Chapter V: The Differencing Elements of Communal Poetry (2)

The simple “plot” of this ballad might be wrought into a long romance after the mediæval fashion, might be made a modern drama, a modern short story,—Maupassant tells something of the sort in a pathetic but repulsive sketch; the manner of _Babylon_, however, is all its own, carrying one miles from romance and drama and tale back into the communal past. Two stanzas open with the ballad commonplaces,—ladies in bower, the conventional summons of an outlaw by breaking a branch, pulling a flower, or otherwise disturbing the peace, and his appearance on the scene. Then comes swift action; then the lingering, fascinating incremental repetition; then the crash, and the leap into tragedy. True, the sudden turns and the lack of connecting and explaining passages are less marked than in other ballads, say at the end of _Child Maurice_, where the almost bewildering swiftness, the daring omission, roused Gray to enthusiasm beyond his wont;[435] but the trait is evident enough and strong enough, even here, to show that one is far from the garrulity of the romances,[436] far from the forward-and-back of a Germanic epic. It is not to be explained by any abbreviation in the record. Zell long ago pointed out[437] that this habit of leapings and omissions is characteristic of what may be regarded as the remains of Hellenic popular verse. Like the ballad repetition, which is incremental, the ballad omission is progressive, and has nothing of that strain and doubling which makes Germanic epic, in Ten Brink’s phrase, spend such a deal of movement without getting from the spot. Yet it is chiefly in the incremental repetition that the ballad shows its primitive habit as compared with the merely retrospective repetition of the romances. The ballad stands close to that spontaneous emotion which rises in a throng and relieves itself in a common, obvious, often repeated phrase; it stands close to the event, and hence the abruptness, the process, due to sight at close quarters, of immediate expression. The æsthetic value of repetition is high when interest is held and concentrated upon a single strong situation, as in _Babylon_; its value is low when the action is a trivial sequence of details, as in a Russian ballad quoted by Bistrom:[438] “He set up his linen tent; when he had set it up, he struck fire; when he had struck fire, he kindled [the camp-fire]; when he had kindled, he cooked the porridge; when he had cooked the porridge, he ate it: when he had eaten it, he lay down,”—and so on, in the strain dear to children.[439] Another variety of incremental repetition, which brings one closer to the conditions under which ballads were made, is found in the account of Porthan[440] about the singing of Finnish songs by a leader who improvises, and a second singer, a sort of echo, a dwindled chorus, who joins him and helps to carry the ballad along its way. The leader[441] sings a line; but before he comes to the end of it, his partner catches the idea and joins him in the final measure,[442]—a word or two; then, while the other is silent, this helper repeats the whole line, often with a slight change of words, mainly an adverb or the like thrown in,—“surely,” “in truth,”—and with an even slighter change of tone; then the leader sings another verse, the helper falls in, repeats, and so to the end of the song. The two sit face to face with clasped hands, and round them are the people _arrectis auribus_. It is fair to conjecture that the folk were not always silent hearers, and that the helper is deputy of a choral throng which has come to silence in the enjoyment of a superior art;[443] Porthan admits that all sorts and conditions of Finns were once able to make these ballads, and he goes on to tell of the universal custom of the women to improvise little songs as they grind at the hand-mills. The trick of singing in pairs is not uncommon, and is seen elsewhere upon a historical background of choral song; Castrén says that the Samoyedes improvise their magic songs in the same fashion, a conjurer of the first class beginning the verse, and joined in the final words by the humbler shaman, who then repeats the whole alone. The song consists of but a few words.[444] Similar methods, on a higher plane, are found in Denmark and Iceland. Ethnological evidence, too, is at hand; in Africa, Captain Clapperton heard two singers sing an artless ballad, one doing the verses, the other the refrain.[445] Often two dancers lead a dance.[446] It is only a step, moreover, from the twain with clasped hands, to the two singers of a flyting, Eskimo song duels, strife between Summer and Winter, amœbean verse of all kinds; see, for example, the Carlin and little boy in the Swedish ballad, or Harpkin and Fin in the English,[447] where one verse suggests the reply in the next. From these to the _schnaderhüpfl_, when one after another steps out and sings, and so back to the chorus, as in Lyngbye’s case of the Faroe fisher, is but another easy inference; in short, it is clear, by overwhelming proof, that the individual performers are a survival of the singing, dancing throng with its infinite repetitions and its unending refrain.

Still another form of incremental repetition will occur to the reader as based on old custom but bare of all save the rawest æsthetic ministrations, and nowadays used only for jocose ends. The same line or stanza is sung indefinitely, with the use of a new name, number, fact, in each repetition; or else the repetition is cumulative, a test of memory, somewhat as in “The House that Jack Built.”[448] There is a German student song, still popular, where the names of those present are rimed, one after the other, into a fixed formula; while degenerate and silly verses of one’s youth, nursery songs,[449] counting-out rimes and the like, will occur to one by the dozen, and seem less negligible, get, indeed, an æsthetic lift, when one finds in them distinct hints of some old incantation, some choral song to bless house and field, as well as echoes from the dance and the labour of primitive man. Counting-out rimes in Germany are often epic,[450] with a spice of adventure, thus working into ballad territory; and these, as with children’s games at large, hold to the dance. F. Wolf sunders the dramatic dances of the Catalan peasantry, with lives of saints, battle of Christian and Moor, robber tales, and so on, as their theme, the work of professional singers, from those simple dances of the country folk and of the children, some of which are of the type now under discussion. He gives[451] a pretty little incremental specimen of this latter sort. But labour is also in the game. In Gottschee[452] there is a ballad of a servant maid who served one year and earned a chicken; chicken hatched chickens: served second year and earned a duck; duck stands on big, wide feet, chicken hatches chickens: served a third year and earned a turkey; turkey said _Long Ears_, duck stands, and so on: and then lamb, kid, pig, calf, pony, little man (the husband) who says _Love Me_, and finally “a youngster” who says _Weigh Me_,—and then back through it all to the chicken. This is sung of course by the girl; but from the cumulative song, with more or less refrain, it is an easy step to the choral song of labour, which is naturally incremental. Such is the song[453] of women weeding the millet, which combines the old refrain of labour in the field with the incremental repetition of a hardly coherent ballad. Prettier is that song[454] which the playmates of a bride sing during the weaving of her bridal wreath.

To-day a maiden has been joyous,—
Joyous she now nevermore;
Joyous surely she shall yet be,—
But as maiden nevermore.

To-day a maid has handed garlands,[455]—
Hand them shall she nevermore;
Hand them shall she surely yet,—
But as maiden nevermore.

The third stanza simply puts “binding” for “handing.” Here is the incremental repetition along with the fixed refrain,—not a very difficult communal feat, by the way, and, as in all these cases, getting its rhythm from the work or the dance, its meaning from the event or deed in hand. So, too, when the bride goes away, she is again besung, and the events are occasion of the quite contemporary words; thus, as she is lifted upon the husband’s horse,-

She is seated, she has sobbed!
She has ridden away, she laughed![456]

The better known collections are full of these simple cumulative songs, which it would be superfluous to record. In Algeria women sing an endless song of the sort with fixed refrain and incremental stanza. A combination of the counting-out rime and the song of labour is found in many places, for example, a Gascon ballad[457] sung by women as they wash clothes and beat the linen in cadence; the feature of dropping a number with each new stanza reminds one of those _Ten Little Indians_ of one’s youth:—

Nine are washing the lye,
Nine.
Nine are washing it,
Nine are rubbing it,
Pretty Marion in the shade,
Pretty Marion,—
Let us to the fountain go.

Then “eight are washing,” then seven, and so on, one woman dropping out at each break. Again, soldiers on the march sing the interminable song of increments with a refrain:[458]—

Ma poule a fait un poulet,
_Filons la route, gai, gai,
Filons la route gaiment_.

Ma poule a fait deux poulets ...

Bücher[459] traces all these marching songs back to a primitive form such as one still hears in Africa, where “for hours at a time” the natives on the march keep singing a half-dozen words or phrases in monotonous repetition, and with no increments. The development hence through incremental stanzas up to the Tyrtæan lyric of battle, verses of the _Chanson de Roland_, and so on, is evident enough. Repetition of the incremental and cumulative sorts, moreover, is easily connected with religious rites. “It seems a fair inference,” says Mr. E. B. Tylor,[460] “to think folklore nearest its source where it has its highest place and meaning.” At the end of the book of Passover services used by modern Jews, as Mr. Tylor and others have noted, there is a poem which curiously resembles the nursery tale of the old woman and her pig; the angel of death is dignified enough, and is slain by the Holy One, but cat eating kid, dog biting cat, and so on, are something ludicrous. Mr. Tylor thinks all this the original of the nursery tale itself. Again, in the same book there is a solemn counting poem; one is God, two are the tables of the covenant, and so on up to thirteen, when all is reversed in order back to one. Watchmen’s songs counting the hours will occur to every reader. Germanic heathendom, doubtless, had this counting song in its ceremonial rites;[461] while incremental repetition in the charms, that oldest form of recorded poetry, is often found, witness the highly interesting charm against a stitch in the side, or rheumatism, from an English manuscript of the tenth century;[462] here are not only the recurring line of incantation, and the epic opening usual in charms, but a trace of something like the repetition with increments: “There sat a smith and made a knife,” and again, “six smiths were sitting, warspears working;” why not _caetera desunt_?

Repetition is not an invention and grace of artistic poetry, as the books are fond of saying; it is the most characteristic legacy, barring rhythm, which communal conditions have made to art. Its artistic expression, in which, to borrow Emerson’s phrase, it comes back to the passive throng “with a certain alienated majesty,” no longer the simple iteration of a refrain or an incremental ballad, takes noblest form in tragedy and monody, shading down into artifice, however effective, in Maeterlinck’s _Princesse Maleine_ and _Pelleas et Mélisande_[463] where it almost makes rhythm of the prose, and into clever but legitimate tricks in Molière’s famous _galère_ passage and in his other passage, almost as famous, of the _sans dot_. It is used to give simple effects; probably it constitutes the charm of Hiawatha, as well as of that imitated ballad by Hamilton, the _Braes of Yarrow_, which Pinkerton ill-naturedly called “an eternal jingle.” We may therefore divide poetic iteration into two great classes,—one natural or primitive, which is as much as to say communal, the other artistic, with a No Man’s Land or Siberia whither one banishes the artificial. This artificial iteration of poetic style is perhaps nowhere so insistent as in those interesting but exasperating oddities known as _Greenes Funeralls_,[464] published “contrarie to the author’s expectation.” Of course, the step from art to artifice is not too obvious. Every one knows the smoothness, the fluidity, as Arnold calls it, which Spenser gave to his verse, often by this delicately managed iteration—say in _Astrophel_;[465] Donne softens his roughness with it in many a poem; but it becomes a tiresome trick at R. B.’s hands:—

Ah, could my Muse old Maltaes Poet passe
(If any Muse could passe old Maltaes Poet),
Then should his name be set in shining brasse,
In shining brasse for all the world to show it,[466]

and it grows worse than tiresome in Gabriel Harvey’s variation of the _ubi sunt_ theme:—

Ah, that Sir Humphrey Gilbert should be dead,
Ah, that Sir Philip Sidney should be dead,
Ah, that Sir William Sakevil should be dead,

which is not even humorous. Now it is clear that classical models play a part here. The pastorals of Vergil, the iteration of elegy imitated by Milton at the opening of _Lycidas_, are to be reckoned with; but not only was the throng behind all this, as shall be seen in a study of the _vocero_, not only are the charming iterations and incremental touches in Catullus,[467]—

multi illum pueri, multae optauere puellae ...
nulli illum pueri, nullae optauere puellae ...

along with store of ordinary repetition and a refrain, to be placed where they belong, in an alternating chorus of youths and maidens, with distinctly communal background; but there were cases in early English where the classical influence is slight, and the song of a swaying mass is clearly to be heard:[468]—

Adam lay ibowndyn, bowndyn in a bond,
Fowre thousand wynter thowt he not to long;
And al was for an appil, an appil that he toke,
As clerkes fyndyn wreten in here book.
Ne hadde the appil take ben, the appil taken ben,
Ne hadde neuer our lady aben heauene qwen.

In fact, early literature is full of repetition which suggests a recent transfer from the dancing and singing throng. So even the mediæval clerk[469] had not only Latin jingling in his head, but also songs of the country folk buzzing in his ears; and it is no classical tone, despite the tongue, that sounds in his—

veni, veni, venias,
ne me mori facias,

while repetition takes a more artistic form in the vernacular:[470]—

Come, my darling, come to me!
I am waiting long for thee:
I am waiting long for thee,
Come, my darling, come to me!

Lips so sweet of red-rose grain,
Come and make me well again:
Come and make me well again,
Lips so sweet of red-rose grain!

Incremental repetition, then, as it is found in traditional ballads, lies midway between two extremes, one communal and one artistic. Behind it is the indefinite iteration, unchanged, of primitive song; before it is the repetition of artistic parallelism which is crossed by variation, mainspring of the poetic dialect. Iteration is the spontaneous expression of emotion, and begins in the throng; it lies at the root of all rhythm, cadence, and consent; variation is the assertion of art, of progress, of the individual. These are the two great elements of poetry. Variation could take place in two ways. The communal singer had his stock of communal refrains and the like, derived from tradition of the singing and dancing throng; for communal purposes he could have added his own stanzas, just as Burns did in modern days. There was the chorus:—

Bonnie lassie, will ye go,
Will ye go, will ye go,
Bonnie lassie, will ye go
To the birks of Aberfeldy?

To this, and many a chorus like it, Burns added his own words.[471] But the early artists who worked out the scheme of national poetry went about their task by a different method. Their material was the unchanged repetition, probably in couplets corresponding to the forward-and-back of a dance, either in line, like some children’s games now, or in a half circle, like that dance of the Botocudos. Out of this repetition they made the artistic parallelism found alike in Germanic epic and in Hebrew psalms, as well as the variation which Heinzel has so neatly compared for this same epic and for the Sanskrit hymn. As regards Germanic verse, Dr. R. M. Meyer[472] notes that repetition of words yielded to the necessity, imposed by rigid metrical law, to take a synonym which would rime with the principal word, thus ending in a mass of kennings or verbal variations. It is clear that the strophic ballad is based upon older conditions, as is proved by preceding examples, and by the lack of variation in typical verses such as this, the opening of a pretty dance-song:[473]—

La rauschen, lieb, la rauschen!

The rigid structure of an alliterative verse calls for variation, not repetition, within its limits; variation in the ballads is incremental and close to actual repetition, being forced within a stanza only by the exigencies of rime:—

O where hae ye been, _Lord Randal, my son_,
O where hae ye been, _my handsome young man_?

The refrain, however, could hold to repetition pure and simple, leaving room for an increment of considerable effect at the climax; thus in the same ballad of _Lord Randal_, the refrain

For I’m weary wi’ hunting and fain wad lie down,

turns at the end to—

For I’m sick at the heart and I fain wad lie down.[474]

Doubtless, too, variation began in the singing before it was evident in the record; that change of accent which editors claim for the well-known verses:—

Sigh nó more, ládies, sigh no móre...
Weep nó more, wóeful shépherds, wéep no móre

may have had its counterpart in far older and far ruder verse of the throng. If the earliest form of poetry was the iterated single verse, a statement of a fact, or, in the first instance, a fact stated not formally but by the repetition of words in a rhythmic period which was itself exactly repeated, it is clear that the progress of poesy may have begun by making a proposition of the single verse and then proceeding to add some new elements in the repetition of it. Artistic skill next fell upon the single verse,[475] fixed its cadence, curbed its repetition by syntactic relations, and, as in Germanic poetry, rang the changes on this law of variation. Now it is evident beyond all doubt how great a part incremental repetition must have played, and it is also evident that this can be studied best in a collocation of communal survivals, like the ballads, and primitive survivals, such as are found in savage songs. Let us look first at certain songs which belong between these two classes, then at a form of verse which is found in both, and finally at the ethnological or primitive material.

Radloff[476] collected an admirable series of songs and ballads in southern Siberia. Here are the homogeneous community, the oral and traditional verse, and the slow but sure ruin[477] of both due to importation of Mahometan learning, books and poets; here too are those fashions of making and keeping a song, half communal, half artistic, which yield to the conditions of written poetry. The gregarious song still lingers in chorus and in improvisations; while individual singers are working free from the throng, and are diverting the old broad current of repetition into channels and courses of art. But this individual artist[478] has a very short tether, and he is close to the community not only in fact but in the character of his work. Improvisation is the rule; composition of the deliberate modern sort is almost unknown. Festal throngs, not a poet’s solitude, are the birthplace of poetry; and the folk, if they must listen and may not sing in chorus, choose a pair of singers to compete. “Some one present steps forward and challenges to a flyting. If no one appears in answer, the challenger sings improvised stanzas making fun of the people before him; but if a match is made up, then the two wage their duel in song until one fails to respond, loses the game, and gives a present to his conqueror.” As with the Faroe islanders, so here on the Tartar steppes, and on the slopes of the Altai, if these rival songs show conspicuous merit, they are remembered, repeated, and sung as traditional ballads.[479] Radloff has several instances. A girl who enters such a flyting with a young man named Kosha, now flouts, now praises, and finally—another world-old trick of traditional song—falls into a series of riddles. What was first created,—who was so-and-so’s father,[480]—when do the waters freeze? Kosha answers them all; the girl gives up, and presents him with a coat. Another pretty flyting[481] is also between youth and maid; the girl holds her own until the boy says he has wounded her brother, whereupon she sits down and weeps. In all these, and in the solitary improvisations, there is constant repetition. Two verses of a challenge—all go by quatrains—are repeated in the answer; while in the continuous ballad, song oscillates, as Ten Brink says of this stage in the development of poetry, between memory and improvisation, production and reproduction. The singer has a mass of verses in his head, and puts his own thought only into the third and fourth lines of a quatrain,[482] the first and second coming from the common stock. That is the recurrent passage, the “ballad slang”; but actual repetition, in its incremental phase, is stronger here than in any poetry on record except that of the Finns. A fine example of this repetition and variation is in the _Kangsa Pi_, one of the historic songs;[483] mostly the stanzas are interlaced in pairs. Often the changes are mere emphasis, not progress; for example:—

If I had a white hawk,
He would scream behind me;
If I had relatives on my father’s side,
They would follow behind me.

If I had a blue hawk.
He would scream behind me;
If I had relatives on the Old One’s side,
They would follow behind me.

These changes of colour, variation on hard-and-fast lines, are very frequent and often inappropriate, as with a white horse and a blue horse;[484] one form of the change is not far remote from a Germanic kenning:—

O Myrat mine, Myrat mine,
A _sea_ is coming,—
How will you cross it?
On its _border_ dwells a tribe,—
How will you come through it?

O Myrat mine, Myrat mine,
A _stretch of water_ is coming,—
How will you cross it?
On its _banks_ dwells a tribe,—
How will you come through it?

Thus a mother to her son; his answer is of the same kind; and so back and forth for nineteen stanzas, when the poem closes with two stanzas sung by the son happily returned from war. With this parallelism of form goes a parallelism of thought not unlike the implied simile in poetry of the schools; witness the hawk and the relatives, quoted just above, or these improvised verses:—

What has scattered the golden-seeming leaves?
Is it the white birch? It is indeed!
She whose hair streams down her back,
Is it my wife? It is indeed!

What has scattered the silver-seeming leaves?
Is it the blue birch? It is indeed!
She whose hair streams down her neck,
Is it my betrothed? It is indeed!

This is growing a bit too artistic for comfort; and presently in another song direct simile breaks out:—

As the meadow fire in spring,
Warms this heart of mine;
As the bird that comes in spring,
Implores this eye of mine.

As the fire that burns in autumn,
Burns this heart of mine;
As the bird that comes in autumn,
Mourns this eye of mine.

Improvised or not, these songs are not only of the individual lover, but of the artist, the bard, still close to his throng, to be sure, but with a clear notion of his dignity and a good care for his singing-robes. As one of these bards, though in another tribe,[485] prettily puts it:—

When the wind blows from the right hand,
Bends and bows the poplar;
When I sit and sing,
May there follow thirty songs!

When the wind blows from the left hand,
May the poplar move and quiver!
When I thus sit and sing,
May my own breast move and quiver!

Presently pen and paper will be found for the singer, and at last printer’s ink to spread his songs; the days of communal chorus and communal repetition are numbered. One other effect of the old communal impulse, however, may be noted along with this trick of style. The rhapsode, singer, leader, where he is first seen detaching himself from the throng, has neither the individuality nor the artistic importance of what one now calls a poet. Every one knows the solicitude of Germanic singers to base their song upon tradition, to put their own invention into the background and appeal to the common stock: “we have heard tell of the Spear-Danes,”—“I heard tell of Hildebrand and Hathubrand.” This meant that the tale to be told had the communal stamp, and was worth hearing.[486] Egger[487] notes that the oldest Greek rhapsodes, like their songs, differed not one from the other in glory; the best song was simply the last which had been heard,[488] and there was no trace of rivalry among the bards, no trace of partiality among the hearers. With the next age, the time of Hesiod, came the stress and struggle for a poet’s crown; and since the crown was to be awarded to the best singer, judges were in demand, and so a rough criticism. It is easy to see that this stage would be reached in any growth of poetry when the bard began to talk of his thirty songs and of his quivering bosom; behind that stage lies the stage of the poets as deputies and mouthpieces of the throng; behind that, the throng itself.

We have now to look at a second class of material where primitive repetition, born of strong communal emotion, gets artistic control and so passes into new phases of development; this, confined to no one epoch of culture, must be sought in some universal human impulse. Birth, marriage, death, ought to give rise to such songs. Obviously, however, the first of these will be of the least value, and in point of fact songs of the sort were rarely recorded in early times, and perhaps rarely if ever made. Marriage and death, from the terms of the case, promise far better; and of the two,—for to treat them both would demand excessive space,—we shall take the songs of death, the _voceri_.[489] A brief glance at the marriage-songs, however, which are mainly sung in communal dance and procession, shows repetition everywhere, increasing with the older stages of culture. In German villages the whole community still has a share in the bridal;[490] while in Tyrol, if a girl goes outside the village for a husband, the youths mob her, tie her to a dung-cart, and lead her through the place, all singing derisive songs, until her father rescues her.[491] Of course, the mobbing of unchaste women who marry is common enough; while in other cases of local indignation, crowds and derisive songs are always in order,[492] being represented under conditions of print by the “ballad,” which can be used as a threat, like the modern reporter’s interview or “exposure.” Gretchen, in her terror, seems to hear these mocking songs. Poor Pamela hoped she would “not be the subject of their ballads and elegies,” if she put an end to herself. But this is the other side of a joyous page. The later epithalamy was sung on private family occasions outside the bridal chamber and Puttenham gives a lively description of such festivities; but public and communal features are the older fact. In Greece[493] the bridal song comes from the festal crowd and accompanies the communal dance; the bride throws bits of food into the village fountain, about which the dances begin,—dances “which are regarded as the last act of the wedding ceremony.” The songs for these dances, moreover, along with verses composed and danced at other stages of the affair, “form a considerable part of the national poetry.”[494] In Albania[495] the bridal bread is baked on Thursday, and the kneading of it is begun with choral songs made for the occasion; on Sunday the marriage takes place, and from the procession of the groom and his friends down to the departure of the pair all is song and dance. The formal dance is opened by bride and groom, when a song is sung: “Raven stole a partridge.—Partridge? What will he do with the partridge?—Play with her, toy with her, and spend his life with her.” English marriage customs, with communal dance and song, were of the same sort;[496] and “the poore Bryde” had to “kepe foote with al dauncers and refuse none, how scabbed, foule, droncken, rude and shamles soever he be,”—an early puritan view of the case. Song and dance, communal rites throughout, were certainly characteristic of the Germanic wedding in its old estate, as is proved by divers names cited by Müllenhoff in his essay on our old choral verse,[497] and by the fact that a wedding was often called outright “the bridal song.”[498] Neocorus,[499] too, tells of the customs in his time among the folk of the Cimbrian peninsula. In the East, again, down to this day, a wedding, like a funeral, is celebrated by the entire village for a full week; it was on communal epithalamies of the sort that one based the artistic bridal poem such as Budde[500] sees in Solomon’s Song. The modern custom is said to keep many primitive traits. After a wedding,[501] which is usually in March, the pair are treated for seven days “as king and queen,” and songs, now of communal victory and the like, now erotic, are sung by the folk; a great dance, moreover, is danced to the _wasf_, a song which praises the charms of bridegroom and bride. The chorus is naturally insistent and incessant, and a main characteristic of the songs is repetition.[502] But all folksong of the wedding tells this tale of dance and song, with repetition as the chief feature of the poetical style; and repetition is studied to even better advantage in that communal song of lamentation for the dead, which, for convenience, may pass by its Corsican name of _vocero_.

Mourners for the dead, now, save in the case of public characters, restricted to kin and friends, but once the whole community, are only mutes or audience to the act of burial; it is clear, however, that the priest and the service, or, as in France, the oration at the grave, along with the reticent group, are deputy for older and indeed still surviving songs of lament improvised and uttered by a near relative, and these again are but a development from the rhythmic wailings of a whole community or clan. Antiquity is no test whatever. A husband who advances to the coffin where his dead wife is lying and gives her a passionate farewell, after the manner of the French, while the funeral guests stand now in sympathetic silence, now with audible manifestations of grief, is doing precisely what Lucian describes as common in his day, barring the extravagance of the previous scene and the violent demonstrations made by Grecian women. Lucian thinks both demonstrations and oration ridiculous,[503] and he gives a kind of parody of the speech which a father makes over the body of his son. So too with the poetical lament, the elegy, mere antiquity goes for nothing; and the question is one of stages of evolution, regardless of chronology, from the communal and choral wail up to the highly individualized and intellectualized monody of grief. The elegy of Simonides over the dead at Marathon was doubtless in its way as artistic as Tennyson’s _Ode on Wellington_; and the same perspective must be kept in dealing with private outbursts of sorrow. Tennyson’s own lines on the death of his brother are not a whit more modern in tone than the _Ave atque Vale_ of Catullus which inspired them. The more primitive obligation was not to hear in respectful sympathy, not to read with intellectual approval, the oration or the poem, but to weep with them that weep and so to sing with them that sing. Uhland[504] cleverly notes the mythological projection of this older custom in that lament for Balder shared by all animate and inanimate creation. We are not, however, to think of the _vocero_ as sprung from the ceremonies of a primitive funeral. Historians of literature are fond of such a process, and fix upon this or that religious rite as the source of some poem or song; Kögel,[505] for example, traces epic to a ceremonial rite as to its ultimate origin, and, for this particular case, insists that the _vocero_ of a Germanic wife over her husband was a song of magic, a kind of incantation, asserting, wildly enough, that choral lament for the dead was unknown to the Germans of Tacitus, while magic songs had long been in vogue. This is distortion of facts and reversal of natural evolution. By the very terms of social organization, social consent must precede social institutions, and a ceremonial must usually be regarded not as the beginning but as the end of a social process. The prime factor in social expression was consent of rhythm; rhythmic cries at wedding[506] and at funeral do not spring from the religious rites, although this or that wedding-song, this or that threnody, may have had such an origin; the rites are rather themselves an outcome, under priestly control and the hardening of custom into law, of this festal excitement, this communal grief. The priest, even the shaman, is deputy of that throng which was once active and is now passive; and when one considers the literature of death, one finds the earliest stages of funeral lament in that half chaotic chorus of repetition and tumultuous cries which cannot be derived from any ceremony, strictly so called, but is rather on the way to ceremony. At this literature we are now to look.

Homer has preserved in an artistic form echoes of primitive wailing, of primitive repetition and choral cries, when he describes the funeral of Hector.[507] “And the others ... laid him on a fretted bed, and set beside him minstrels, leaders of the dirge, who wailed a mournful lay, while the women made moan with them.” Andromache then leads the lamentation, “while in her hands she held the head of Hector, slayer of men. ‘Husband, thou art gone young from life.’ ... Thus spake she wailing, and the women joined their moan.” Then Hecuba; and again the line like a refrain, “Thus spake she wailing, and stirred unending moan.” Lastly Helen; and again, “Thus spake she wailing, and therewith the great multitude of the people groaned.” Wailings of the throng are echoed also in choruses of Greek tragedy;[508] but it is these epic passages and their details which carry one back into the communal realm, quite away from the satire of Lucian,[509] however some of the features which he describes may seem to be repeated here. The song of lament, whether a domestic duty or a professional act, was mainly a matter for the women, and was originally improvised; at the funeral of Achilles,[510] it is his mother and “the deathless maidens of the waters” who wail about his pyre, and it is the muses themselves who raise the clear chant. So Hildeburh at the funeral pile, in that episode of the _Béowulf_:[511]—

Sad at his shoulder sorrowed the woman,
Moaned him in songs.

That a wailing chorus answered her wailing there can be no doubt, though nothing is said of it; that the song is not quoted, that the record of these rites is brief, can be explained easily enough, when one remembers the monk who set down this fine old epic with pagan delight in his heart but a crucifix before his eyes, and constant thunder of ecclesiastical denunciation in his ears. Those _neniae inhonestae_, the singing of diabolical songs and the dancing of diabolical dances[512] about a corpse, all the “payens corsed olde rites,” were denounced by bishops and councils of the church with a fervid iteration which at once accounts for the silence of the poets and testifies to the stubborn vogue of the ceremony. The dance is of course a survival of very primitive rites, as will be seen in the study of the actual _vocero_, and as can be learned from ethnology; for the epics it has been developed into funeral games, although in the _Béowulf_ one finds an older stage of these ceremonies than in Homer. Besides Hrothgar’s lament over Aeschere, a lament intensified by the absence of the dead body,[513] and the moanings of old Hrethel for his son,[514] there is the hero’s own funeral, where, when all the clan, presumably, have mourned their lord, presumably in song, and when the wife has sung, like Hildeburh, her _giomorgyd_, her song of lamentation, at last the ashes are placed in the barrow, and twelve noble youths ride round it chanting the praises of the dead king. A close parallel to this ceremony is found far to the eastward. In what is now known to have been a Gothic rather than a Hunnish rite, warriors rode, “as in the games of the circus,” round the body of Attila where he lay in state, and as they rode sang also a funeral song of praise; Jordanis[515] gives a Latin version of it, but as it stands in this guise, it has a very artistic and even artificial ring. The clan-grief and the clan-praise at Beowulf’s funeral are nearer to the facts. As regards the riding, it is clear that this takes the place of an older dance or march, just as the song takes the place of older wailings and cries. The processions of a whole community, at times of planting and of harvest, round the field, the barn, the village, to which we shall presently refer when considering the refrain, are matched by similar rites of marching with dance and song round hearth, grave, altar, in the ceremonies of wedding and burial. On the Isle of Man a wedding party goes three times round the church before it enters; and in many places the corpse is carried in the same way for a funeral. In the latter case, the solemn march is only a repetition of the dance round the corpse itself, the mourners going hand in hand, now slowly, now tumultuously, to the sound of their own wailing. Ethnological evidence, again, puts the songs and dances for the dead, as found among savage tribes throughout the world, in line with these survivals among the peasantry of Europe; no chain of evidence could be more complete. To this ethnological material we shall presently return; meanwhile it is in order to note the evidence in literature.

We have seen obvious cases of the _vocero_ in oldest English, and it could be followed in other Germanic records. Probably many of the English and Scottish ballads began as a kind of _vocero_, something like the coronach of Highland clans: one thinks of _Bonny George Campbell_, with its repetition and refrain, and of _The Bonny Earl of Murray_, with its triad of incremental repetitions, ballads which follow close upon the death of their hero; of ballads less immediate but still memorial, like _The Baron of Brackley_, and perhaps _The Lowlands of Holland_; even of the widely spread ballads of a condemned criminal, the _Good Nights_, and such admirable precipitates of this kind as _Mary Hamilton_. For more direct evidence, the refrain line _Ohon for my son Leesome Brand!_[516] is promising; but it is only a line. One _vocero_, however, has come down to us, although considerably changed from the normal and original pattern. In Aubrey’s _Remains of Gentilisme and Judaisme_,[517] mention is made of “Irish howlings at Funeralls, _also in Yorkshire within these 70 yeares_ (1688)”; and again, quoting the song, _This can night_, Aubrey says it is from Mr. Mawtese, “in whose father’s youth, sc. about sixty years since (now 1686), at country vulgar Funeralls was sung this song,” by a woman like a _praefica_. Scott has a like account; it was sung a century ago[518] “by the lower ranks of Roman Catholics in some parts of the north of England. The tune is doleful and monotonous.” The refrain, or, as Scott calls it, the chorus, is very insistent and belongs to genuine communal tradition; he quotes an account of Cleveland, Yorkshire, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, which was found by Ritson in a manuscript of the Cotton library: “When any dieth, certaine women sing a song to the dead bodie, recyting the journey that the partye deceased must goe.” The following stanzas will serve as specimens of this highly developed but interesting _vocero_:—

This ae nighte, this ae nighte,
_Every night and alle_;
Fire and sleete and candle-light,
_And Christe receive thye saule_.

When thou from hence away art paste,
_Every night and alle_,
To Whinny-muir thou comest at laste,
_And Christe receive thye saule_.

In Germany, the _vocero_ lingered long, but is dying or dead; it was an improvised farewell in “free” rhythm.[519] A very interesting communal survival akin to the _vocero_ was known in Flanders down to the year 1840,—The Maids’ Dance[520] at the funeral of a companion; it was sung and danced by the young girls of the parish. When the coffin had been lowered into the grave, all these girls, holding by one hand the cloth which had covered the corpse, went back to the church singing this “dance” with a force and a rhythmic accent which roused the hearer’s surprise.[521] The two stanzas and the refrain are, of course, partly modern; but they show traces of the old dance and _vocero_ noted below as surviving among the Corsicans:—

Up in heaven is a dance;
_Alleluia_.
There the maidens are dancing all.
_Benedicamus Domino.
Alleluia, Alleluia._

It is for Amelia;
_Alleluia_,
We’re dancing as the maidens dance.
_Benedicamus Domino.
Alleluia, Alleluia._

But there is better material in the literature of other races. Nowhere, for example, is the wailing and chanting of women over the dead better attested than among the Hebrews of the Old Testament; Syrians of to-day hold to the same rites and sing a song of mourning strangely like that which Jeremiah heard twenty-five centuries ago.[522] The lament of David over Saul and Jonathan, known to be an actual _kîna_, with its personal touch of “my brother,” and its communal refrain, _how_ _are the mighty fallen_, differs from the professional lamentation of the women, which was in a fixed rhythm,[523] while David’s outburst is spontaneous and “free.” In cases of this kind, to be sure, one must always reckon with the literary and artistic element; but David’s _vocero_ is close to the popular custom, and of more value to the student than the lament of tragedy old and new. Indeed, a kind of declamation over the dead relative is often found in tragedy, with some resemblance to the actual _vocero_ both in matter and in style, but with an alien touch of rhetoric; so Hieronimo, showing the corpse of his son, has the repetition and play of words already noted among the early Elizabethans, and at far remove from that “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom!” of the immediate lament:—

Here lay my hope, and here my hope hath end;
Here lay my heart, and here my heart was slain;
Here lay my treasure, here my treasure lost,

and the rest. Hamlet and Laertes at the grave of Ophelia suggest further distortion, turning the lament into a kind of flyting. It is the actual _vocero_, and the communal conditions of it, from which one learns the course of poetry; and this actual _vocero_, even in its Homeric form, has two elements, the song of the relative and the answering wail of the throng. With later conditions the single song comes to be professional, as with Hebrews, Romans, and nearly all nations; or else the women move with sympathetic gestures now round the chief mourner, now round the corpse, singing and wailing as they go. Like modern Syria, modern Greece keeps the old custom; the myriologue has many features of the Homeric rite, particularly the primitive trait of improvisation. The song, says Fauriel,[524] is never composed in advance, but is always improvised in the very moment that it is delivered, and is always fitted to the person addressed. “It is always in verse; the verses are always in the metre of other popular songs; and they are always sung.” Each village—and the communal trait is significant—has an air of its own for these lamentations, and sings them to no other air. Hahn’s account[525] is worth quoting. When a man has died, the women of his family make a fearful cry,[526] which brings all the neighbouring women to the house, shrieking, howling, and gesticulating with the mourners. The actual relatives tear their hair, dash their heads against the wall, _call upon the dead by name_, and scream so loudly[527] and continuously that for a time they often lose their voices.[528] So the women; the men are more calm. The corpse is now washed and clad, whereupon the women seat themselves about it, and the real lament begins. “This is always rhythmic and generally consists of two verses sung by one voice and repeated by the whole chorus of women.” Now it is traditional, now improvised. As fast as one woman is exhausted, another lifts her hand in signal and begins a new verse. On the way to burial they sing in the same fashion.

This song over the dead, which is found throughout the world, in Greenland, in Peru, in the Hebrides, among the Hottentots,[529] shows a course of development in which the detached or literary lament is the latest stage. Here it may be a great poem, pulsing with the grief of nations and close to the common heart, or a mere exercise made by rule; the gay science of Provence, like the school poetry of Germany and England, had minute directions for the making of a good _planch_.[530] “One may compose a song of lament in any melody,” runs the Catalan rule, “save in the melody of a dance,”—strange exception, when one comes to the dances which so often went with the real _vocero_; and Master Vinesauf,[531] in his _Poetria_, called out Chaucer’s well-known gibe[532] by the recipe for a poem of grief. “When you wish to express grief,” he advises, “say something like this;” and an appropriate sentiment follows. That is the literary stage, the detached lament; but behind the little artifice, as behind the great art, lies the real _vocero_ with elements that need to be set in right perspective. We see the corpse, the wailing relatives, the singing relatives, the professional singing women, the whole clan in tumultuous grief, loud discordant cries, a choral wail which is rhythmic and articulate, chanted verses. Of all these the professional singing woman such as Jeremiah invoked, the _praefica_ of Rome, the keener at an Irish funeral, is the nearest to literary lament, and connects the communal with the artistic. Behind her, and taking her place as one follows back the course of evolution, stands the “free” or natural mourner, now and then a man,[533] but usually wife or mother or sister of the dead. Behind these, again, stands the throng itself, the original mourners, clan or horde of a time when the bonds of mere community were stronger than any ties of kin, and when individual grief was hardly if at all lifted from the communal level; and with this stage one has come from elaborate verse, through choral lament, to mere iteration of clamorous grief, rhythmical by the consent of a throng and by the compulsion of dance, gesture, and spasmodic utterance. In this communal refrain, then, we reach the origin of all laments; here is surely one, at least, of the “beginnings of poetry”; and in the _vocero_ of Corsica break forth even yet those cadenced interjections which were heard throughout the Orient, spread over Greece in the wailings for Adonis, and echo in the repeated denunciation of Jeremiah: “They shall not lament for him, saying, _Ah my brother!_ or _Ah sister!_—They shall not lament for him, saying, _Ah Lord!_ or _Ah his glory!_ He shall be buried with the burial of an ass, drawn and cast forth beyond the gates of Jerusalem.”[534] But these earliest cadenced cries are best approached by means of the second stage; and the song of grief can still be heard in Corsica from wife or mother of the dead, with all the force and naturalness of the _vocero_ as it is described by Homer and in the _Béowulf_. Elsewhere, of course, and in Italy itself, one can find material of the sort. D’Annunzio describes, in terms said to be rigorously correct, a peasant mother’s improvised _vocero_ at sight of her drowned boy.[535] After a few moments of silence, broken only by wild outcries, she begins her spontaneous song in a short, panting rhythm, rising and falling with the palpitations of her heart; a characteristic noted also by writers on the Corsican _vocero_.

We turn, then, first to this Corsican lament.[536] _Voceri_ they call the songs, as one might say “vociferations,” a name doubtless due to the _gridatu_ or inarticulate wailings of the throng, which precede the _vocero_ proper; _lamenti_ and _ballati_ are terms sometimes used instead, the second, of course, referring to those dances which were once an inseparable part of the rite, but are now seldom seen. “Make wide the circle,” runs one lament, “and dance the _caracolu_; for this sorrow is very sore.”[537] As for the song itself, it is briefly but adequately defined[538] as an “improvised funeral song,” sung by a near female relative of the dead man, in a strophe of six verses with four measures to the verse, that verse beloved everywhere of communal poetry; and since the same occasion begets them all, all _voceri_ have considerable likeness one to another, with recurrence of word and phrase. The speech of Corsica is itself rudely poetic; and these improvisations, though full of traditional passages,—“sweeter than honey”; “better than bread,”—are direct in their diction, even to a point that seems at first sight to deny such a fundamental communal trait as repetition. Iteration, however, is there, insistently there, when one takes into account not only the refrain, always breaking down into sobs and repeated moans, but the evident suppression of repetition in the text. As to the refrain, the leader now bids all present join her in this wailing cry, and now bids them cease in order that she may be heard:—

Di gratia, fate silenziu ...
Finitele ste gride ...

and now, again, she takes the refrain bodily into her own song, beginning thus a new stanza. “_Di, di, dih!_ Woe is me! Make one great cry of sorrow, brothers and sisters all,” sings a wife over her husband; and this inarticulate bit of chorus, always sung, as Marcaggi says,[539] at the end of each stanza, by the women who surround the corpse, may be the imitation—echo would better hit the truth—of the old sobbing of the throng. As for the text, repetition is hardly to be expected in print, and the editors have doubtless done as Lyngbye did with Faroe ballads, though here and there occurs a line[540] like,—

Chéta, chéta, chéta, o Sàgra,
Chét’ é nun piegna piu tantu.

They are keen to record the power of improvisation shown by their countrywomen; what use to print pages of iteration? A fine hint, however, can be found in Marcaggi’s forewords, not only of the silly sooth but of the old time; he saw, he says, “one day a poor woman run shrieking from her house, her hair disordered, and coming to the public square, where the corpse of her sister-in-law lay, sing in a mournful and monotonous note, with grotesque leaps and bounds:—

O commari Mari!
O commari Mari!