Chapter V: The Differencing Elements of Communal Poetry (5)

Most stubborn, of course, is this converted or Christian survival, and almost as stubborn the custom of the village and of remote agricultural communities; such a procession as Coussemaker[753] describes, popular throughout Flanders and Brabant, with a fixed refrain, held its place even in the cities. Occasionally Church and State were opposed;[754] a proclamation of Henry VIII forbade processions “with songes and dances from house to house,” and even carols were forbidden by act of Parliament in Scotland. Wakes[755] were either abolished, or else passed into that curious communal revival, the love-feast and the watch-meeting of Methodists. But the communal song and procession are fast dying out, and the new century will hear little of them; although early in the old century the Christmas days[756] heard many a shouting throng, now with cries of _an guy_, now _gut heil_, now _hogmenay trololay, give us your white bread and none of your gray_! and whatever other etymological puzzles the scanty records can show. These fragments of festal song are too far gone in corruption for profitable use. Aubrey[757] felt the lapse, and made such _memoranda_ as these: “get the Christmas caroll and the wasselling song;” “get the song which is sung in the ox-house when they wassell the oxen,” that is, with echo of an old refrain, where they drink “to the ox with the crumpled horne that treads out the corne”; and he has noted a few of these songs. The civil wars, he thinks, made an end of these old customs; “warres doe not only extinguish Religion and Lawes, but Superstition; and no suffimen is a greater fugator of Phantosmes than gunpowder.” But peace has its victories of this sort. Not long ago the procession about village and parish boundaries was common enough; the whole community took part in this festal affair, and all sense as of an individual purpose or individual ownership was laid aside. Shout, dance, song, banquet, even directly ceremonial acts, were the concern of a homogeneous throng, “our village” in strictest communal sense. On the march—for example, the boundary march at Hamelin, in the late autumn,—rose traditional songs, varied by noise of every sort; and at the feast which followed, gentle and simple joined hands in the dance, until, with recent innovations, the gentry withdrew, became mere onlookers, and at last left the old rite to fall, like most communal traditions, into a shabby, vulgar, discredited uproar of the lower classes, a thing common and unclean. A quite similar case of degeneration is quoted by Brand from the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ for June, 1790, as going on at Helstone in Cornwall.[758] But where the prosperity of crop and barn is in question, the rites are more stubborn and hold their ground. This Helstone song welcomes summer; but before that was sung, processions of all kinds were wont to go about the fields, and in 1868 what the _Times_ newspaper called a “ritualistic revival” came off in Lancashire, priest and choir making a progress through the fields with cross and banners, and singing as they went. Rogation week is still known as gang-week.[759] In older times the community itself was priest and choir; the cases are plentiful and may be read in Brand’s account of “parochial perambulations.” Then there is the song of bringing home the May,[760] the dance and song about the Maypole, with material and survival beyond one’s compass; enough to let them echo in the verses put by Nash into his chaotic but pretty play, where the clowns and maids sing as they dance:—

Trip and goe, heave and hoe,
Up and down, to and fro;
From the town to the grove
Two and two let us rove.
A-maying, a-playing:
Love hath no gainsaying;
So merrily trip and go.[761]

The voices of the real maying folk are here, and the steps, lightly touched by art in the transfer to the play; in that Furry-Day Song at Helstone, with its opening about Robin Hood and Little John, there is a rougher but less effective refrain:—

With ha-lau-tow, rumble O!
For we were up as soon as any day O!
And for to fetch the summer home,[762]
The summer and the May O!
For summer is a-come O!
And winter is a-gone O!

What the poet can do with a fragment of communal song, with a heart full of communal sympathy, and with that final touch of art and individual reflection, may be felt by any one who will read in the echo of this rough old chorus those exquisite verses of Herrick to Corinna.

Songs that may pass as communal drama hold something of this old refrain of labour; so, for example, in the flytings of winter with summer or with spring,[763] which seem to go back in England to times before the conquest. A refrain, with change of “summer” to “winter” in alternate stanzas, runs through a ballad printed by Uhland:[764]—

Alle ir herren mein,
Der Sommer ist fein!

Another refrain is sung “by all the youth,” when a mock fight between the two is ended, and winter lies at jocund summer’s feet:—

Stab aus, stab aus,
Stecht dem Winter die Augen aus!

In the strife by deputy,[765] owl appearing for Hiems, and cuckoo for Ver, there is the call of the bird for refrain; or else it is holly for summer and ivy for winter, a chorus,[766] said to have been written down in Henry VI’s time, running—

Nay, Ivy, nay,
Hyt shal not be, iwys;
Let Holy hafe the maystry
As the maner ys.[767]

These flytings came to be extraordinarily popular, and it is hard to draw a line between the _volkspoesie_ and the _volksthümliche_; learned allegory, which was early on the ground, has the mark of Cain upon it, and cannot be missed. Probably Böckel[768] is right in looking on the winter and summer songs as originally communal, with those dialogues between soul and body, which one finds in nearly every literature of Europe, as a learned and allegorical imitation; a combination of the two kinds is not unusual.[769] So one passes to all manner of debates,[770]—riches and poverty, wine and water, peasant and noble, priest and knight, down to Burns’s _Twa Dogs_; but it is the old communal sap that keeps holly and ivy green, and an old communal rite, the driving out of winter or of death, lingers in the verses which German children still sing to the dance:[771]—

Weir alle, weir alle, weir kumma raus,
Weir brenge enk’n Tod hinaus;
Der Summa is wieder kumme,
Willkummen, lieber Summe![772]

Refrain and chorus of labour among savages have been noted here and there in the foregoing pages; to collect them to any extent would be useless. They are found everywhere, and show that stage of development at which the repetition of a single sentence, often of a single word, affords unmeasured delight or ease. Individual singing is almost unknown in many savage tribes,[773] and the refrain in its function as deputy of the older chorus, is less common than the chorus itself.[774] Where the savage is still mainly a hunter, mainly a warrior, the refrain is insistent whenever a connected bit of description breaks away from the choral song, as if artistic poetry could not yet walk by itself; and where he has begun to till the soil, or even merely to gather plants and fruits, there is the chorus and there is the refrain of a rude harvest-home. For the hunter and warrior we may quote Heckewelder’s account.[775] “Their songs are by no means inharmonious. They sing in chorus; first the men and then the women. At times the women join in the general song, or repeat the strain which the men have just finished. It seems like two parties singing in questions and answers, and is upon the whole very agreeable and enlivening.... The singing always begins by one person only, but others soon fall in successively, until the general chorus begins, the drum beating all the while to mark the time.” Their war-dance is described in the familiar terms; but Heckewelder adds a more interesting account of the feast which under agricultural conditions would be a harvest-home. “After returning from a successful expedition,” he says, “a dance of thanksgiving is always performed.... It is accompanied with singing and choruses, in which the women join.... At the end of every song, the scalp-yell is shouted as many times as there have been scalps taken from the enemy.” As to the rhythm, Heckewelder makes a statement much clearer than the accounts given in Schoolcraft’s question and answer, for he does not undertake to express Indian metres in terms of civilized poetry, but simply says that “their songs ... are sung in short sentences, not without some kind of measure harmonious to an Indian ear.”

These Indians, however, were not in the absolutely primitive stage, and the artist had elaborated dance, speech, song; in short, like European peasants of isolated communities a century ago, the redskin was at that point of poetical development where improvisation is a general gift, and every one is expected to compose his bit of song, leaning, of course, on the chorus, on refrain and repetition, and on those traditional phrases which even more than modern speech realized Schiller’s lines about the poet:—

Weil dir ein Vers gelingt in einer gebildeten Sprache
Die für dich dichtet und denkt, glaubst du schon
Dichter zu sein?

“The Indians also meet,” says Heckewelder, “for the purpose of recounting their warlike exploits, which is done in a kind of half-singing or recitative ... the drum beating all the while.... After each has made a short recital in his turn, they begin again in the same order, and so continue going the rounds, in a kind of alternate chaunting, until every one has concluded.” It is easy to see that while the chorus of war is an eminently communal performance, asking an exactness of consent which makes strongly for rhythm at its best, the conditions of nomadic and belligerent life must breed excellent differences, set apart the great warrior, the great orator, and work in certain ways toward communal disintegration and the triumph of the artist. Agricultural communities, on the other hand, foster the choral and social side of poetry, and discourage individual feats. So even with the Indians; witness that “cereal chorus,” as Schoolcraft calls it,[776] at the corn-husking, sung whenever a crooked ear is found by one of the maidens:—

Crooked ear, crooked ear, walker at night,—

with additions and variations. This crooked ear, _wa-ge-min_, is the symbol of a “thief in the cornfield,” and may have some relationship with Mannhardt’s corn-demon.[777]

Older views of the American savage show him in the warlike guise, to be sure, but with poetry overwhelmingly choral. Lafitau,[778] who says that commerce with the white man has materially changed the savage’s customs, is determined to paint him in his unspoiled state. During an eclipse, for example, all the tribe dance in a peculiar manner, filling the air with lugubrious cries; that rhythm is in them, though it is no song in Lafitau’s ear, is proved by the dance, which, of course, compels a rhythm, and by that picture of the girl who shakes pebbles in a calabash, “trying meanwhile to make her rough voice accord with this importunate jingle.”[779] Singing and dancing are the chief features of Indian social life, and constitute the main charm of the life to come; improvised songs, even speeches, occur, but general singing and dancing make the background of their poetry and fill their festivals.[780] Everybody improvises, and has his special song,—a trait noted among the Eskimo; the dancers always sing, and apparently the singers always dance; the verse is measured, but has no rime, and individual songs are always supported by an accompanying _he! he!_ in cadence from the throng, a sort of burden. Dramatic songs of war are common; and Lafitau gives a case marvellously like that Faroe ballad of the luckless fisherman, with satirist and victim in full view, although here the latter is passive, and is often forced by the laughter and scorn of the tribe to break away and hide his head in shame.[781] Song-duels, too, as among the Eskimo, are frequent, with throwing of ashes, which makes Lafitau call on Athenæus for a parallel among the ancient Greeks. But, after all, what sticks in Lafitau’s mind about Indian dances is the fury of them and that wild _he! he!_ which gave them cadence, but which often “made the whole village tremble and shake.” The war-dance is described in terms familiar to the reader of later accounts.

Lery gives an older story, but in the same spirit as that found in Lafitau. Of great interest is the Huguenot’s account[782] of a festivity which he and one Jacques Rousseau saw and heard performed by five or six hundred savages in a certain village. The men retired into one house, the women to another; Lery and his friend were shut in with the women, about two hundred in all. From the house of the men came a low murmur, like that of folk at prayers; and the women, pricking their ears, huddled together in great excitement. Then the noise grew in volume, and the men could be heard singing in concert, and often repeating their interjection, _he, he, he, he_; the women now began to reply in kind, crying, _he, he, he, he_, for more than a quarter-hour, leaping, meanwhile, and foaming at the mouth, till it was quite plain to Lery that the devil was entering into them. But this was not all. From another house a mob of children now tuned the hallowed quire; and the Huguenot, despite his year and a half in those parts, is free to say he felt a desire to be “en nostre Fort,” doubting the sequel of all this coil. Suddenly the women and children were quiet; and Lery could now hear the men singing and shouting “_d’un accord merveilleux_,” so that these “sweet and more gracious sounds” heartened him to go near the house of the men. He made a hole in the soft wall and looked in; then, with two friends, he went inside, saw the dance, and heard the songs, which ran on without stop. All the men stood in a close circle, but without clasping hands or stirring from the place, bent forward, moving only the leg and the right foot, each having his right hand on his buttocks, the arm and left hand hanging, and so danced and sang. It seems to have been a communal dance, like that of the Botocudos, save that certain priests—_caraïbes_—richly arrayed, holding in their hands “little rattles or bells made of a fruit bigger than an ostrich egg,” had evidently extraordinary powers. There is a remarkable picture by way of illustration,[783] showing the naked dancer, bent over, as described, with a priest behind him, a parrot on a perch just above the dancer’s shoulder, and a monkey at his feet,—these doubtless an exuberance of the artist.

The social foundation, the communal dance, the incessant refrain, the festal excitement, are here plain outcome of primitive conditions in survival; the priest, and the ritual functions which are left to one’s guessing, show that mingling of ceremonial tradition and art which is bound to spring up with even savage culture. Despite this mingling, however, the overwhelming characteristic of the whole affair is communal, and the songs are in close tether to the refrain. An excellent summary of American savage songs and American savage poetry in general has been already quoted in part from a paper by Dr. Brinton,[784] and may be used here as a conclusion of the whole matter. Repetition is the groundwork of this poetry; it is always sung; it has no rhythm,—no metre, that is,—no alliteration, but depends on two kinds of repetition. Either one verse is repeated indefinitely, or a refrain is used. “The refrain is usually interjectional and wholly meaningless; and the verses are often repeated without alteration four or five times ever.” This is the case with Eskimo poetry. Now and then, each line “is followed by an interjectional burden.” A little ballad may be quoted from Dr. Brinton’s paper[785] to show how events passed into poetry, without forming what could be called in any sense narrative or epic verse. About the year 1820, the Pawnees captured a girl and put her to the torture; but a Pawnee brave, of generous vein, made a daring rescue and flight. After three days he came back; and as the thing was so mad, it was counted inspiration, and no one harmed him. Whereupon this song was sung:—

Well he foretold this,
Well he foretold this,
Yes, he foretold this,
I, Pitale-Sharu,[786]
Am arrived here.
Well he foretold this,
Yes, he foretold this;
I, Pitale-Sharu,[786]
Am arrived here,—

and in this song, leaning so hard on the event, so bare of statement, so woven in with the life of the actual day that lapse even of a year or so must have brought need to its hearers to be edified by the margent,[787] so dependent on the refrain, so suggestive of an accompanying dance and of gestures to make the little drama real, it is not unfair to say that one has at least some of those factors which went to make the beginnings of poetry.

The refrain has been considered as the main communal element in songs of labour; here are its functions in communal play, primarily a combination of consenting cries and movements in the festal dance. The song that always went with a dance got its name thence, and was called a ballad; and in the ballad, whether strictly taken as a narrative song, or as the purely lyrical outburst for which there is no better term than folksong, this consenting and cadenced series of words found its main refuge and record. The subject is complicated enough, and asks a volume to put it into any semblance of order; all that can be done here is to group the main facts in their relation to primitive poetry. Unless one holds fast to the idea that refrains represent the original choral song of the mass, one begins to explain them by their modern features, and thus, while accurate as to a certain stage of poetry, falls into error on the historic and genetic side. Ferdinand Wolf[788] gives an admirable account of the refrain, an admirable definition, but with a wrong inference of origins, when he assigns it to the participation of the people or of the congregation in songs which were sung to them by one or more persons on festal occasions, where the throng repeated in chorus single words, verses, whole strophes, or else in pauses of the main song answered the singer with a repeated shout to express their agreement, applause, horror, joy, or grief,—a shout which often lost its real meaning and became a mere conventional choral cry. Hence, says Wolf, it is clear that the refrain is as old as songs of the people.[789] It has been said that this statement is misleading in any genetic sense; it fails to note the growth of the exarch or foresinger into the poet, and to follow the backward curve of evolution to a point where the voice of the foresinger is lost in the voices of the choral throng itself, that raw material from which all poetry has been made. On the other hand, this definition undoubtedly states the facts of the refrain in its mediæval stage of survival from the chorus. In ballads, for example, it is the part taken by the throng in distinction from the part of the minstrel; but there is great difficulty in deciding how the throng actually sang the refrain. Names are no guide; and the terms, chorus, refrain, and burden are used in no exclusive fashion.[790] Probably one will not stray far from facts if one assumes that whenever a ballad came to be sung artistically, as a part-song in the rough, the refrain—_hey-no-nonny, the wind and the rain_, or what not—was really a burden, “the base, foot, or under-song”;[791] as is proved by the scene in _Much Ado_,[792] where no man is in the group to sing this base or foot, and Margaret, wishing a song to which they can dance, cries,—“Clap us into _Light o’ Love_; that goes without a burden: do you sing it, and I’ll dance it.” A passage quoted by many writers from the old play, _The Longer thou Livest the more Foole thou art_, tells how Moros enters, “synging the foote of many songes”; and bits of them follow, an interesting list; a little later, three of the characters are to “beare the foote,” and there is much testing of the key. On the other hand, in Jonson’s _Bartholomew Fair_,[793] there is the same play of getting key and tune, and Cokes “sings the burden” with Nightingale; but this is simply a couplet recurring at the end of each stanza. So Guest[794] defines the burden as “the return of the same words at the close of each stave.” Is this right? For what one most wishes to know, so far as the singing of ballads is concerned, is whether the refrain, constant or intermittent, was sung as the “foot,” that is, contemporaneously with the regular lines, or after them, either as couplet or in alternation,—as in—[795]

It was a knight in Scotland borne,
_Follow, my love, come over the strand_,
Was taken prisoner and left forlorne
_Even by the good Earle of Northumberland_.

Here the fitness of things indicates intermittent singing of the refrain which thus makes a four-line stanza out of a two-line stanza; this is Rosenberg’s theory of the evolution of a ballad strophe.[796] Certainly the refrain came to be used in artistic and late communal poetry to mark off the stanza as the rime marked off the verse. What we now call a chorus, a recurrent stanza, sung after each new stanza, is often a clear case in ballads; for example, in _The Twa Magicians_,[797] that provocative and tuneful cadence of—

O bide, lady, bide,
And aye he bade her bide;
The rusty smith your leman shall be
For a’ your muckle pride.

But there is doubt in regard to the refrain when it is said to be sung as burden, or what Grundtvig calls burden-stem; although there is no doubt that refrains were taken from folksong and chorus and were used as burdens in the ballad.[798] Even the song of labour is used for the refrain:[799]—

Hey with a gay and a grinding, O!

distorted into—

Hey with the gay and the grandeur, O!

The question, as Professor Child acknowledged, is extraordinarily difficult even when narrowed down to ballads. It is discussed at length in an unpublished dissertation by the late Dr. J. H. Boynton, who decides for the simultaneous singing of the ballad strophe and the refrain,[800] and incidentally for the growth of a four-line strophe out of the early strophe of two lines. Icelandic and Faroe ballads show the most archaic elements in the Germanic group, and “a large proportion of their refrains deal directly with the dance.” The “stem” is sung first by the leader of the dance, and is a “lyric in itself,” fit to go “with any ballad.” Now it is clear that whether the ballad and the burden were sung simultaneously, as Boynton believes to have been the case, or alternately, as certain English ballads seem to require, and as Guest assumed in his definition, this question of musical technique cannot affect the inference that the burden, a “lyric in itself” which serves as refrain, is older than the ballad or narrative song, and has most intimate relations with the steps of the dance. In other words, here is the refrain in its passage from a dominant place as choral repetition of the throng, timed to their steps and deriving its existence from these steps and from the expression of festal delight that prompted them, to an ancillary and subordinate place as choral support to the artistic progress of a narrative in song. This agrees with the records of communal song not only under savage conditions but among the homogeneous and unlettered communities of Europe. Neocorus,[801] a priest who writes about the beginning of the seventeenth century, defending that unschooled song which he still heard at the dances and festivities of his countryfolk of the Cimbrian peninsula, and which still flowed so easily, although much of it was lost that ought to have been recorded and sung, describes their communal dance; it is in a fairly advanced stage, of course, and is led by an expert. First, this leader comes forward singing alone, or with a colleague, and begins a ballad. “And when he has sung a verse, he sings no further, but the whole throng, who either know the ballad or else have paid close attention to him, repeat and echo the same verse. And when they have brought it to the point where the leader stopped, he begins again and sings another verse.” This is again repeated. Presently, with the singing thus under way, a leader of the dance comes forward, hat in hand, dances about the room, and invites the whole assembly to join. Facts which have been given already, and facts still to be considered, show clearly that these leaders of song and of dance are deputies of the throng which once danced as a mass to its own choral singing. On the other hand, as Boynton noted, repetition and refrain may take the form of a genuine burden. In Icelandic ballads, the “burden-stem” was often in a different metre from the ballad stanza; it was sung “to support the voice by harmonious notes under the melody,” and “was heard separately only when the voices singing the air stopped.”[802] But in the Faroe isles “the whole stem is sung first, and then repeated as a burden at the end of every verse.” This is certainly more natural than the process, known in Iceland, where a leader sings the incremental stanzas and the throng keeps singing the burden or accompaniment; although a very familiar ballad might so be sung, and the fact would of course indicate either a shifting of interest toward purely musical ends, as in Elizabethan England, or else a devotion on the part of the crowd to the dance proper and the refrain, while the narrative is left to the leader of the song.[803]

Apart from the manner of singing it under later conditions, the refrain in itself, so far as ballads are concerned, is clearly the recurrent verse or verses sung by the festal crowd; and the nearer one comes to the source of a ballad, that is, to the dancing throng, the more insistent and pervasive and dominant this refrain becomes. That is the fact which nobody has ever denied. Jeanroy,[804] in a careful discussion of origins, concludes that refrains are really fragments of song for the dance, now and then, as he hints, of songs of labour; he regards them solely in their function as lines sung at the end of a stanza, and like other scholars thinks they were “originally repeated by the chorus in answer to the soloist.”[805] Elsewhere, however, he grants that this need not have been the universal fashion, and that now and then all the dancers may have sung all the song,[806] a theory fortified by his conjecture that the refrain was once made up of imitative sounds. However, the modern refrain of the dance, best preserved among French and Italians, is a lively lilting couplet, or the like, to which the other riming verses are prefixed in the growth of the actual song, as in the stanzas quoted from Bujeaud:—

Là haut, dessus ces rochettes,
J’entend le haut-bois jouer,
Et vous autr’, jeunes fillettes,
Qui allez au bal danser,
_Allez, allez, tenez vous dreites,
Prenez gard’ de n’ pas tomber_.

The transition is very evident. In another case[807] the leader calls on the dancers to make some cry imitative of animals, which now serves as refrain; but, wherever found, the test of a really popular refrain, as Jeanroy insists, is that it was made for the dance. Read “in the dance,” and communal conditions are even better satisfied.

For the ballad is a song made in the dance, and so by the dance; a mass of those older dance-songs which have come down to us as popular, are later development, are of either aristocratic or learned origin, and simply point back to the communal dance which is the real source of the song. Originally a chorus of all the dancers, it gave vent to the feelings of joy,—in the old _vocero_ dance, of grief,—to the common emotion of the throng. An impulse which makes for this song of the dance is simple delight that the season of dancing is begun:—

A l’entrada del tems clar, _eya_;[808]

and so one may trace these invocations of nature to their later form at the beginning of a narrative song like _Robin Hood and the Monk_. This dancing of the round as an expression of feeling on the part of a throng—dancing in pairs, we know, did not reach Neocorus’s country, for example, until the middle of the sixteenth century—meets one everywhere in mediæval records, and it has died a reluctant death; unless observation be at fault, even children are ceasing to play the old round games common not many years ago, a city of refuge that seemed at one time so secure. But in those mediæval days one danced in throngs on almost any occasion; and impossible as the story may be if taken literally, there is truth enough for our purpose in that account[809] of Leicester’s army in 1173 pausing on a heath, where they “fell to daunce and singe—

“Hoppe, Wylikin, hoppe Wyllikin,
Ingland is thine and mine.”

Many of the folksongs go little beyond this stage of an exhortation to dance, along with a brief comment on the posture of affairs or on the scene. Such an exhortation as refrain for the dance occurs in the old play of the _Four Elements_, with an interesting context. Says Ignorance—

I can you thank; that is done well;
It is pity ye had not a minstrel
For to augment your solace.

and Sensual Desire replies:—

As for minstrel, it maketh no force,[810]
Ye shall see me dance a course
Without a minstrel.

Then he singeth this song and danceth withal, and evermore maketh countenance according to the matter; and all the others answer likewise:—

Dance we, dance we, prance we, prance we.

Ignorance says it “is the best dance without a pipe he has seen this seven year.” But Humanity inclines to think “a kit or taboret” would improve the dance; and the dancers retire to a tavern where they are sure “of one or twain of minstrels that can well play.” Humanity now proposes “to sing some lusty ballad”; but Ignorance is against all such “peevish prick-ear’d song,” and when he is told that prick-song in church pleases God, makes the often-quoted reply that there is no good reason why it is “not as good to say plainly _Give me a spade_, as _Give me a spa, ve, va, ve, va, vade_.” No; if a song is wanted, one of the good old sort will do; and there follows a list not unlike that of Moros in the play or that of Laneham in the letter, with the trifling exception that this runs into a helpless sort of burlesque. “Robin Hood in Barnsdale stood” is probably a genuine first line, and so are some of the other titles. The main thing is that ballad singing is opposed to prick-song and the new fashions generally, and that a refrain from all lusty throats is better for the dance than pipe or minstrel. The refrain in this case is just the old exhortation to dance. This exhortation is common enough in folksong, alone or as a refrain:[811]—

Springe wir den reigen ...
Saute, blonde, ma joli’ blonde ...

but a pure and simple description of the matter in hand, as communal, spontaneous, and immediate an expression in song as may be, and tied to steps of the dance by the shortest of tethers, is doubtless to be found in the game where a circle of children dance round one of their companions in the ring to this refrain:[812]—

Here we go the jingo-ring,
The jingo-ring, the jingo-ring,
Here we go the jingo-ring
About the merry-ma-tanzie.

Let this be a survival of a wedding ceremony, or whatever the learned will, the refrain, sung with each stanza, and suited of course to the action, is typical of the earliest choral stage.[813] Now so soon as narrative takes the place of this description of contemporary and common action, this exhortation of all to all to do something which they are all doing, then memory, deliberation, arrangement, are needed, and an artist comes to the fore. When a ballad records some doing of the folk, when the epic element takes upper hand, it is clear that a process of separation is inevitable. A ballad of this sort may long remain as favourite song for the communal dance. Thus a lively little thing, found in Flanders and in Germany,[814] is of particular interest, first for the narrative which is the old satire on monk and nun, so popular in mediæval times; secondly for the refrain, which is nothing less than a dance about the maypole, keeping the song itself in some places for this festivity; and thirdly for the wandering of the ballad as a whole, from the fifteenth century down to its modern refuge in a children’s game:—

A monk went walking along the strand,—
Hey! ’twas in the May!
He took his sweetheart[815] by the hand,—
Hey! ’twas in the May!
So gay!
Hey! ’twas in the May!

Here the dance has held its own with the story; but in most cases, as the foresinger or exarch takes command, the new verses, beginning as incremental repetition in the dance, grow bolder and learn to walk alone; singing is still a condition, but the dance is only an occasion, not a cause; and finally the crowd passes over the bridge of chorus and refrain into a quite passive state of audience, with intermittent echo and applause, utterly disappearing at last behind the sheets of a broadside.

This, of course, is a conclusion at very long range; and there is an extensive period, a large field, where elements of art mingled freely with the old communal motive. For a single example, take the _Bouquet de Marjolaine_.[816] This is a case of incremental repetition, with the same rimes throughout, and an unvaried refrain or chorus which is knitted to each stanza by this pervading rime. The third line of each stanza forms the opening line of the next stanza, so that the story proceeds slowly but surely to the end. The whole can be gathered from one stanza and its refrain, with addition of the following incremental lines:—

Me promenant dans la plaine,
(Tir’ ton joli bas de laine)
J’ai trouvé un Capitaine.
(Tir’ ton, tir’ ton, tir’ ton bas,
Tir’ ton joli bas de laine,
Car on le verra.)

Then, “il m’a appelé’ vilaine”; “je ne suis point si vilaine;” “le plus jeun’ fils du roi m’aime;” “il m’a donné pour étrenne”—“une bourse d’écus pleine,” “un bouquet de marjolaine;” “je l’ai planté dans la plaine;”—and, for good last, and with that touch of pathos common in these things, despite the gay tone, “s’il fleurit, je serai reine”; and so, with the refrain, an end. Full of communal elements, this song is nevertheless of an artistic type and of an aristocratic origin, an offshot of the _pastourelle_ and its kin; popular enough, of a certain simplicity and beauty, it is not directly communal in its tone; it has gone among the people, and yet, though it was imitated from purely communal refrains, like other and older songs treated so successfully by Jeanroy, it has not come directly from the people. In fact, the communal refrain of the dance is seldom in such independent case as this infectious lilt; when it is not a survival, as in children’s games, its best chance for life is as parasite to a narrative ballad or even to a “lyric of sentiment and reflection,” as anthologies call them. Thus Ten Brink is undoubtedly right when he takes the refrain as old, traditional, communal, and the stanzas as new and artistic, in that pretty English lyric, _Ichot a burde in boure bryht_, which has the refrain at the beginning, as in many Provençal ballads:—

Blow, northern wind,
Send thou me my sweeting!
Blow, northern wind, blow, blow, blow!

Compare this with the artistic refrain of _Alisoun_, from which it differs so widely, and with the refrain of the Cuckoo Song, in its recorded form part of an elaborate composition, but doubtless taken from the “nature” refrain of a dance. The ballads and folksongs of Europe are of course in the transitional stage. They ought to be sung, but many of them may have been recited; they echo the cadence of a dancing throng, and have often timed the dance, though they are separable from such company. It must be borne in mind, however, that many ballads in which one would not now suspect such uses, were employed to regulate the slow steps of a dance. Narrative ballads were in great favour for the purpose; Faroe islanders danced to the stories of Sigurd, and the Russians, whose folksongs are always choral and without instrumental music, dance the _khorovod_ to a narrative song,—in fact, the word means a blended song and dance; while even the Robin Hood ballads, if we may believe the _Complaynt of Scotland_, as well as some ballad of Johnny Armstrong, were sung at the dance of the shepherds. Savages sing narrative poems to the dance, and so do Melanesians.[817] One can therefore understand the statement made by Steenstrup,[818] that every genuine ballad has a refrain, though this may not be recorded; for the refrain is the tie which binds a ballad to its parent dance. As one retraces the path of the ballad, the refrain grows in importance, slowly pushing the leader or soloist nearer and nearer to the throng, until he is lost in it; and a repetition of cadenced choral cries becomes the main factor of poetry. As every one knows, those cadenced cries were regulated by the dance; and to this important factor in early poetry, already considered under the head of rhythm, we must now turn.

Dancing, most momentary of all the arts, as A. W. Schlegel called it, in Wagner’s words “the most real,” seeing that the whole man is concerned in it, “from head to foot,” with motions and gestures that give it tone, and rhythm that gives it speech,[819] was also the primitive and universal art, the sign of social consent; consenting steps, with mimicry of whatever sort, timed a series of rude cries which expressed the emotion of the moment, and so grew into articulate language. But the song detached itself from dancing long before dancing could shake off the choral cries and the refrain. Among Tasmanians and Australians songs already existed apart from the dance; but there was no dance without a song, and the dances were prevailingly of the whole horde or clan. Survivals of this primitive stage, and the early history of dancing in all quarters of the world, afford good warrant for the conclusion of Böhme;[820] “no dance without singing, and no song without a dance,” is his axiom for earliest times. Moreover, this proof of the connection of song and dance in the primitive horde, a bond which one or two writers have lately tried to sever, but without success, disposes of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s attempt[821] to explain the dance as a modification of the old movement of obeisance.

Dancing is universal among savages; and if a few cases occur which make against this doctrine, one may safely assume, as Ribot does, and even Wallaschek,[822] that they are due to insufficient observation,[823] or else, at the worst, that they belong to tribes with hardly any claims of humanity, degenerates, retrogrades, who have no social order and consequently no dance. Again, the primitive form of the dance is to be found in the choral throng; but it must be borne in mind that even rudest tribes can develop an art of complicated, traditional, and ritual character,[824] which in its turn breeds the solo and the professional artist in dancing. However, the choral dies hard even under civilized conditions; among savages it is prominent everywhere and in full vigour. Waitz,[825] speaking of tribes in the South Seas, says that song there is mainly choral, and dancing, affair of the community as a whole, is as universal as song, often passing into mimicry and a rude drama. Everywhere, too, song is accompanied by dancing, and when women thus dance and sing they clap hands or slap the hip in time with their steps and words, after the manner of their sisters in mediæval Europe. Musical instruments are few. Chamisso noted now and then what he took to be degeneration of song into mere howling; but we know there is a more excellent way to explain these festal and cadenced cries. Dancing is in order at each important moment for the community,—when strangers arrive, when war is imminent, at feasts of every sort. As with these natives of the South Sea, so with other and more savage tribes. It is useless to insist in detail upon the African love of dancing, which goes on every evening and in every village for hours at a time. “The natives of Obbo began their dance by all singing together a wild but pleasant-sounding melody in chorus,[826]” is only one of many descriptions of this favourite communal diversion; but the legends and the complicated artistic dances which exist side by side with the choral song and the communal dance warn one that while primitive ways survive on the Dark Continent, there is a lower stage of song and dance to be found elsewhere. Like the Botocudos in South America, the Australians are on a quite elementary level with regard to dance and song; they attach more importance to the gesture than to the articulate word, so far as the telling of stories or the describing of events is concerned, and they know scarcely any individual performance.[827] Dance and song are of the horde, the clan, as a whole. Choral shouts, refrains which repeat a word or a short phrase indefinitely, and so time the steps of the throng, make the original social art; with the aid of gesture, mimicry of labour, of feats of hunting, this passes into kangaroo-dances, erotic pantomimes, sham fights, and all the rest. Perhaps, as Hirn[828] suggests, the dance of the Weddas, or Veddahs, in Ceylon is as primitive as anything of the kind; although Ehrenreich’s account of the Botocudos[829] shows little if any advance. A spear is stuck into the ground to serve as centre for the ring of dancers, who move with swaying of legs and arms to the cadence of their own singing,—call it rather shouting,—while they keep exact time by slapping the naked stomach.[830] From this communal dance and song, emerges after a while, as in the case of the Botocudos, an individual performer; and it is clear that elaborate dances, such as those given for the benefit of Captain Cook and other foreign visitors, are an outgrowth of this primitive huddling in mass with concert of cries and movements. It is significant that instinct of the clan calls for some concerted dance and song as necessary preface for war or any similar doing of the community as a whole; in long range of development this is the war-dance of our own Indians, often described, where a general chorus serves as background and stimulus alike to the volunteers who step forward singly and promise, in chanted and improvised song that times their steps, deeds of individual valour in the impending fight. So, perhaps, the _gab_ of romance, the _gilp_ or _gilpewide_[831] of Germanic warriors, was originally made not only, as we know it, in the mead hall, but to the chorus of the tribes and with the steps of a dance. At close range, however, and with the foe in sight, it was a communal and general gab, a choral performance; witness the interesting account of Captain Cook.[832] In the first voyage, some four hundred islanders, about to attack the captain and his friends, but hesitating, at length “sung the song of defiance and began to dance.” Such was a particular case; and in his general statement, Cook says that New Zealanders, before they begin the onset, “join in a war-song, to which they all keep the exactest time”; and while he does not mention the dance here, it is evidently implied, for his scattered accounts of skirmish and fight are full of it. A curious case is what would seem to be a war-dance in a boat which was attacking Cook’s ship; as it approached, the savages in the boat varied menaces with peaceful talk, “till, imagining the sailors were afraid of them, they began the war-song and dance, and threw stones on board the ship.” Then Cook goes on: “In the war-dance their motions are numerous, their limbs are distorted ... they shake their darts, brandish their spears ... they accompany this dance with a song, which is sung in concert; every strain ending with a loud and deep sigh. There is an activity and vigour in their dancing which is truly admirable; and their idea of keeping time is such that sixty or eighty paddles will strike at once against the sides of their boats, and make only one report.” Concerted singing, this communal initiative, goes not only before war, but before embassies, messages of peace, greetings, and the like; and the dance is clearly an original prop of this song, now and then retained, but often omitted. In Cook’s last voyage,[833] “a double canoe, in which were twelve men, came towards us. As they drew near the ship, they recited some words in concert, by way of chorus, one of the number first standing up and giving the word before each repetition,”—a “solemn chant,” Cook calls it. Readers of these and other voyages in the South Seas, know how singing rather than speaking takes the foreground of private as well as of tribal life; a chief coming on board the ship hails it with a song to explain his visit, and there is the case of the islander who told in song his story of life aboard an English ship, and, asking the native who had met him what news there was from home, put his excited questions in rhythm and got the equally excited answers in rapid chant. Behind this individual song is the chorus; with the chorus is nearly always the dance; wherever the dance, there is song. Musical instruments the islanders knew, of course,—drums, perhaps, best; but as Cook says[834] of a great dance which was given for him, it did not seem “that the dancers were much assisted by these sounds, _but by a chorus of vocal music, in which all the performers joined at the same time_.”

Indians of the Western continent have the same tale to tell, and it has been told in part already by Lery, Lafitau, and the older travellers. A century and more ago, Carver[835] noted that the savages of North America “usually dance either before or after every meal”;[836] and “they never meet on any public occasion, but this makes a part of the entertainment.... The youth of both sexes amuse themselves in this manner every evening.” At the feasts and other dances, “every man rises in his turn, and moves about with great freedom and boldness, singing, as he does so, the exploits of his ancestors. During this the company, who are seated on the ground in a circle, join with him in making the cadence, by an odd tone, which they utter all together, and which sounds ‘_Heh, heh, heh_.’” This they repeat “with the same violence during the whole of the entertainment.” “The women dance without taking any steps ... but with their feet conjoined, moving by turns their toes and heels.... Let those who join in the dance be ever so numerous, they keep time so exactly with each other that no interruption ensues.”

In recent times the intricate dances, ritual and ceremony which, of course, reach back in far tradition, have been studied and recorded; but this is not a primitive phase of the art,[837] and even among the Moqui and Navajo tribes of New Mexico, where instrumental music is common, now and then the dancers furnish their own music, each one rolling out “an _aw, aw, aw, aw_, in a deep bass tone.”[838] So in ancient Mexico, where civilization of a sort had long held sway, the dances “were almost always accompanied by singing”; this, however, was “adjusted by the beating of instruments.”[839] But this public dance is no longer communal in the old way; ritual of the clan becomes a state religion, while dance and song are not only lifted but expanded. There is a sense of ritual, to be sure, about the dance of a small community, as when among the Bechuanas, to ask a man “what he dances,” is the same as asking to what clan or tribe he belongs, a phrase curiously akin to Gosson’s remark[840] that “to daunce the same round” means to be of the same flock. But all this belongs only to the primitive horde or the late homogeneous community; the dance of such a little clan about their growing crops yielded to traditional and solemn rites, and the spontaneous singing and dancing which Vergil recommends to his farmers[841] is really a more primitive stage of the art than the seemingly older ceremony of the Arval brothers, which had already hardened into ritual and belonged to a close corporation under control of the state. Tribal dances become expiatory and religious acts at a very early stage of culture; it is easy to see that the records would preserve such a dance only when it had lost some of its spontaneous character, and taken on a ritual form. Germanic, Slavic, and Romance peoples have the communal dance surviving as a religious act; and it was one of the hardest tasks for councils and bishops to stop this dancing of the congregation within the church itself. Often they allowed it in a modified form. As a part of ritual, choristers still dance before the altar of the cathedral at Seville; sixteen boys in blue and white form “in two eights,” facing each other, and the priests kneel in a semi-circle round them. Then “an unseen orchestra” begins to play, the boys put on their hats and sing the _coplas_ in honour of the Virgin:—

O mi, O mi amada
Immaculada!—