Christianity. But “the limitless will of Gothic humanity,” which Schaeffer (op. cit., p. 35) sees in the heaven-storming cathedrals, is only intelligible as the result of the contemporary revolution in the individual, who had once more learned to will, after leaving his will to God for so long. Yet in the first instance this art was dumb, like all sculpture and plastic art, though at the same time, like all great art, it was in the highest sense dramatic or, rather, dynamic. For Gothic is nothing but " plastic art in architectural form.” “When the Gothic spirit had exhausted its passion for the Beyond, it withdrew from the arts of form and poured itself forth in music, in the souls of Bach, Handel, and Mozart; what remained on this side split up into many parts and became Romantic, in the sense of the Klopstock-to-Hélderlin epoch. . . . But so far as that demand for the plastic asserted itself — unconsciously and in the depths of its essence — it entered into the poetry of language and produced the noble art of Greek corporeality in Goethe’s men and Holderlin’s odes ” (op. cit., p. 40). Here we see the urge of all essentially “dramatic” art towards life and the living, which can express only in drama and culminates in the Shaksperian form. For in the drama man does not create life in language only. The actor performs it before our eyes in real, bodily, human form and so leads art back again to the life from which it had started. All that the painter wanted to Copy or create in pictorial, or the sculptor in plastic form, found in the word a purely human and in the humanized drama of Shakspere a dramatic, dynamic, and vivid expression. But the prime drama of all European art was Christianity itself, at least in its significance as a new ideology of sacrifice, corresponding to the death and rebirth cycle of the ancient world. The only difference is that Christianity, out of the man sacrificed (crucified) for an idea, created the ideology of a willing self-sacrifice of one who dies for all others and precisely for that reason is himself immortalized. But this only represents a supreme spiritualization of the primitive myth in which the individual sacrifices (dismembers) himself so as to produce the world from his body: an ideology which we have seen to be the prototype of all impulse to artistic production. We shall return in the last chapter to this problem of artistic renunciation; here our interest lies in the course of the development from the primitive human sacrifice, which has always the character of a building-sacrifice, to the spiritualized renunciation of the creative artist. The fundamental idea is that for all created things there is needed not only a creator, but a piece of life, life itself, which is somehow withdrawn from its proper destiny of death and fixed in an intransient existence. The basic question, then, is: whence is this life taken which creates and gives life to the work of art? From the creator, or from someone else, who offers himself as a sacrifice either voluntarily or by compulsion or through the lot falling upon him? The whole problem of artistic renunciation is contained in the acceptance and knowledge that the creator must give a part of life —in fact, his own life ——in order to make it eternal in his work of art. The sacrifice of another life is only a sham sacrifice which does not save him from self-sacrifice, though it may be the immediate instinct of self-preservation to find a substitute. This, too, is the whole primitive idea of a sacrifice, whether of man or of animal; in every case there is the identification of sacrificial victim and priest, and beyond this again the original identity of all living and dead things, which of course was what gave rise to the notion of a kingdom of the dead corresponding to that of the living. And on this identity of living and dead the whole world-outlook of primitive man, with its collective soul-concept, is built up. Death demands a victim; but to the collective ideologism of primitive society it is immaterial who dies; one is as good as another, in dying as in living. It is only later that each one seeks to maintain his personal individuality, and only then that the killing becomes a sacrifice; but not a sacrifice to any god (unless, indeed, the god the individual thus distinguished from the mass is himself reputed to be this god). The sacrifice itself is thus at the same time its own real object—an object negative rather than positive, and definitely not an “I.” At this stage already we have the cheating of death, or of nature, out of its tribute — an idea which did not exist in the original killing of man or animal. For when a basic identity makes one as good as another, death in any case receives its tribute. It was only when it became a matter of a particular individual, and of the finding of a substitute victim for him, that the element of deceit crept in — an element which we find inseparably associated not only with sacrifice, but with games, of which, as we shall see in the next chapter, gambling with fate and competing with the rival are characteristic elements. At this point there enters the Oracle. At first sight it appears as if its object was for destiny to settle who was to be the particular sacrifice. But already magic is inevitably in the field as a method of righting fortunes, and this shows how little serious men were in subordinating themselves to the decisions of fate. Had they done so, the whole business of oracles would have been unnecessary — it may indeed have been only an ex post facto justification for a sacrifice already consummated, as is suggested, for instance, by the fact that at least in the case of entrail-augury the animal had first to be killed before it could be settled whether the victim approved of the sacrifice or not.’ Anyhow, even this inspection of entrails, that strikes us as so primitive, appears to presuppose a complicated process of justification whereby a man must excuse the deceit of vicarious sacrifice by obtaining the sanction from the victim.

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1‘In the primitive narrative of the Californian Indians (see p. 259) the stag is consequently asked, before he is slain, whether he consents to it. 204

The fact that this justification afterwards takes on the form of a prophesying of the future only confirms our view, for does not the sacrifice take place in order that the sacrificer may have a future himself — that is, remain alive? Such a substitution-sacrifice, however, is at bottom a drama, in looking at which we not only feel the tragedy of all human fate because of our identification with the hero, but, quite as strongly, the consolation that in this case it is not we but another that is the victim—a motive which probably guides the poet in his choice of historical material and in his poetically representing sufferings of his own in others. Here again we must recognize that Christianity represents a universal drama of world-history, which, in spite of all archaization in the Greek sense or modernization in the individualistic, still does represent the universal human quality of. this ideology of sacrifice. For tragedy also, like every other art-form, has passed through an ideological development, which, in spite of all external similarity of forms, discloses varieties of spiritual and intellectual meaning. Greek tragedy was a symptom of the collapse of Greek humanity, which the mythic hero, as prototype of the hybrid individual, interpreted with grand gesture as a fate which he could accept because he willed it. In post-Christian drama the death of the hero is merely a consolatory warning, which shows how the Greek or the Roman or the Macbeth or the Wallenstein is the victim of his own fate — which we can avoid if we would draw the right moral. The Classical drama-hero is thus different in essence from the modern, for the latter has an intrinsic individuality, whereas the Classical hero is only an individual consciously and for the occasion elevated above the people, which is represented by the chorus. The poet who sings and laments in drama the hero and his sufferings — which epic had shown as his deeds — thus becomes the heir of the hero in whose place he is put or puts himself; ¹while the sculptor or painter is in this respect the heir rather of the god who creates men, like Prometheus, the symbol of Greek artistic creation.”²

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1 See my Don Juan. Une étude sur le Double

2 See the section ‘* Erzichen und Beherrschen"” in Genetische Psychologie, II (1928).

Modern drama, of which Hamlet may still be regarded as the type, thus also shows us the passive hero — which means the poet himself — who is not guilty as the Classical hero is because of his overweening actions, but because of his rejection of the heroic réle in the fulfilment of which he is hindered by a predisposing feeling of guilt. Thus the hero, who had originally been the exemplar of the poet, gradually assumes his qualities — a process which has found so unique an expression in Shakspere’s Hamlet because this drama shows us the heroic ideology transforming itself into the poetic. The merely biographical question, how far the passive hero shows the qualities of his particular poet, is, in my view, secondary to the far more important fact that the hero represents the poet himself as a type; and this at a stage of development when the magic power of the word begins to fail in face of human passions; when, therefore, the individual is already checked in his willed actions; once more the creative power of the word shines in all its poetic beauty, but it achieves nothing more than the momentary lightening of the poet’s heart. This decay of the magic power of one man’s word is connected with increasing individualization, which is also reflected in the transformation of the hero and his character. In Shaksperian drama the hero no longer stands as in the Greek drama over against the chorus, which represented the whole people, nor other typical dramatis persone, but a whole series of equally individual characters, of whom each one is a hero in his own way, and in this sense speaks his own language. That all the characters in modern drama also speak the language of their poet as a collective language is not irreconcilable with this; we saw it equally in Homer’s epic mixture of languages which bridged the national differences of his heroes. But while, in the heroic epic which reflects the exhaustive struggles of the Migrations, we saw the poetic attempt to save the individual, in the form of national hero, from his submergence in the flood of the masses, we recognize in the tragedy which developed in the hour of the people’s victory the ruin of a hero reborn from the mass, who perishes not because of the people’s overweeningness, but his own. Tragedy shows him as freeing himself from the mass, symbolized in the chorus, only to fall a victim to the fate consequent on his own greatness. This second hero is no longer leader of the masses — their head, as it were —but he stands over against the crowd as an overdominant individual. The last modern struggle of this type we find in the already almost comic heavy tragedian, in whom the poet who would depict his own personal conflicts on the stage finds a mere megaphone.