Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/459

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PROFESSIONAL INSTITUTIONS.

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[After the above chapter was written my attention was drawn to a passage in the late Prof. Henry Morley's work, A First Sketch of English Literature (p. 209), which in short space yields verification for the various leading propositions contained in it and in the preceding chapter:—

"Our English ballads are akin to those which also among the Scandinavians became a familiar social amusement of the people. They were recited by one of a company with animation and with varying expression, while the rest kept time, often with joined hands forming a circle, advancing, retiring, balancing, sometimes remaining still, and, by various movements and gestures, followed changes of emotion in the story. Not only in Spain did the people keep time by dance movement to the measure of the ballad, for even to this day one may see, in the Faroe Islands, how winter evenings of the North were cheered with ballad recitations, during which, according to the old northern fashion, gestures and movements of the listeners expressed emotions of the story as the people danced to their old ballads and songs."

Here, then, as in the Hebrew triumphal reception of the living hero, and the Greek worship of the apotheosized hero, we see a union of music and the dance, and with them a union of rhythmical speech with some dramatic representation of the incidents described, and of the emotions caused by the description. We see that everywhere there has tended to bud out afresh the combined manifestations of exalted feeling from which these various arts originate. Another fact is forced upon our attention. We are shown that in all cases, while there arises some one of a group who becomes singer or reciter, the rest assume the character of chorus. This segregation, which characterized the religious worship of the Greeks and characterized also their dramatic representations, is not only displayed in later times by the cathedral choir, which shares the service with the solo-singers, and by the operatic chorus which does the like on the stage, but is also displayed by the choral accompanists described in the above passage, and even now survives among us as the chorus which habitually winds up the successive verses of a convivial song in a public house.]

Describing a lecture by Dean Buckland on Kent's Cavern, Sir Henry Ackland says that the lecturer "paced like a Franciscan preacher up and down behind a long show-case, up two steps, in a room in the old Clarendon (at Oxford). He had in his hands a huge hyena's skull. He suddenly dashed down the steps, rushed, skull in hand, at the first undergraduate on the front bench, and shouted, 'What rules the world?' The youth, terrified, threw himself against the next back seat, and answered not a word. He rushed then on me, pointing the hyena full iu my face: 'What rules the world?' 'Haven't an idea,' I said. 'The stomach, sir,' he said (again mounting his rostrum), 'rules the world. The great ones eat the less, and the less the lesser still.'"

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