MUNDATU POETRY, MUSIC AND DANCES. 97 



the identical remaining terms of the line The substitut'on of synonyms has nothing 

 to do with the expansion or generalization. 



Would it be a satisfactory explanation to ascribe this substitution to a mere dread 

 of monotony, to the mere desire of changing just for the sake of changing ? But such 

 a desire would seem to point to a refinement which we hardly expect from an entirely 

 illiterate aboriginal race. It is an exigency of style as style, and therefore seems to 

 presuppose a literature. 



On the other hand, poetic instinct may very well be conceived as exacting such 

 an expedient in languages of a certain type, whereas languages developed along other 

 and higher lines would naturally reject it as monotonous and tedious, because they 

 have other and better means at their disposal to obtain the same or similar effects. 



Mundari is far from being a very apt instrument for the expression of abstract 

 thought, whether of the ratiocinative or of the emotional character. It is too much 

 tied down to a rather close, not to say slavish, imitation of concrete realities, and it 

 can hardly rise beyond the lower forms of abstraction. But poetry is essentially an 

 abstraction of a very high order. It cares little or nothing for the concrete realities 

 it touches on, but out of these it draws only those elements which cause in men the 

 great emotions and passions of love and hate, of pleasure, joy and delight, of grief or 

 anguish, of hope or dread, of terror or despair. It must therefore present concrete 

 things precisely under those aspects under which they are most likely to give rise to 

 these emotions and leave their other attributes in the background. It is said that 

 poetry is essentially concrete. In a sense it certainly is, inasmuch as it hardly ever 

 reasons, but depicts concrete realities, and does so in the most vivid manner. The 

 concrete realities it uses must, by poetry, be transformed as it were into very words, 

 and into precisely such words as will most intelligibly and most irresistibly speak to 

 the emotional nature in man. And in this sense it is a very high abstraction indeed. 



Like the power or faculty of speech, which, out of a few material sounds, creates 

 an instrument attuned to the almost infinite variety of mental activity, this power of 

 using concrete realities for the purpose of addressing and deeply stirring the equally 

 noble emotional part of the human spirit is, in its essentials, not a reward of effort 

 and study, nor the result of high culture, but a free gift to man in all ages and all 

 climes. It is a gift enabling the simplest, as well as the most intellectual, to absorb, 

 to force into his own soul, the whole of nature, nay at times the whole of the universe, 

 and there attune it to the spirit s own present disposition, impregnating it with all 

 its own ;oys and sorrows, so as to transform that objectively cold and unchangeable, 

 unfeeling universe into very words, which sing, or sigh, or laugh, or cry, or glow with 

 brightest hope, or darken with despair. In this sense poetry certainly is an abstraction 

 of the very highest order, not an abstraction wrought by the intellectual, but by the 

 emotional, nature of the spirit that lives in man. But the outward means used for its 

 expression must naturally differ from race to race, from nation to nation, according to 

 their different tempers and degrees of culture, which manifest themselves so strikingly in 

 the structural character as well as in the single words of their languages. 



Now we have quite a number of ready-made words which present objects to the 



