Note 218 — Chapter II · RHYTHM AS THE ESSENTIAL FACT OF POETRY (continued 2)

It is the neglect of choral conditions and communal consent which takes away the value for general purposes from Dr. Otto Hoffman’s otherwise praiseworthy study of the Reimformeln im Westgermanischen (Leipzig, 1886, pp. 9 ff.). Man, he says, naturally speaks in breath-lengths, in periods which tend to be of equal duration. “Whoever could give to these periods, with their tendency to equal quantities, the most symmetrical and equal portions of actual speech, passed for an artist.” To this symmetry in duration was added similarity of sound; so came the short riming phrases, as well as the verse-lengths themselves. But poetry did not wait until clever artists furbished up into verse-lengths and attractive harmonies these breath-lengths of a spoken sentence. Language itself, as one will presently see, had more a festal than an individual origin; and long before the artist was practising his breath-lengths for a connected story, the rhythm of verse was fixed by the muscular rhythm of steps in a communal dance accompanied by words, often by one sound, repeated indefinitely, but in exact cadence with the steps.