Chapter V: The Differencing Elements of Communal Poetry (3)

People said,” adds Marcaggi, “_that she was following the custom of a former age_, and that she lacked proper reserve.”[541] This is, indeed, the more primitive note; and the iterated cry, mere appeal to the dead, like those _cris d’enterrement_ which Bladé heard at Gascon burials, was once sung by the swaying and dancing throng of mourners. Psychologically and physiologically this is quite in order; a kind of communal hysterics, intensely rhythmical, as with a badly frightened child, as with insanity, delirium, abnormal emotion of any kind, has the cadent and recurrent note at its utmost; and this woman, with her “lack of decorum,” like that peasant on the beach by the drowned boy, is the modern survivor and deputy of panic emotion, a belated case in the pathology of epidemic grief. Between this mere iterated cry, as was said above, and the later professional song of lament,[542] lie the bulk of Corsican _voceri_, sung by sister or mother of the dead, and most characteristic when it is a violent death which they deplore and when they will stir to vengeance a group of male relatives standing sullenly by the corpse. For while a _vocero_ in the case of some peace-parted soul, such as the village priest, is often a decorous and comforting office,[543] the passion of the thing is felt only over the bier of a man murdered in feud. St. Victor, whom all the others quote on this point, describes the scene. At first, in the chamber of death, rises a great wail of lament, through which oaths of vengeance flash like lightning; men draw their daggers, and dash their guns upon the stone floor; women dip their handkerchiefs in the blood still oozing from the wounds;[544] sometimes they are moved to a frenzy that vents itself in dancing round the corpse amid loud cries, until silence is demanded and the dead man’s mother, wife, sister, moves to the bier and begins her _vocero_. There is no art in it; “the excuse for its violence is in its explosive force, ... it sings through the mouth of a wound.” It begins, however, in a plaintive way, calls tenderly upon the dead, then tells the story of his taking off; now the gently cadenced movements of the singer grow more violent, and presently she breaks into a storm of imprecations and into wild appeals for the vendetta.[545] One after another of these singers improvises such a lament, and for every stanza a chorus of sobs and cries and moans, often, one gathers, of articulate words, rises from the throng. The passion, too, is real; readers who come of northern blood must banish certain associations of the cardboard castle, the cloak and sword, loud baritone confidences, and stage moonlight. These _voceri_ of vengeance are not rated as rant by the law, which often and vainly tries to put them down. Thus among the Basques, a race, as George Borrow declared, not of poets but of singers, laws were passed against the old fashion of the funeral;[546] it was forbidden “to make lamentations, to tear one’s hair, to bruise the flesh, to wound one’s head, to chant death-songs.” A Basque chorus of lament is described by Michel. “All the women join in it with deep sighs and cries of grief, addressed now to the dead and now to themselves; they begin with high tones, then fall into a deep note, and pronounce from time to time _ayené_, a Basque word which means _Alas!_” It is quite clear that in these repeated words of the chorus one finds the origin of the _vocero_, the “cry” of communal grief; and a study of such cries at the actual burial, as they are still heard in Gascon funerals,[547] shows to what beginnings one must refer the more elaborate _voceri_ of the Corsicans. As early as 1340 a law was passed at Tarbes against “cries and lamentations at the return from a burial.” According to Bladé, the Gascon burial cries are a kind of recitative, lacking rime and even what modern ears demand in the way of rhythm, for they are now divorced from the dance, and at best are timed to the steps of the procession. They begin when a funeral procession starts from the church to the cemetery, and are a series of “distinct exclamations combined into irregular stanzas”; mostly they begin “in a high note, falling slowly, to rise again at the end.” The iteration of these cries is insistent; Bladé quotes a long _cri_ of the sort:[548]—

Ah!
Ah! Ah! Ah!
Ah! Pauvre!
Ah! Pauvre!
Ah! Pauvre!
Mon Dieu!
Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu!

Ah!
Pauvre Père!
Pauvre Père! Pauvre Père!
Vous êtes mort, pauvre Père!
Pauvre Père, vous êtes mort!
Vous êtes mort!
Vous ne reviendrez jamais!
Jamais! Jamais!

Then the first stanza is repeated. The choral possibilities of this cry are clear enough, and sung to the dance about a corpse, as was undoubtedly the primitive case, its rhythm would have been exact and no “recitative.” A further step is taken when individual and artistic touches make themselves felt in a pretty little _cri_ which is sung by a mother[549] over her child:—

Pauvret!
Ah!
Tu seras bien seulet
Au cimitière
Cette nuit,
Et moi
Je te pleurerai
A la maison.
Mon Dieu!
Ah!

Repetition is the original rhythm, the original poem; then comes improvisation by the individual, begetting the increment and founding a “text,” while variation plays upon the repeated words. Such is the course of poetry, and in particular of the _vocero_; repetition lies at the heart of it. Wetzstein,[550] describing the Syrian song of lament sung by the women, lays stress upon the constant iteration in it, and upon the chorus which consists mainly of a single word,—“woe!” “alas!”—counterpart of the chorus in Corsican and Basque _voceri_. Indeed, the _vocero_ is not only inscribed with woe, but was once nothing else; and fragments of this or that “cry” of burial and of death found their way into the mythology and the recorded poetry of Phœnicians, of Egyptians, and of Greeks. Brugsch,[551] in his study of the songs about Adonis and Linos, makes it clear that Linos was simply a personification of these Phœnician cries of lament, _ai lenu_, the choral “alas!” or “woe to us!” The refrain or repeated cry of grief sung by mourners about their dead finds thus both mythical and ritual projection and the immortality insured by great artistic song. This _ai_, _ai_, seems to be one of the oldest choral funeral cries, common, as Brugsch puts it, “to the whole Orient as well as Egypt”; and he follows it down to the exquisite elegy of Bion. Linos, in the vintage songs, was made a personification of this cry,[552] became a Greek, was said to be buried in Argos, and was worshipped on Helicon amid lamentations of matron and maid gathered at the yearly festival. One remembers Ezekiel’s wrath over the women who, in the gate of the Lord’s house, were weeping for Tammuz. In the Egyptian lament of Isis for Osiris, the opening words, “Come back,” are repeated, as in the choral cry from which it sprang, and are in accord not only with the _vocero_ of Europe, but with the refrain of a dirge in India:[553]—

We never scolded you; never wronged you;
_Come to us back_!...
_Come home, come home, come to us again!_

The Egyptian _vocero_, the _ai en Ise_, is worth quoting in full:[554] “Come back, come back, God Panu, come back! For they which were against thee are no more. Ah, fair helper, come back to see me, thy sister, that love thee; and drawest thou not nigh to me? Ah, fair youth, come back, come back! I see thee not, my heart is sore for thee, my eyes seek thee. I wander about for thee, to see thee in the form of Nai, to see thee, to see thee, fair lord, in the form of Nai, to see thee, the fair one,—to see thee, to see thee, God Panu, the fair one! Come to thy darling, blessed Ounophris, come to thy sister, come to thy wife, come to thy wife, God Urtuhet, come to thy spouse! I am thy sister, I am thy mother, and thou comest not to me; the face of gods and of men is turned to thee, while they weep thee, seeing me that weep for thy sake, that weep and cry to heaven that thou hear my prayer,—for I am thy sister that loved thee on earth. Never lovedst thou another than me, thy sister! Never lovedst thou another than me, thy sister!” Like the companion lament of Nephthys, this is distinctly a _vocero_ of the sister over the brother; and the repeated _mââ-ne-hra_, “come home,” the refrain of the piece, gave rise to the name Maneros, fabled to be a prince of Egypt, a fact which reminded Herodotus of the similar song of Linos in Greece. In his chapter on the Lityerses song, Mannhardt[555] notes that this name, too, with that of Bormos, both supposed to be sons of a king, like Maneros, Linos, Mannerius, was developed out of an old refrain. The Greeks, singing a lay which corresponded to the Maneros, went with choral cries and music to seek the vanished Bormos. So, too, with Hylas; a Bithynian festival is on record, where sacrifice is made at the scene of his capture by the nymphs; and the festal throng thereupon wander over the hills and about the Hylas Lake, crying incessantly upon his name. It is needless to follow all these myths and the ritual connected with them; nor can we turn aside and study the memorial festivals of the dead, like that old Germanic feast in November, now surviving in All Souls’ Day, where masses said for the repose of Christian dead, and flowers laid upon their tombs, took the place of older sacrifice, dance, and song.[556] What one sees beyond question is the origin of funeral songs in the communal chorus, and what one infers with great probability is that death, and the resulting expression of communal grief in choral song and dance, had much more to do with earliest forms of poetry than even the erotic impulse. Sociology now declares that primitive feeling for children, relatives, clan, was far keener in its emotional expression than the sense of sexual desire.[557] The importance of the love-lyric, now overwhelming, and mainly an individual outburst, yields in primitive life to the importance of the choral _vocero_ over a dead clansman; so that, using the terms in a modern way, one must reverse that saying of the preacher: it was death that was stronger than love. Coming back to modern survivals, one finds this _vocero_ common, both in its individual and in its choral form, among the Celts. Leaving the Ossianic lament alone in its gloom, one may take the honest and homely prose of Pennant,[558] who made a tour through Scotland in the year 1769, and saw a lyke-wake[559]—he calls it a “late-wake”—in the Highlands. “The evening after the death of any person, the relatives and friends of the deceased meet at the house, attended by bagpipe and fiddle; the nearest of kin, be it wife, son, or daughter, opens a melancholy ball, dancing and greeting, _i.e._ crying violently, at the same time; and this continues till daylight, but with such gambols and frolics among the younger part of the company that the loss which occasioned them is often more than supplied by the consequences of that night.” This is eighteenth-century humour, and an eighteenth-century reason to explain the hilarity is quoted from Olaus Magnus. Unfortunately Pennant did not hear what he calls the “Coranich”; but he learned that such a song is generally in praise of the dead, a recital of his deeds or the deeds of his forbears. Questions, too, were addressed to the corpse, why, for example, he chose to die—a common trait of the _vocero_, already put to use by Chaucerian humour,[560] and noted by old Camden; Pennant remarks that the mother of Euryalus makes the same query.[561] But Pennant had heard such songs in the south of Ireland; and this feature of an Irish wake is still accessible to the curious. On its native soil it has been often studied and described.[562] When the corpse has been laid out, “the women of the household range themselves at either side, and the keen (_caoine_) at once commences. They rise with one accord, and moving their bodies with a slow motion to and fro, their arms apart, they ... keep up a heart-rending cry. This cry is interrupted for a while to give the _ban caointhe_, the leading keener, an opportunity of commencing. At the close of every stanza of the dirge the cry is repeated.” The authors give the air to which keens are chanted. “The keen usually consists in an address to the corpse, asking him, ‘Why did he die?’—or a description of his person, qualifications, riches; it is altogether extemporaneous.” A note attributes the ease of improvisation to the fact that assonance, “vocal rime,” is enough to satisfy the needs of Irish verse. The keener is often a professional and paid; sometimes a volunteer and a member of the family. “Any one present, however, who has the gift, may put in his or her verse; and this sometimes occurs.... Besides _caoines_, extempore compositions over the dead, _thirrios_, or written elegies, deserve mention. They are composed almost exclusively by men, as the _caoines_ are by women.” One thinks of Marcaggi’s poetical bandits and their written effusions as compared with the improvised songs of the _voceratrice_ over her dead. It is odd to see how the zeal of certain antiquarians would reverse the law of nature, and make this improvised keen a degenerate form of older and carefully composed elegies of Irish “bards.” O’Conor thought the old keen to be “debased by extemporaneous composition”;[563] and a Mr. Blanford[564] describes the degradation in detail. The keen, he says, was once an antiphonal affair prepared beforehand, and sung by bards with the aid of a chorus,—elaborate in every way. On the decline of these bards, “the Caoinan fell into the hands of women, and became an extemporaneous performance.” Like the degeneration theory of ballads, this account of the keen goes to pieces under the test of comparative and historical studies. Spenser, to be sure, speaks of these bards, and not without respect;[565] but it is clear that the ancestral line of the keen among Irishmen runs back to “the lamentations at theyr burialls, with dispayrefull outcryes and immoderate wailings,”[566] which he mentions in his argument to prove that the Irish are descended from the Scythians. Would that Spenser had not cut short his tale “of theyr old maner of marrying, of burying, of dauncyng, of singing, of feasting, of cursing, _though Christians have wiped out the most part of them_,”—best reason for telling in detail of all the Christians had left!

Wailings, cries now articulate and now inarticulate, but wrought by repetition, by the cadence of rocking bodies, or of measured steps, by the spasmodic utterance of extreme emotion, into a choral consent which is not harmony, perhaps, to modern ears, but which has a rhythm of its own,—these are the raw material of the poetry of grief. Like the “cries” at a Gascon burial, like the Irish keen, is the _rauda_ of Russian Lithuania, which Bartsch[567] significantly calls “a preliminary stage of actual folksong.” This _rauda_ or _daina_ is sung by women; it lacks what one calls melody and verse; and it is sung mostly on the way to the burial or at the grave. Prætorius, at the end of the seventeenth century, describes the Lithuanian _vocero_ as a mingled song and sob, with the usual questions to the corpse, so familiar in the Irish keen—why did the man die, had he not enough to eat and drink, had he not clothes and shoes?[568] Brand, who made his tour in 1673, tells the same story; relatives and friends, however, are here seated round the corpse, shrieking and howling, to be sure, but in words of a more lyric tone: “Why hast thou left us? Whither art thou gone? I shall go to thee, but thou wilt not come to me.”[569]

Enough has been said to show the origins of the _vocero_ in Europe. Among the Tartar folk of Siberia, songs of lament, although nearly always improvised, have more the character of an elegy, and are sung by the relatives of the dead during a full year after the funeral.[570] If the husband dies, it is his wife who makes the song; if son or daughter dies, it is the mother; while a dead mother is sung by her daughter or a near female relative. Men sing these songs only when a rich or powerful person dies, and then only at the funeral:[571] one thinks of David over Jonathan and Saul, and of that old king in the _Béowulf_. Among the Eskimo,[572] however, occurs a _vocero_ precisely like the type which has been found common to the primitive customs of Europe,—a song by the near relative, with chorus of moans, sobs, and cries from the women who stand about. Coming to the distinctly savage state, one finds material enough to fill a book, all going to prove that a choral cry and not an individual composition must be taken as starting-point of the _vocero_. “Of the Tasmanians, Mr. Davis relates[573] that ‘during the whole of the first night[574] after the death of one of their tribe they will sit round the body, using rapidly a low, continuous recitative, to prevent the evil spirit from taking it away.’” Naturally the artist comes early upon the scene; dirges, eulogies, elegies of every sort, are built on this choral foundation; and that communal magic, if it was anything more than a Tasmanian _vocero_, is soon replaced by the magic of the individual shaman. To put him in the van of funeral lament, however, to say that he preceded communal and choral wailings for the dead, is ignoring the facts of primitive life and the instincts of human nature. Comparetti makes the magic songs of the Finns precede their heroic and legendary verse, and this may well be true; but the communal lament is older than both, for, as was seen in the case of the Botocudos, primitive folk have no legend, no history, and as for the magic, while the sayings of a shaman would get the earliest record, they demand a communal background. For it is the unavoidable condition of all recorded literature that what is of the moment and of the mass dies with its occasion; while only individual skill, the hand of a single performer, is moved to keep the record of his doing on purpose to a life beyond life. Even the humblest shaman, too, learns his art and his rude ritual from an older artist in magic,[575] and so his making becomes a tradition and his verses flit from mouth to mouth. But the history of religion has taught us to look elsewhere than to the temple and the priest and the Deus Optimus Maximus of civilized worship, if we would find the beginnings of cult and the earliest divinity. As we go back to a horde of homogeneous men, so we go back to a horde of homogeneous spirits; as one spirit rises above the rest, so the shaman is deputed, with his superior powers,[576] to cope with the superior god. It was the “we” of the horde, in the new sense of coherence and social being, which started that communal thinking and made that communal belief in the “they” of a surrounding and potent host of spirits; and it is not unreasonable to suppose that communal appeal, sheer cries and leaps in some wild consent of rhythm, must have begun those magic rites which are perhaps to be surmised in no very advanced stage in the songs of Mr. Davis’s Tasmanians. Actual incantations that come down to us are full of repetition, and frequently have a chorus or refrain;[577] elements that point back to a communal source. Among American Indians the necromantic songs abound in a chorus which is nearly all repetition, like[578]—

Na ha, Yaw ne;
Na ha, Yaw ne.

But it is the _vocero_ which we are now to study among savage tribes. A case or so from Africa and Asia will do for that side of the world—evidence is more than abundant—and then America may tell its tale at a time when borrowing is out of the question. M. Adanson, a correspondent of the Royal Academy of Sciences, travelled in Senegal about 1750; his account[579] of _vocero_ and dance is fairly representative of the case. One night in a village he was awakened by a “horrid shrieking,” and found that a young woman had just died. What follows is interesting for comparison with the custom in modern Greece. “The first shriek was made,” says M. Adanson, “according to custom, by one of the female relations of the deceased before her door. At this signal, all the women in the village came out and set up a most terrible howl, so that one would have thought they were all related to the deceased;” the traveller forgets that in certain levels of culture the clan, even the horde, is above kin. The noise lasted till break of day; relatives then went into the dead woman’s cottage, took her hand, and asked her questions,—the common trait of the _vocero_ everywhere. When she was buried, the lamentations ceased; but for three nights the young people danced a memorial dance. At this the performers sang a song, “the burden of which was repeated by all the spectators.” Then follows the description of certain erotic features of the dance, and the usual testimony to that exactness of time observed in song and movement and gesture. The _vocero_ itself is mainly a lament; Mungo Park speaks of “the loud and dismal howlings,” another of “leaping and dancing”; while in Loango relatives “weep, sing, and dance” about the corpse.[580] In Korea, after a night of merriment the body is carried to its tomb; “the bearers sing and keep time as they go, whilst the kindred and friends ... make the air ring with their cries.”[581]

Interesting are the accounts of American Indians in the days of discovery. Jean de Lery, a Frenchman who went to Brazil with the Protestant emigrants in the sixteenth century, and wrote an account of his journey,[582] was struck by the likeness between the funeral laments made by savages, and the _voceri_ of the women of Béarn singing over their dead husbands. He quotes one, a good document. “‘La mi amou, La mi amou: Cara rident, œil de splendou: Cama lengé, bet dansadou: Lo mé balen, Lo m’esburbat: Matî depes: fort tard au lheit.’ That is to say, ‘my love, my love, laughing face, fine eye, light limb, brave dancer, valiant mien, lovely mien, early up and late to bed.’” So too the Gascon women: “‘Yere, yere, o le bet renegadou, o le bet iougadou qu ‘here’: that is to say, ‘O the brave Protestant, O the brave player that he was!’ And so do our poor American women, who, besides a refrain for each stanza,[583] always throw in a ‘He is dead, he is dead, for whom we now are mourning,’ whereupon the men respond and say: ‘Alas, it is true; we shall never see him more until we are behind the mountains, where, as our Caribs tell us, we shall dance with him’—and other things of the sort, which they add in their response.” Lescarbot,[584] quoting Lery about the Brazilians, remarks the agreement in songs of lament between them and the Canadians “fifteen hundred leagues away.” Such a song ran—

Hé hé hé hé hé hé hé hé hé hé,

a monotonous performance on paper, with the notes _fa_ _fa_ _sol_ _fa_ _fa_ _sol_ _sol_ _sol_ _sol_ _sol_, not too elaborate music; but bodily graces made up for this, since they then “shrieked and cried in fearful wise the space of a quarter-hour, and the women leaped into the air with such violence as to foam at the mouth.” Then once more the tuneful mood began, and they sang, “Heu heüraüre heüra heüraüre heüra heüra onech.” In this song they are mourning for their dead parents. As with Lery and Lescarbot, so the spirit of comparison is astir in Lafitau,[585] who, however, has less to tell of folklore at home, and a great deal to say of the ancients, as may be gathered from the title of his book; the laments for the dead he calls _nénies_, and speaks of the “matron” who plays the part of _praefica_. He tells, however, a plain story of the savage customs. When a corpse has been dressed and laid in state, tears and lamentations, restrained up to that time, begin to break forth, but in order and cadence. The “matron” leads the other women, who “follow in the same measure, _but use different words, according to the relation which they bear to the deceased_,”—second stage of the _vocero_, with a survival of the chorus, however, far more pronounced than in Corsica. Men, too, mourn their dead, but in a nobler way, singing the death-song and dancing the hereditary dance;[586] but these _voceri_ of the women are of great interest. Grosse[587] quotes from Grey the Australian _vocero_ for a young man, where “the young women sing—‘My young brother,’—the old women sing—‘My young son,’—and all in chorus sing—‘Never shall I see thee again, Never shall I see thee again.’”

In Schoolcraft’s[588] time things had undergone no great change; for “every person aggrieved makes his own complaint, and it is pitiful to see a married person commence wailing and singing _kitchina takah_, then wailing again _kitchina_,—‘men’s friend.’ These are all the words,”—a significant fact. “The same way in other deaths the deceased is bewailed.” Here is the single _vocero_; but it is a faint affair in comparison with the volume and sound of the funeral chorus. Schoolcraft’s evidence all runs this way. “Choruses,” says Mr. Fletcher,[589] “are about all the Indians sing.” Carver,[590] to be sure, like the other travellers, tells of a mother who seemed to improvise a song of lament over her dead child at the time when it was laid among the branches; but he is emphatic about the chorus, and calls it “a not unpleasing but savage harmony.” A recent writer,[591] noting the monotonous choral songs at funerals, thinks “these chants may no doubt occasionally have been simply wailing or mourning ejaculation.” As one comes to lower levels of culture, among the Patagonians, for example, and the interior tribes of Africa, mere choral iteration of monotonous sounds and beating the ground with the feet—perhaps not so much “to keep off the evil one”[592] as to find the communal consent—are the prevailing characteristics of the _vocero_. The funeral dance of the Latuka, which Baker saw,[593] really comes to this; while the feathers, the bells, the horns, are easily recognized as lendings of an incipient culture, and teach the plain lesson that the state of the African savage is not to be transferred outright to primitive man. Indeed, it is quite evident that such perfect consent of communal voice and step as was shown by the Botocudos may be confused and broken in what one must call higher stages of culture,—for example, that dance of the Latuka. In Nubia Miss Edwards[594] saw a ceremony, mainly dance, at the grave of a member of the tribe, which seemed to her artificial in the extreme. “The lamentation itself is a definite musical phrase executed by women who, beginning on a high note, proceed down the scale in third-tones to the lower octave or even the twelfth. It is taught, like the _zaghareet_, or cry of joy, by mothers to their young daughters in their earliest years.” It is only when the historian looks at all this evidence of savage dance and cry, of feminine song and choral response, of refrain passing into rite and myth, of detached and artistic lament, and when he applies to it the evolutionary test, the comparative and historical test, that it lies in true perspective and allows him to draw some definite conclusion about one at least of the beginnings of poetry. The _vocero_ began as communal wailing, horde or clan or house mourning the brother and inmate in rhythmic cries to the cadence of the dance; with new domestic ties of blood, in which of course the mother and sister are supreme,[595] these two stand out as singers of the solitary _vocero_ to which the crowd makes answer in refrain. The inevitable sundering of individual and chorus now makes headway, the former passing into literature, the latter, dropping its concomitant dance and surviving as refrain, dies slowly out in all save a few isolated communities, and in all recorded verse except here and there a chanted dirge. But in each of these diverging fortunes, as in the earliest, so in the last estate of the _vocero_, in elegy, threnody, ode, one common trait abides; and everywhere it echoes the insistent voice of repetition.[596] As an example of this repetition, as well as of the _vocero_ in its earlier stage, we may conclude with an iterated verse sung by a negro woman, once a slave, who still lived with her master’s family in the South.[597] She had just buried her husband, but went about her tasks as usual and waited upon the children of the house. Suddenly, however, in their presence, and to their great fright, she burst out with these words,—

O dem ropes dat let him down!

and continued to sing them without ceasing, in a strange crooning way, the better part of an hour, and at intervals during some days. It were to consider too curiously, perhaps, if one should compare this crude case of “vision” with certain forms of poetry that bear a similar relation to the original song of grief.

So much for the _vocero_. It has led us from the ballads back to that ethnological evidence making so strongly, in diction as in rhythm, for the primitive note of iteration, for the fundamental element which marks the communal origin of poetry, precisely as variation has marked its individual and artistic course. Repetition of sounds, when joined with act of labour, with march or dance, with strong emotion of a festal or communal kind, made possible the perception of consent, or, to speak with Professor Baldwin Brown, of order. It begets this sense of order in other arts; repetition of a certain kind of line on a jar made a rhythm of decoration, just as a series of similar groups of words, of steps, made poetry and dance. How important repetition must have been in early poetry, and in any unrecorded verse, is clear when one reflects that the invention of writing turned poetry from an art wholly of time and succession to an art half plastic; we see the line, the stanza, nowadays, and repetition is an impertinence in poetry, because hearing has become a secondary and imagined process. The æsthetic value of repetition in primitive verse gets a new aspect when one considers

Wie das Wort so wichtig dort war,
Weil es ein gesprochen Wort war;

although that other protest is right enough for one who has only modern poetry in view:—

Im Anfang war das Wort?...
Ich kann das Wort so hoch unmöglich schätzen.

For repetition as the main element in savage poetry it is useless to spread out evidence; no one denies the fact, and ethnology is full of it. From surviving incremental repetition, as in the _Kalevala_ and in the ballads, one passes back, with the increment steadily diminishing, to outright and unrelieved iteration. The Africans have songs, some of them known as “national,” which consist of a single word, arranged in rude rhythmic groups, repeated for hours; and they get as much satisfaction from it as presumably those Ephesians got out of their own vehement and repeated cry. Lery and Lescarbot heard these songs of an iterated word. Lafitau[598] says that Father Marquette saw Indians dance the calumet dance, and was surprised “that the slave in singing said nothing but the single word _Alleluia_,”—of course an accidental coincidence of sounds,—“pronouncing the _u_ after the Italian fashion, and dividing the word into two parts.” The iterated word in primitive song has its meaning somewhere, but often shades back into an inarticulate sound, and shades forward into a traditional and unintelligible cry, mere relief of emotion. Perhaps words of this sort went with the “detestable air” which Mary Shelley heard at the _festas_ near her house in Italy.[599] The countryfolk, “like wild savages, ... in different bands, the sexes always separate, pass the whole night in dancing on the sands close to our door, running into the sea, then back again, all the time yelling one detestable air at the top of their voices,—the most detestable air in the world.” The favourite song of the Botocudos, their lyric mainstay, was just _Kălăuīā ahā́_, repeated indefinitely. The chorus of Indian war-songs, in North America, “consists for the most part of traditionary monosyllables which appear to admit often of transposition, and the utterance of which, at least, is so managed as to permit the words to be sung in strains to suit the music and dance.”[600] Dr. Brinton, in a summary of the characteristics of American aboriginal poetry,[601]—which was always sung,—noting that repetition is the groundwork, says that this element of iteration has two forms: a verse is sung repeatedly, which of course makes some statement, or there is a repeated refrain; but this refrain is wholly interjectional and meaningless. The Fuegians often sing not so much as a word, but only a syllable repeated forever. Progress is in the text, and by the individual; communal reminiscence is in the refrain: it is clear, then, that the refrain is the original “poem,” and to the refrain one must look for an idea of beginnings. A. W. Schlegel[602] conjectured that the earliest forms of lyric poetry were due to an “effort of the human heart to express a feeling or mood and to give it permanence by tone and rhythm,” this effort resulting at first “in simple words and interjections often repeated.” These are kept in the chorus or refrain; incremental repetition, as was shown above, works its way in the text. The chorus, to be sure, rises soon to the dignity of a coherent sentence; but its communal and retrograde force still is strong, and it insists on naked repetition, while individual singers cherish the increment. Miss Kingsley[603] heard the Bubis sing in chorus over and over for hours this verse and nothing more,—

The shark bites the Bubi’s hand.

A more advanced stage is seen in the cautious but distinct incremental repetition of a singer among the North American Indians; we quote from Schoolcraft:[604]—

Ningah peendegay aindahyaig:
We he heway ...[605]

That is, “I will walk into somebody’s home.” The following words proceed very cautiously. “The composer appears to commence with delicacy ... singing that he would walk into some indefinite home. The next line implies that he will walk into his or her home. In the third line ... he will walk into her home during some night. He then informs her that he will walk into her dwelling during the winter. In the fifth line”—it is really a stanza, with that eternal chorus—“he becomes decisive and bold, and says he will walk into her lodge this night.” So, too, the warrior sings:[606]—

I will kill, I will kill,
The Americans I will kill!

But the repeated air of that “cereal chorus,”[607] when a girl gets a crooked ear at the husking, has the stricter note:—

Wagemin, wagemin,
Paimosaid:
Wagemin, wagemin,
Paimosaid.

The work of developing poetry from a rhythmic chaos of wild and repeated cries up to a chorus of this kind was a communal achievement; art is responsible for increment and variation. Communal consent in rhythm caused the repetition of more or less articulate sounds, and so developed that most important element in primitive speech now known as emphasis. Repetition, which is modern emphasis in sections, marks the event or sensation which it records as something out of the common, holds it in the ear and before the mind as something to note and to keep noting, and so makes for memory, not idly called the mother of the muses, while it heightens the actual emotional state. Just as certain early efforts of plastic art expressed great wisdom by several heads, great strength by a number of hands, great fecundity by many breasts, so early man by the iteration of a word gave it poetic force; a better art seeks perfection of the single feature, and fitness of the single word. It has been shown already how poetry made a gain when repetition of a certain number of sounds gave ease to the instinct for harmony, and a yet greater gain when the regular recurrence of a louder sound or a longer sound satisfied the craving for finer distinctions;[608] it has been shown how the mere zeal of repetition was crossed by increment and variation, until the oldest element of poetry was made superfluous in the plainer form and was almost utterly driven out of diction, with no refuge but rhythm and certain forms of lyric sacred and profane. In this plain and outright form of repeated words, however, it lingered long in ballads, in festal rites, and of course among the savages; it is in the refrain, therefore, that one can still find some hints of the actual beginnings of poetry. The refrain has been touched incidentally in the treatment of repetition; it is now to be considered for itself.[609] Important as it is in ballads, the refrain has even weightier meanings when studied in what may be called the occasional poetry of the people.

The refrain, which in its communal function survives as repetition pure and simple practised by the throng, and in its artistic function has come to be the means of marking off a strophe or stanza, is really the discredited and impoverished heir of that choral song which by general consent stands at the beginning of all poetry. This choral song, under the influence of art and the reflecting, remembering, individual mind, was developed into such forms of epic, drama, lyric, as meet us, more or less divested of communal traits and conditions, on the threshold of every national literature. Greek tragedy is a well-known case in point. The refrain, however, is not a development but a survival,[610] so far, at least, as communal conditions are involved; and even in ballads what is called the refrain or the burden is a slowly yielding communal element fighting hopelessly against invading elements of art. In other words, as the ballad recedes into primitive conditions, the refrain grows more and more insistent, so that for the earliest form of the ballad, now nowhere to be found, but easy to reconstruct by the help of an evident evolutionary curve, one must assume not the refrain as such, but rather choral song outright. Different altogether from this communal survival is the artistic use of the refrain. The extreme of art and often of artifice is reached in those forms of verse which were developed out of the older minstrelsy of France, and are known as _ballade_, _rondel_, _triolet_, _chant royal_, with a refrain as their distinguishing feature; it is conceded, however, that in the first instance this refrain was everywhere taken from popular song.[611] Learned poetry of the Middle Ages,[612] to be sure, imitated not the vernacular refrain, but the refrain of classical verse; this, however, in its turn had been taken from the poetry of the people, and, whether one considers the _Hymen, O Hymenaee_ of Catullus,[613] or the later _Cras amet qui nunqnam amavit_, which trips so featly through the _Pervigilium Veneris_[614] and keeps such true step with the popular rhythm of its stanzas, is at no great remove from communal song.

But refrains of artistic poetry are of subordinate interest for our study of primitive verse; and it is clear that all investigations which neglect the older and more popular phases, which neglect the primitive choral song and the primitive communal conditions, can lead to no valid conclusions about the refrain. It is something, of course, when Bujeaud explains this or that refrain of a modern song as imitated from sounds of some musical instrument, or taken from the _argot_ of the streets;[615] but when Rosières[616] undertakes to tell the whole story of the refrain, and settle its origins beyond doubt, saying now that it “springs from the periodic return of full sounds,” now that it is a _tra-la-la_ to take the place of musical instruments, now that it is “a little poem stuck in all the fissures of a big poem,” and now, with a passing recognition of communal conditions, but with sufficient vagueness, that it voices popular song, then, indeed, one feels the vanity of dogmatizing to the full.[617] The need of comparative, historical, and genetic study is also evident in a similar essay on the refrain in Middle High German. Freericks[618] regards the original refrain not as repetition of the words of a singer but as an expression of sentiment which they evoke, coming back in cries of sorrow or of joy. “When utterances of this sort continually interrupt the song, there is the refrain in its simplest form.” So too Minor,[619] in his book on German metres, calls the refrain “the original cry of the throng in answer to the song of the singer.” Against all this, Dr. R. M. Meyer, in two essays,[620] makes emphatic and successful protest. With an eye on conditions and not on theory, Meyer shows the refrain to belong to the oldest poetry of man,—inarticulate cries at first, in rhythmic sequence, to express fear, wonder, grief, affection. The refrain, for example, is the original part of a threnody, as we have seen very plainly in our study of the _vocero_; in short, so far from being an aftergrowth of communal song, this refrain is declared by Dr. Meyer to be the very root of the matter. With more attention to choral song in the horde or clan, Posnett has come closer to the facts than Meyer, who failed to appreciate all the communal conditions of such early verse; for while Meyer referred to inarticulate cries as a beginning of the refrain, it is evident that these immediately formed the chorus, and that the refrain is rather survival and deputy of this old chorus than the chorus outright. The refrain, in other words, allows one to feel one’s way back to the choral song of the horde,[621] but is not to be transferred to those primitive times even in its unintelligible and inarticulate forms. To make this clear, we must study the refrain in its various communal survivals.

Records of early literature and early religion show the refrain in its original guise as a part of the choral song, and it echoes audibly the steps of the dance. Nowhere is this echo more insistent than in that hymn of the Arval brothers, sung, of course, with a dance that was confined to the priests, and already come a long way from the shouting and leaping throng of primitive time; nevertheless, as a hymn used in processions about the fields, it is to be connected with the survivals of similar rites and the songs still heard from European peasants at the harvest-home. In the inscription which preserves it, each verse, except the last, is given thrice.[622] A free translation[623] follows:—

Help us, O Lares, help us, Lares, help us!
And thou, O Marmar, suffer not
Fell plague and ruin’s rot
Our folk to devastate.
Be satiate, O fierce Mars, be satiate!
Leap o’er the threshold! Halt! now beat the ground!
Be satiate, O fierce Mars, be satiate!
Leap o’er the threshold! Halt! now beat the ground!
Be satiate, O fierce Mars, be satiate!
Leap o’er the threshold! Halt! now beat the ground!
Call to your aid the heroes all, call in alternate strain;
Call, call the heroes all.
Call to your aid the heroes all, call in alternate strain.
Help us, O Marmar, help us, Marmar, help us!
Bound high in solemn measure, bound and bound again,
Bound high and bound again![624]

Refrain and iteration are here in thrall to religious ceremony, and the priest has laid hands upon the rough material of the throng; but the throng is present, takes part,—even if, in later time, by deputies,—and invention is at a minimum, appearing only in its regulative, and not in its originating force. It is easy to see how question and answer, strophe and antistrophe, are simply a development and division out of the crowd with one voice, as in the Greek chorus. So, too, in an Assyrian hymn:[625]—

Who is sublime in the skies?
Thou alone, thou art sublime.
Who is sublime upon earth?
Thou alone, thou art sublime.

The Hebrew psalms[626] show very clearly a more or less artistic use of the refrain sung under congregational and therefore to some extent communal conditions.[627] These communal conditions can be guessed in their older and simpler form from such an account as is given of David and his dancing before the ark, when he “and all the house of Israel brought up the ark of the Lord with shouting and with the sound of the trumpet”;[628] the personal song detached itself from the rhythmic shouts of the dancing or marching multitude precisely as the song of the wife and sister over their dead came out clearer and clearer from the wailings of the clan. So, if D. H. Müller be right, following in the path marked by Lowth, the form of Hebrew prophecy was at first choral, then was divided into strophe and antistrophe, yielding in time to an impassioned solo of the prophet himself. In any case, this single prophet, in historical perspective, lapses into the throng, into those “prophetic hordes” which Budde compares with modern Dervishes, “raving bands” now forgotten or dimly seen in the background of a stage where noble individuals like Amos, still in close touch with the people, play the chief part, and hold the conspicuous place.[629] As Amos and his brother prophets yield to the later guild whose prophecies were written, so one goes behind Amos to the “bands,” to communal prophecy, to the repeated shouts and choral exhortation, and so to the festal horde of all early religious rites. The backward course would be from a prophecy written to be read, to the chanted blessing or imprecation of the seer; thence to a singing and shouting band under the leadership of one man, with constant refrain; and at last to the shouting and dancing of purely communal excitement, the real chorus. Moses and the children of Israel “sang a song unto the Lord, saying, I[630] will sing unto the Lord.... And Miriam the prophetess ... took a timbrel in her hand, and all the women went out after her with timbrels and with dances. And Miriam _answered_ them, Sing ye to the Lord.” Here is certainly no premeditated verse; and it must be borne in mind that refrains, except where they have a sacred tradition behind them and are kept up by the priests, as in the Arval “minutes,” easily drop from the record. Oral tradition, on the other hand, is fain to hold fast to all these vain repetitions; they are the salt of the thing. Now and then an unmistakable refrain is preserved. “And it came to pass as they came, when David returned from the slaughter of the Philistines, that the women came out of all the cities of Israel, _singing and dancing_, to meet King Saul, with timbrels, with joy, and with instruments of music. _And the women sang one to another in their play_, and said:—

“Saul hath slain his thousands,
And David his tens of thousands.”[631]

That women in all nations and at certain stages of culture make songs of triumph like this, as they dance and sing, is known to the most careless reader; one or two chorals, strangely similar to these songs of the Hebrew women, may be noted from mediæval Europe. Now it is the singing of Gothic songs of welcome by those maidens who come from their village, as the women of Israel from their cities, to meet and greet Attila,[632] dancing as they sing. So the daughter of Jephtha greeted her sire with the singing and dancing maidens; and so in Cashmere a stranger is still met by the women and girls of a village, who form a half circle at the first house where he comes, join their arms, and sing eulogies of him, dancing to the tune of the verse. Malays and even Africans do the same.[633] Again, it is in the seventh century, and an obscure saint, Faro by name, has won the gratitude of a community; straightway a song is made and sung “by the women as they dance and clap their hands.”[634] It was not often that a saint’s name lent grace to these songs of the women and saved them from clerical wrath; the decrees of councils, the letters of bishops, refer perpetually to the wicked verses and diabolical dances in which maids and even matrons indulged at the very doors of the church. Sometimes, however, national glory covered the shame. In the chronicle of Fabyan,[635] who is here telling no lies, it is said that after Bannockburn songs were made and sung with a refrain “in daunces, in the carols of the maidens and minstrels of Scotland, to the reproofe and disdaine of Englishmen”; and Barbour,[636] mentioning a fight in Eskdale where fifty Scots defeated three hundred English under Sir Andrew Harcla, says he will not go into details, seeing that any one who likes may hear—

Young wemen, quhen thai will play,
Syng it emang thame ilke day.

One is even fain to believe that Layamon[637] was thinking of the women when he said that after a treaty of peace,

Tha weoren in thissen lande blisfulle songes.