Note 59 — PART FOUR

Professor Gummere also gives this analysis of Karl Bücher's essay on "Labor and Rhythm" (Arbeit und Rhythmus, Leipzig, 1896): "Fatigue, which besets all work felt as work by reason of its continued application of purpose, vanished for primitive man, as it vanishes now for children, if the work was once freed from this stress of application and so turned to a kind of play. The dance itself is really hard work, exacting and violent; what makes it the favorite it is with savages as with children? Simply its automatic, regular, rhythmic character, the due repetition of a familiar movement which allows the mind to relax its attitude of constant purpose. The purpose and plan of work involve external sources and external ends; rhythm is instinctive, and springs from the organic nature of man; it is no invention. The song that one sings while at work is not something fitted to the work, but comes from movements of the body in the specific acts of labor; and this applies not only to the rhythm, but even to the words. So it was in the festal dance.... That poetry and music were always combined by early man, and, along with labor, made up the primitive three-in-one, an organic whole, labor being the basal fact, with rhythm as an element common to the three; and that not harmony or pitch, but this overmastering and pervasive rhythm, exact, definite, was the main factor of early song,—these are conclusions for which Bücher offers ample and convincing evidence." (Ib. pp. 108, 109.)