The fissiparous birth of individual from communal poetry is confirmed by the process observed everywhere among savage tribes. Solitary performance has come there to a considerable pitch of skill, but it yields always in importance to the chorus, and along with profit and reputation of a sort it often involves a kind of shame. Prostitutes do the individual singing and dancing in many parts of the Orient;[981] singing-women and dance-girls, even in advanced stages of culture, pay dearly for their eminence; and something of this decline in caste clings to the most respectable solitary performances, now and here, of the skilled “entertainer.” The mimes of the Middle Ages were often held to be without the pale, not only of the law, but of the church itself;[982] and while other causes worked to this end, something must be conceded to that attitude of every public to its entertainer or even teacher,—extravagant praise and delight, extravagant rewards, but with it all a sense of aloofness, an inclination to wave away this centrifugal element which has set itself over against the communal body, now an indulgent contempt, where mere pastime is concerned, and now dislike and distrust at an exhibition of independent thought.
It has been repeatedly shown that short improvisations are the earliest form of individual poetic art, and are sung in the intervals of a chorus, or to relieve the monotony of labour, where again they detach themselves from the parent refrain, modify it, add to it, and so build up a song. There is no need to dwell on the evidence for savage improvisation. The African is amazing in his power to turn an event into verse; it is a communal affair for the most part, with a chorus in the background. At public dances the Indians of America improvise, man for man, indefinitely, leaning also on the monotonous refrain. Throughout the South-Sea Islands[983] improvisation of songs is as common as speech; even the children improvise. The lower the level of culture, the more general this gift of improvising; “among the Andamans every one composes songs.”[984] The same holds of Australia, of far Siberia, and throughout the savage world; moreover in all these cases the habit is not solitary but festal. The oldest poetry known to tradition among the Afghans was improvised in reply to an insulting verse;[985] but the professional singer is on hand, and improvisation has become an art. The history of poetry among civilized races always shows a surplus of improvisation in the initial stage known to the records; so it is with the Greek _skolion_, as well as with dramatic beginnings; and so, to take a different case, with the Arabs, where improvisation long held almost absolute sway,[986] although drama had no place and a subjective spirit reaches back to the earliest tradition. Again, where a literature is undeveloped, although under civilized conditions, improvisation is the main force; in this case are the Basques.[987] In fine, it is not a vain tradition which puts a general gift of improvising verse before the development of any national literature; and Plutarch, in his treatises on Music and on the Pythian Oracle, speaking of a time when all formal utterance was in poetry, and when even men without poetic fire were wont to make verses on any subject, is telling not a fable but something very close to truth. The proof is not far to seek, and comes from ethnological as well as literary sources.