their dances are imitating the movements of wrestling and the pancration; and soon they will begin the wild gestures of the Bacchanalian worship. It is a choral carnival in which an outburst of communal feelings has for the moment drowned the little voices of self-interest. These choral dances and songs contrast remarkably with the personal and artistic lyrics of an Alcæus or Sappho; and perhaps this is one reason why the intensely personal art of later Greece cared so little to preserve them. However this may be, our communal song-makers of the Greek city, as of the Russian village community and the Indian tribe, are a group in which individual song-making and the celebration of individual feelings are still in the background.
§ 29. Dr. Hans Flach, in his History of the Greek Lyric,[1] has written with all a German scholar's usual erudition on the folk-songs of the Greeks, their development of flute-playing, the Oriental influences on their lyric, and other topics deeply interesting to the special student of Greek literature. We cannot, however, regard Dr. Flach's book as an adequate study of the choral or the personal lyric from the standpoint of social life in early Greece. We believe that K. O. Müller's method of studying the beginnings of Greek song in close company with social life has been too much neglected by recent subjective criticism. Nay, farther, we believe the study of early Greek poetry as dependent on social development in Greece to be only a step towards a larger comparative study, which shall forget classic exclusiveness to learn from Norse or Arab as well as from Thrace and Pieria. The truth is that when we soberly survey the materials out of which Dr. Flach and others would build up a history of lyric poetry in Greece, we find them
- ↑ Tübingen, 1883.
