Man, remarks Wilhelm von Humboldt, belongs to the singing species of animals. True it is, that wherever found, he has some notion of music, cultivates the accord of sounds by some sort of instrument, and gives expression to his most acute emotions in modulations of vocal tone.

The earliest and simplest poetry is nothing more than such modulated sounds; it is not in definite words, and hence, is not capable of translation; it is but the expression of feeling through the voice, as is the wail of the infant, the rippling laughter of youth, the crooning of senility, the groans of pain or sorrow.

Perhaps this first is also the highest expression of the aesthetic sense. The most admired cantatrices of to-day drown the words in a wealth of vocalization, and the meaning is lost, even were the language one known to their hearers, which it usually is not. I have heard a living poet, himself of no mean eminence, maintain that the harmony of versification is a far higher test of true poetic power than the ideas conveyed.

These principles must be borne in mind when we apply the canons of criticism to the poetry of the ruder races. It is not composed to be read, or even recited, but to be sung; its aim is, not to awaken thought or convey information, but solely to excite emotion. It can have a meaning only when heard, and only in the surroundings which gave it birth.

Hence it is, that the notices of the poetry of American nations are so scant and unsatisfactory. While all travelers agree that the tribes have songs and chants, war songs, peace songs, love songs, and others, few satisfactory specimens have been recorded. Those who have examined the subject most accurately have found that many so-called songs are mere repet.i.tions of a few words, or even of simple interjections, over and over again, with an endless iteration, in a chanting voice. The Dakota songs which have been preserved by Riggs, the Chippeway songs obtained from the interpreter Tanner, and the numerous specimens of native Californian chants recorded by Powers, as well as many others of this cla.s.s which might be mentioned, are mainly of this character.

Consequently, they show very poorly in a translation, and are apt to convey an unjustly depreciatory notion of the nations which produce them. To estimate them aright, the meter and the music must be taken into consideration, and also their suitability to the minds to which they were addressed.[69]

But the anthology of America is not limited to specimens of this kind.

In the Iroquois _Book of Rites_ there are funeral dirges of considerable length, expressive and touching in meaning; and in the Algonkin a few have been preserved in the original, which are authentic and pleasing. Here, for instance, is a nearly literal version of a Chippeway love song:--

"I will walk into somebody's dwelling, Into somebody's dwelling will I walk.

To thy dwelling, my dearly beloved, Some night will I walk, will I walk.

Some night in the winter, my beloved, To thy dwelling will I walk, will I walk.

This very night, my beloved, To thy dwelling will I walk, will I walk."[70]

Much more striking, and to me strangely so, are the songs of the Taensa, a small tribe who dwelt on the banks of the lower Mississippi. They are now extinct, but a very curious account of their language, by a Spanish missionary, has been preserved and recently published. The early travelers speak of them as an unusually cultivated people, but one cannot but be surprised to find them capable of composing an epithalamium like the following:--

"Tikaens, thou buildest a house, thou bringest thy wife to live in it.

"Thou art married, Tikaens, thou art married.

"Thou wilt become famous; thy children will name thee among the elders.

Think of Tikaens as an old man!

"By what name is thy bride known? Is she beautiful? Are her eyes soft as the light of the moon? Is she a strong woman? Didst thou understand her signs during the dance?

"I know not whether thou lovest her, Tikaens.

"What said the old man, her father, when thou askedst for his pretty daughter?

"What betrothal presents didst thou give?

"Rejoice, Tikaens! be glad, be happy!

"Build thyself a happy home.

"This is the song of its building!"

Some of the songs of war and death are quite Ossianic in style, and yet they appear to be accurate translations.[71]

The comparatively elevated style of such poems need not cast doubt upon them. The first European who wrote about the songs of the natives of America, who was none other than the witty and learned Montaigne, paid a high tribute to their true poetic spirit. Montaigne knew a man who had lived among the Tupis of Brazil for ten or twelve years, and had learned their language and customs. He remembered several of their songs of war and love, and translated them to gratify the insatiable thirst for knowledge of the famous essayist. The refrain of one of them, supposed to be addressed to one of those beautiful serpents of the tropical forests, ran thus:--

"O serpent, stay! stay, O serpent! that thy painted skin may serve my sister as a pattern for the design and form of a rich cord, which I may give to my love; for this favor, may thy beauty and grace be esteemed beyond those of all other serpents."

"I have had enough to do with poetry," comments Montaigne on this couplet, "to say about this that not only is there nothing barbarous in this fancy, but that it is altogether worthy of Anacreon." Such is his enthusiasm, indeed, that he finds in this simple and faithful expression of sentiment the highest form of poesy; "the true, the supreme, the divine; that which is above rules and beyond reasoning."[72]

Scarcely can we call these words extravagant, when, in our own century, another Frenchman, eminent as a scientific observer, and speaking from the results of personal study on the spot, has said of the songs of a tribe of this same Tupi stock, the Guarayos, that they cannot be surpa.s.sed for grace of language and delicacy of expression.[73]

Many interesting Klamath, Omaha and Zuni verses have been collected by the efforts of Gatschet, Dorsey, Cushing and other zealous laborers connected with the Bureau of Ethnology at Washington, and these will shortly be accessible to all through the accurate publications of the government press.

The melodious Nahuatl tongue lent itself readily to poetic composition, and was cultivated enthusiastically in this direction long before the Conquest. Apparently the poetic dialect never freed itself from the use of unmeaning particles thrown in to complete the meter; as, indeed, may also be said of the English popular song dialect, which retains to this day very many such.[74]

With this exception the Tezcucan poets, for it was in that province that the muses were most a.s.siduously worshiped, made use of a pure, brilliant, figurative style, and had developed a large variety of metrical forms.

One of the most famous disciples of the lyre was Nezahualcoyotl, himself sovereign of Tezcuco about the year 1460. He left seventy odes on philosophical and religious subjects, which were borne in memory and repeated after the Conquest. Translations of a few of them have come down to us, but my inquiries as to the whereabouts of the originals, if, indeed, they exist, have been fruitless.[75] The Jesuit, Horatio Carochi, published some ancient verses in his grammar of the Nahuatl (Mexico, 1645). Several which appear in later works do not seem to merit the credit of antiquity. They are more like those which Sahagun wrote and published, in Nahuatl, at a very early period,[76] Christian songs, intended to take the place of the ditties of love and chants of war, which the natives had such a pa.s.sion for singing.

Under the t.i.tle _Cantares de los Mexicanos_, there was long preserved in the library of the University of Mexico a ma.n.u.script of the sixteenth or seventeenth century, with a large number of supposed ancient Aztec songs; but what has become of it now, n.o.body knows.[77]

Thus it is that these precious monuments of antiquity are allowed to lie uncared for, through generations, until, at length, they fall a prey to ignorance or theft.

A few other fragments of Nahuatl poetry, all probably modern, but some of them the versification of native bards, might be named; but the whole of it, as now existing, could give us but a faint idea of the perfection to which the art appears to have attained in the palmy days of the great Tezcucan poet-prince.

In the literature of the Maya group of dialects, there have been preserved various sacred chants, some in the _Books of Chilan Balam_, others in the Kiche _Popol Vuh_. What are known as the "Maya Prophecies" are, as I have said, evidently the originals, or echoes of the mystic songs of the priests of Kukulkan and Itzamna, deities of the Maya pantheon, who were supposed to inspire their devotees with the power of foretelling the future.

The modern Maya lends itself very readily both to rhyme and rhythm, and I have in my possession some quite neat specimens of versification in it, from the pen of the Yucatecan historian, Apolinar Garcia y Garcia.

When we reach Peru we find a race not less poetical in temperament than the cultured Mexicans. Nothing but their ignorance of an alphabet, and the indifference or fanatical hatred of the early explorers for the productions of the native intellect, prevented the perpetuation of a Qquichua literature, both extensive and n.o.ble. As it is, we may expect many valuable examples of it when the learned Peruvian scholar, Senor Gavino Pacheco Zegarra, shall publish his long promised _Tresor de la Langue des Incas_. Among them he has announced the first appearance of a number of _Yaravis_, or elegiac chants, composed by the Indians themselves, and sung in memory of their departed friends.

We know, from the testimony of Garcillaso de la Vega, that the Inca bards formed a separate and highly respected cla.s.s, and that in their hands the supple Qquichua tongue had been brought under well recognized rules of prosody. He mentions the different cla.s.ses and subjects of their poems, compares them to similar compositions in Spanish, and even gives specimens of two short ones, of undoubted antiquity, and adds that, when a boy, he knew many others. "What would not one now give,"

exclaims Mr. Markham, "for those precious relics of Inca civilization, which the half-caste lad allowed to slip from his memory."[78] All that Mr. Markham could collect, in his extensive journeys in Peru, were not above twenty songs of ancient date, and I regret to say that these have not yet been published.

Of those charming Tupi songs, to which I have already referred, I fear that we have but very few preserved in the original tongue. Not that there is any lack of poems in the _lingoa geral_, or "common language" of Brazil, as the ordinary and corrupt Tupi there spoken is called. It is a melodious idiom, lending itself easily to rhyme and rhythm, and several Brazilian writers of European blood have gained reputation by their compositions in it. But of genuine aboriginal productions, there are not many.

The entertaining old voyager, Jean de Lery, who visited Brazil with Villegagnon in 1557, has recorded a few simple airs, which appear to be merely choruses or refrains of songs, the delivery of which was, however, so effective, that to hear them carried him out of himself; and ever, when his memory recalled them, his heart beat, and it seemed that he heard the wild cadence once again resounding in his ears through the tropical forests.[79]

Some strange old poetic invocations in archaic Tupi addressed to the moon and to the G.o.d of love, Ruda, who dwells in the clouds, have been collected and printed by Dr. Couto de Magalhaes, a writer whose studies on Tupi poetry, its character and development, merit high praise.[80]

Both the songs and music of the modern natives of that country attracted the attention of the learned Von Martius, and in his volumes of _Travels in Brazil_ an appendix is devoted to their discussion.[81]

Many excellent hints for preparing a Tupi anthology are also contained in an erudite note of Ferdinand Denis to his description of the visit of fifty native Tupis to France, in 1550.[82]

Section 7. _Dramatic Literature_.

The development of the dramatic art can be clearly traced in the American nations. When the Spaniards first explored the West Indian Islands they found the inhabitants much given to festivals which combined dancing with chanting, and the introduction of figures with peculiar costumes. The native name of these representations was adopted by the Spaniards, and applied to such performances elsewhere. The word is _areytos_, and is derived from the Arawack verb, _aririn_, to rehea.r.s.e, recite.[83]

Such dramatic recitations were found among most of the tribes of North and South America, and have been frequently described by travelers.

Often they were of a religious nature, having something to do with devotional exercises; but not seldom they were simply for amus.e.m.e.nt.

Occasionally they were mere pantomimes, where the actors appeared in costume and masks, and went through some ludicrous scene. Thus, to quote one example out of many, Lieutenant Timberlake saw some among the Cherokees, about the middle of the last century, which he speaks of as "very diverting," where some of the actors dressed in the skins of wild animals, and the simulated contest between these pretended beasts and the men who hunted them, were the motives of the entertainment.[84]