Chapter V · THE DIFFERENCING ELEMENTS OF COMMUNAL POETRY (continued 2)
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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 227are 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 228always 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 229the 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 230wife 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 231heart; 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 232moans, 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!
People said,” adds Marcaggi, “that she was following the custom of a former age, and that she lacked proper reserve.”[541] 233This is, indeed, the more primitive note; and the iterated cry, mere appeal to the dead, like those cris d’enterrement which Bladé heard at Gascon burials, was once sung by the swaying and dancing throng of mourners. Psychologically and physiologically this is quite in order; a kind of communal hysterics, intensely rhythmical, as with a badly frightened child, as with insanity, delirium, abnormal emotion of any kind, has the cadent and recurrent note at its utmost; and this woman, with her “lack of decorum,” like that peasant on the beach by the drowned boy, is the modern survivor and deputy of panic emotion, a belated case in the pathology of epidemic grief. Between this mere iterated cry, as was said above, and the later professional song of lament,[542] lie the bulk of Corsican voceri, sung by sister or mother of the dead, and most characteristic when it is a violent death which they deplore and when they will stir to vengeance a group of male relatives standing sullenly by the corpse. For while a vocero in the case of some peace-parted soul, such as the village priest, is often a decorous and comforting office,[543] the passion of the thing is felt only over the bier of a man murdered in feud. St. Victor, whom all the others quote on this point, describes the scene. At first, in the chamber of death, rises a great wail of lament, through which oaths of vengeance flash like lightning; men draw their daggers, and dash their guns upon the stone floor; women dip their handkerchiefs in the blood still oozing from the wounds;[544] sometimes 234they are moved to a frenzy that vents itself in dancing round the corpse amid loud cries, until silence is demanded and the dead man’s mother, wife, sister, moves to the bier and begins her vocero. There is no art in it; “the excuse for its violence is in its explosive force, ... it sings through the mouth of a wound.” It begins, however, in a plaintive way, calls tenderly upon the dead, then tells the story of his taking off; now the gently cadenced movements of the singer grow more violent, and presently she breaks into a storm of imprecations and into wild appeals for the vendetta.[545] One after another of these singers improvises such a lament, and for every stanza a chorus of sobs and cries and moans, often, one gathers, of articulate words, rises from the throng. The passion, too, is real; readers who come of northern blood must banish certain associations of the cardboard castle, the cloak and sword, loud baritone confidences, and stage moonlight. These voceri of vengeance are not rated as rant by the law, which often and vainly tries to put them down. Thus among the Basques, a race, as George Borrow declared, not of poets but of singers, laws were passed against the old fashion of the funeral;[546] it was forbidden “to make lamentations, to tear one’s hair, to bruise the flesh, to wound one’s head, to chant death-songs.” A Basque chorus of lament is described by Michel. “All the women join in it with deep sighs and cries of grief, addressed now to the dead and now to themselves; they begin with high tones, then fall into a deep note, and pronounce from time to time ayené, a Basque word which means Alas!” It is quite clear that in these repeated words of the chorus one finds the origin of the vocero, the “cry” of 235communal grief; and a study of such cries at the actual burial, as they are still heard in Gascon funerals,[547] shows to what beginnings one must refer the more elaborate voceri of the Corsicans. As early as 1340 a law was passed at Tarbes against “cries and lamentations at the return from a burial.” According to Bladé, the Gascon burial cries are a kind of recitative, lacking rime and even what modern ears demand in the way of rhythm, for they are now divorced from the dance, and at best are timed to the steps of the procession. They begin when a funeral procession starts from the church to the cemetery, and are a series of “distinct exclamations combined into irregular stanzas”; mostly they begin “in a high note, falling slowly, to rise again at the end.” The iteration of these cries is insistent; Bladé quotes a long cri of the sort:[548]—
Ah!
Ah! Ah! Ah!
Ah! Pauvre!
Ah! Pauvre!
Ah! Pauvre!
Mon Dieu!
Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu!
Ah!
Pauvre Père!
Pauvre Père! Pauvre Père!
Vous êtes mort, pauvre Père!
Pauvre Père, vous êtes mort!
Vous êtes mort!
Vous ne reviendrez jamais!
Jamais! Jamais!
Then the first stanza is repeated. The choral possibilities of this cry are clear enough, and sung to the dance 236about a corpse, as was undoubtedly the primitive case, its rhythm would have been exact and no “recitative.” A further step is taken when individual and artistic touches make themselves felt in a pretty little cri which is sung by a mother[549] over her child:—
Pauvret!
Ah!
Tu seras bien seulet
Au cimitière
Cette nuit,
Et moi
Je te pleurerai
A la maison.
Mon Dieu!
Ah!
Repetition is the original rhythm, the original poem; then comes improvisation by the individual, begetting the increment and founding a “text,” while variation plays upon the repeated words. Such is the course of poetry, and in particular of the vocero; repetition lies at the heart of it. Wetzstein,[550] describing the Syrian song of lament sung by the women, lays stress upon the constant iteration in it, and upon the chorus which consists mainly of a single word,—“woe!” “alas!”—counterpart of the chorus in Corsican and Basque voceri. Indeed, the vocero is not only inscribed with woe, but was once nothing else; and fragments of this or that “cry” of burial and of death found their way into the mythology and the recorded poetry of Phœnicians, of Egyptians, and of Greeks. Brugsch,[551] in his study of the songs about Adonis and Linos, makes it clear that Linos was simply a personification of these Phœnician cries of lament, ai lenu, the choral “alas!” or “woe to us!” The 237refrain or repeated cry of grief sung by mourners about their dead finds thus both mythical and ritual projection and the immortality insured by great artistic song. This ai, ai, seems to be one of the oldest choral funeral cries, common, as Brugsch puts it, “to the whole Orient as well as Egypt”; and he follows it down to the exquisite elegy of Bion. Linos, in the vintage songs, was made a personification of this cry,[552] became a Greek, was said to be buried in Argos, and was worshipped on Helicon amid lamentations of matron and maid gathered at the yearly festival. One remembers Ezekiel’s wrath over the women who, in the gate of the Lord’s house, were weeping for Tammuz. In the Egyptian lament of Isis for Osiris, the opening words, “Come back,” are repeated, as in the choral cry from which it sprang, and are in accord not only with the vocero of Europe, but with the refrain of a dirge in India:[553]—
We never scolded you; never wronged you;
Come to us back!...
Come home, come home, come to us again!
The Egyptian vocero, the ai en Ise, is worth quoting in full:[554] “Come back, come back, God Panu, come back! For they which were against thee are no more. Ah, fair helper, come back to see me, thy sister, that love thee; and drawest thou not nigh to me? Ah, fair youth, come back, come back! I see thee not, my heart is sore for thee, my eyes seek thee. I wander about for thee, to see thee in the form of Nai, to see thee, to see thee, fair lord, in the form of Nai, to see thee, the fair one,—to see thee, to see thee, God Panu, the fair one! Come to thy darling, blessed Ounophris, come to thy sister, come to thy wife, come to thy wife, God Urtuhet, 238come to thy spouse! I am thy sister, I am thy mother, and thou comest not to me; the face of gods and of men is turned to thee, while they weep thee, seeing me that weep for thy sake, that weep and cry to heaven that thou hear my prayer,—for I am thy sister that loved thee on earth. Never lovedst thou another than me, thy sister! Never lovedst thou another than me, thy sister!” Like the companion lament of Nephthys, this is distinctly a vocero of the sister over the brother; and the repeated mââ-ne-hra, “come home,” the refrain of the piece, gave rise to the name Maneros, fabled to be a prince of Egypt, a fact which reminded Herodotus of the similar song of Linos in Greece. In his chapter on the Lityerses song, Mannhardt[555] notes that this name, too, with that of Bormos, both supposed to be sons of a king, like Maneros, Linos, Mannerius, was developed out of an old refrain. The Greeks, singing a lay which corresponded to the Maneros, went with choral cries and music to seek the vanished Bormos. So, too, with Hylas; a Bithynian festival is on record, where sacrifice is made at the scene of his capture by the nymphs; and the festal throng thereupon wander over the hills and about the Hylas Lake, crying incessantly upon his name. It is needless to follow all these myths and the ritual connected with them; nor can we turn aside and study the memorial festivals of the dead, like that old Germanic feast in November, now surviving in All Souls’ Day, where masses said for the repose of Christian dead, and flowers laid upon their tombs, took the place of older sacrifice, dance, and song.[556] What one sees beyond question is the origin of funeral songs in the communal chorus, and what one infers with great probability is that death, and the resulting expression of communal 239grief in choral song and dance, had much more to do with earliest forms of poetry than even the erotic impulse. Sociology now declares that primitive feeling for children, relatives, clan, was far keener in its emotional expression than the sense of sexual desire.[557] The importance of the love-lyric, now overwhelming, and mainly an individual outburst, yields in primitive life to the importance of the choral vocero over a dead clansman; so that, using the terms in a modern way, one must reverse that saying of the preacher: it was death that was stronger than love. Coming back to modern survivals, one finds this vocero common, both in its individual and in its choral form, among the Celts. Leaving the Ossianic lament alone in its gloom, one may take the honest and homely prose of Pennant,[558] who made a tour through Scotland in the year 1769, and saw a lyke-wake[559]—he calls it a “late-wake”—in the Highlands. “The evening after the death of any person, the relatives and friends of the deceased meet at the house, attended by bagpipe and fiddle; the nearest of kin, be it wife, son, or daughter, opens a melancholy ball, dancing and greeting, i.e. crying violently, at the same time; and this continues till daylight, but with such gambols and frolics among the younger part of the company that the loss which occasioned them is often more than supplied by the consequences of that night.” This is eighteenth-century humour, and an eighteenth-century reason to explain the hilarity is quoted from Olaus Magnus. Unfortunately Pennant did not hear what he calls the “Coranich”; 240but he learned that such a song is generally in praise of the dead, a recital of his deeds or the deeds of his forbears. Questions, too, were addressed to the corpse, why, for example, he chose to die—a common trait of the vocero, already put to use by Chaucerian humour,[560] and noted by old Camden; Pennant remarks that the mother of Euryalus makes the same query.[561] But Pennant had heard such songs in the south of Ireland; and this feature of an Irish wake is still accessible to the curious. On its native soil it has been often studied and described.[562] When the corpse has been laid out, “the women of the household range themselves at either side, and the keen (caoine) at once commences. They rise with one accord, and moving their bodies with a slow motion to and fro, their arms apart, they ... keep up a heart-rending cry. This cry is interrupted for a while to give the ban caointhe, the leading keener, an opportunity of commencing. At the close of every stanza of the dirge the cry is repeated.” The authors give the air to which keens are chanted. “The keen usually consists in an address to the corpse, asking him, ‘Why did he die?’—or a description of his person, qualifications, riches; it is altogether extemporaneous.” A note attributes the ease of improvisation to the fact that assonance, “vocal rime,” is enough to satisfy the needs of Irish verse. The keener is often a professional and paid; sometimes a volunteer and a member of the family. “Any one present, however, who has the gift, may put in his or her verse; and this sometimes occurs.... Besides caoines, 241extempore compositions over the dead, thirrios, or written elegies, deserve mention. They are composed almost exclusively by men, as the caoines are by women.” One thinks of Marcaggi’s poetical bandits and their written effusions as compared with the improvised songs of the voceratrice over her dead. It is odd to see how the zeal of certain antiquarians would reverse the law of nature, and make this improvised keen a degenerate form of older and carefully composed elegies of Irish “bards.” O’Conor thought the old keen to be “debased by extemporaneous composition”;[563] and a Mr. Blanford[564] describes the degradation in detail. The keen, he says, was once an antiphonal affair prepared beforehand, and sung by bards with the aid of a chorus,—elaborate in every way. On the decline of these bards, “the Caoinan fell into the hands of women, and became an extemporaneous performance.” Like the degeneration theory of ballads, this account of the keen goes to pieces under the test of comparative and historical studies. Spenser, to be sure, speaks of these bards, and not without respect;[565] but it is clear that the ancestral line of the keen among Irishmen runs back to “the lamentations at theyr burialls, with dispayrefull outcryes and immoderate wailings,”[566] which he mentions in his argument to prove that the Irish are descended from the Scythians. Would that Spenser had not cut short his tale 242“of theyr old maner of marrying, of burying, of dauncyng, of singing, of feasting, of cursing, though Christians have wiped out the most part of them,”—best reason for telling in detail of all the Christians had left!
Wailings, cries now articulate and now inarticulate, but wrought by repetition, by the cadence of rocking bodies, or of measured steps, by the spasmodic utterance of extreme emotion, into a choral consent which is not harmony, perhaps, to modern ears, but which has a rhythm of its own,—these are the raw material of the poetry of grief. Like the “cries” at a Gascon burial, like the Irish keen, is the rauda of Russian Lithuania, which Bartsch[567] significantly calls “a preliminary stage of actual folksong.” This rauda or daina is sung by women; it lacks what one calls melody and verse; and it is sung mostly on the way to the burial or at the grave. Prætorius, at the end of the seventeenth century, describes the Lithuanian vocero as a mingled song and sob, with the usual questions to the corpse, so familiar in the Irish keen—why did the man die, had he not enough to eat and drink, had he not clothes and shoes?[568] Brand, who made his tour in 1673, tells the same story; relatives and friends, however, are here seated round the corpse, shrieking and howling, to be sure, but in words of a more lyric tone: “Why hast thou 243left us? Whither art thou gone? I shall go to thee, but thou wilt not come to me.”[569]
Enough has been said to show the origins of the vocero in Europe. Among the Tartar folk of Siberia, songs of lament, although nearly always improvised, have more the character of an elegy, and are sung by the relatives of the dead during a full year after the funeral.[570] If the husband dies, it is his wife who makes the song; if son or daughter dies, it is the mother; while a dead mother is sung by her daughter or a near female relative. Men sing these songs only when a rich or powerful person dies, and then only at the funeral:[571] one thinks of David over Jonathan and Saul, and of that old king in the Béowulf. Among the Eskimo,[572] however, occurs a vocero precisely like the type which has been found common to the primitive customs of Europe,—a song by the near relative, with chorus of moans, sobs, and cries from the women who stand about. Coming to the distinctly savage state, one finds material enough to fill a book, all going to prove that a choral cry and not an individual composition must be taken as starting-point of the vocero. “Of the Tasmanians, Mr. Davis relates[573] that ‘during the whole of the first night[574] 244after the death of one of their tribe they will sit round the body, using rapidly a low, continuous recitative, to prevent the evil spirit from taking it away.’” Naturally the artist comes early upon the scene; dirges, eulogies, elegies of every sort, are built on this choral foundation; and that communal magic, if it was anything more than a Tasmanian vocero, is soon replaced by the magic of the individual shaman. To put him in the van of funeral lament, however, to say that he preceded communal and choral wailings for the dead, is ignoring the facts of primitive life and the instincts of human nature. Comparetti makes the magic songs of the Finns precede their heroic and legendary verse, and this may well be true; but the communal lament is older than both, for, as was seen in the case of the Botocudos, primitive folk have no legend, no history, and as for the magic, while the sayings of a shaman would get the earliest record, they demand a communal background. For it is the unavoidable condition of all recorded literature that what is of the moment and of the mass dies with its occasion; while only individual skill, the hand of a single performer, is moved to keep the record of his doing on purpose to a life beyond life. Even the humblest shaman, too, learns his art and his rude ritual from an older artist in magic,[575] and so his making becomes a tradition and his verses flit from mouth to mouth. But the history of religion has taught us to look elsewhere than to the temple and the priest and the Deus Optimus Maximus of civilized worship, if we would find the beginnings of cult and the earliest divinity. As we go back to a horde of homogeneous men, so we go back to a horde of homogeneous spirits; as one spirit rises above the rest, so the shaman is deputed, with his superior powers,[576] to cope 245with the superior god. It was the “we” of the horde, in the new sense of coherence and social being, which started that communal thinking and made that communal belief in the “they” of a surrounding and potent host of spirits; and it is not unreasonable to suppose that communal appeal, sheer cries and leaps in some wild consent of rhythm, must have begun those magic rites which are perhaps to be surmised in no very advanced stage in the songs of Mr. Davis’s Tasmanians. Actual incantations that come down to us are full of repetition, and frequently have a chorus or refrain;[577] elements that point back to a communal source. Among American Indians the necromantic songs abound in a chorus which is nearly all repetition, like[578]—
Na ha, Yaw ne;
Na ha, Yaw ne.
But it is the vocero which we are now to study among savage tribes. A case or so from Africa and Asia will do for that side of the world—evidence is more than abundant—and then America may tell its tale at a time when borrowing is out of the question. M. Adanson, a correspondent of the Royal Academy of Sciences, travelled in Senegal about 1750; 246his account[579] of vocero and dance is fairly representative of the case. One night in a village he was awakened by a “horrid shrieking,” and found that a young woman had just died. What follows is interesting for comparison with the custom in modern Greece. “The first shriek was made,” says M. Adanson, “according to custom, by one of the female relations of the deceased before her door. At this signal, all the women in the village came out and set up a most terrible howl, so that one would have thought they were all related to the deceased;” the traveller forgets that in certain levels of culture the clan, even the horde, is above kin. The noise lasted till break of day; relatives then went into the dead woman’s cottage, took her hand, and asked her questions,—the common trait of the vocero everywhere. When she was buried, the lamentations ceased; but for three nights the young people danced a memorial dance. At this the performers sang a song, “the burden of which was repeated by all the spectators.” Then follows the description of certain erotic features of the dance, and the usual testimony to that exactness of time observed in song and movement and gesture. The vocero itself is mainly a lament; Mungo Park speaks of “the loud and dismal howlings,” another of “leaping and dancing”; while in Loango relatives “weep, sing, and dance” about the corpse.[580] In Korea, after a night of merriment the body is carried to its tomb; “the bearers sing and keep time as they go, whilst the kindred and friends ... make the air ring with their cries.”[581]
Interesting are the accounts of American Indians in the days of discovery. Jean de Lery, a Frenchman who went to Brazil with the Protestant emigrants in the sixteenth century, 247and wrote an account of his journey,[582] was struck by the likeness between the funeral laments made by savages, and the voceri of the women of Béarn singing over their dead husbands. He quotes one, a good document. “‘La mi amou, La mi amou: Cara rident, œil de splendou: Cama lengé, bet dansadou: Lo mé balen, Lo m’esburbat: Matî depes: fort tard au lheit.’ That is to say, ‘my love, my love, laughing face, fine eye, light limb, brave dancer, valiant mien, lovely mien, early up and late to bed.’” So too the Gascon women: “‘Yere, yere, o le bet renegadou, o le bet iougadou qu ‘here’: that is to say, ‘O the brave Protestant, O the brave player that he was!’ And so do our poor American women, who, besides a refrain for each stanza,[583] always throw in a ‘He is dead, he is dead, for whom we now are mourning,’ whereupon the men respond and say: ‘Alas, it is true; we shall never see him more until we are behind the mountains, where, as our Caribs tell us, we shall dance with him’—and other things of the sort, which they add in their response.” Lescarbot,[584] quoting Lery about the Brazilians, remarks the agreement in songs of lament between them and the Canadians “fifteen hundred leagues away.” Such a song ran—
Hé hé hé hé hé hé hé hé hé hé,
a monotonous performance on paper, with the notes fa fa sol fa fa sol sol sol sol sol, not too elaborate music; but bodily graces made up for this, since they then “shrieked and cried in fearful wise the space of a quarter-hour, and the women leaped into the air with such violence as to foam at the mouth.” Then once more the tuneful mood began, and they 248sang, “Heu heüraüre heüra heüraüre heüra heüra onech.” In this song they are mourning for their dead parents. As with Lery and Lescarbot, so the spirit of comparison is astir in Lafitau,[585] who, however, has less to tell of folklore at home, and a great deal to say of the ancients, as may be gathered from the title of his book; the laments for the dead he calls nénies, and speaks of the “matron” who plays the part of praefica. He tells, however, a plain story of the savage customs. When a corpse has been dressed and laid in state, tears and lamentations, restrained up to that time, begin to break forth, but in order and cadence. The “matron” leads the other women, who “follow in the same measure, but use different words, according to the relation which they bear to the deceased,”—second stage of the vocero, with a survival of the chorus, however, far more pronounced than in Corsica. Men, too, mourn their dead, but in a nobler way, singing the death-song and dancing the hereditary dance;[586] but these voceri of the women are of great interest. Grosse[587] quotes from Grey the Australian vocero for a young man, where “the young women sing—‘My young brother,’—the old women sing—‘My young son,’—and all in chorus sing—‘Never shall I see thee again, Never shall I see thee again.’”
In Schoolcraft’s[588] time things had undergone no great change; for “every person aggrieved makes his own complaint, 249and it is pitiful to see a married person commence wailing and singing kitchina takah, then wailing again kitchina,—‘men’s friend.’ These are all the words,”—a significant fact. “The same way in other deaths the deceased is bewailed.” Here is the single vocero; but it is a faint affair in comparison with the volume and sound of the funeral chorus. Schoolcraft’s evidence all runs this way. “Choruses,” says Mr. Fletcher,[589] “are about all the Indians sing.” Carver,[590] to be sure, like the other travellers, tells of a mother who seemed to improvise a song of lament over her dead child at the time when it was laid among the branches; but he is emphatic about the chorus, and calls it “a not unpleasing but savage harmony.” A recent writer,[591] noting the monotonous choral songs at funerals, thinks “these chants may no doubt occasionally have been simply wailing or mourning ejaculation.” As one comes to lower levels of culture, among the Patagonians, for example, and the interior tribes of Africa, mere choral iteration of monotonous sounds and beating the ground with the feet—perhaps not so much “to keep off the evil one”[592] as to find the communal consent—are the prevailing characteristics of the vocero. The funeral dance of the Latuka, which Baker saw,[593] really comes to this; while the feathers, the bells, the horns, are easily recognized as lendings of an incipient culture, and teach the plain lesson that the state of the African savage is not to be transferred outright to primitive man. Indeed, it is quite evident that such perfect consent of communal voice and step as was shown by the Botocudos may be confused and broken in what one must call higher stages of culture,—for example, 250that dance of the Latuka. In Nubia Miss Edwards[594] saw a ceremony, mainly dance, at the grave of a member of the tribe, which seemed to her artificial in the extreme. “The lamentation itself is a definite musical phrase executed by women who, beginning on a high note, proceed down the scale in third-tones to the lower octave or even the twelfth. It is taught, like the zaghareet, or cry of joy, by mothers to their young daughters in their earliest years.” It is only when the historian looks at all this evidence of savage dance and cry, of feminine song and choral response, of refrain passing into rite and myth, of detached and artistic lament, and when he applies to it the evolutionary test, the comparative and historical test, that it lies in true perspective and allows him to draw some definite conclusion about one at least of the beginnings of poetry. The vocero began as communal wailing, horde or clan or house mourning the brother and inmate in rhythmic cries to the cadence of the dance; with new domestic ties of blood, in which of course the mother and sister are supreme,[595] these two stand out as singers of the solitary vocero to which the crowd makes answer in refrain. The inevitable sundering of individual and chorus now makes headway, the former passing into literature, the latter, dropping its concomitant dance and surviving as refrain, dies slowly out in all save a few isolated communities, and in all recorded verse except here and there a chanted dirge. But in each of these diverging fortunes, as in the earliest, so in the last estate of the vocero, in elegy, threnody, ode, one common trait abides; and everywhere it echoes the insistent 251voice of repetition.[596] As an example of this repetition, as well as of the vocero in its earlier stage, we may conclude with an iterated verse sung by a negro woman, once a slave, who still lived with her master’s family in the South.[597] She had just buried her husband, but went about her tasks as usual and waited upon the children of the house. Suddenly, however, in their presence, and to their great fright, she burst out with these words,—
O dem ropes dat let him down!
and continued to sing them without ceasing, in a strange crooning way, the better part of an hour, and at intervals during some days. It were to consider too curiously, perhaps, if one should compare this crude case of “vision” with certain forms of poetry that bear a similar relation to the original song of grief.
So much for the vocero. It has led us from the ballads back to that ethnological evidence making so strongly, in diction as in rhythm, for the primitive note of iteration, for the fundamental element which marks the communal origin of poetry, precisely as variation has marked its individual and artistic course. Repetition of sounds, when joined with act of labour, with march or dance, with strong emotion of a festal or communal kind, made possible the perception of consent, or, to speak with Professor Baldwin Brown, of order. It begets this sense of order in other arts; repetition of a certain kind of line on a jar made a 252rhythm of decoration, just as a series of similar groups of words, of steps, made poetry and dance. How important repetition must have been in early poetry, and in any unrecorded verse, is clear when one reflects that the invention of writing turned poetry from an art wholly of time and succession to an art half plastic; we see the line, the stanza, nowadays, and repetition is an impertinence in poetry, because hearing has become a secondary and imagined process. The æsthetic value of repetition in primitive verse gets a new aspect when one considers
Wie das Wort so wichtig dort war,
Weil es ein gesprochen Wort war;
although that other protest is right enough for one who has only modern poetry in view:—
Im Anfang war das Wort?...
Ich kann das Wort so hoch unmöglich schätzen.
For repetition as the main element in savage poetry it is useless to spread out evidence; no one denies the fact, and ethnology is full of it. From surviving incremental repetition, as in the Kalevala and in the ballads, one passes back, with the increment steadily diminishing, to outright and unrelieved iteration. The Africans have songs, some of them known as “national,” which consist of a single word, arranged in rude rhythmic groups, repeated for hours; and they get as much satisfaction from it as presumably those Ephesians got out of their own vehement and repeated cry. Lery and Lescarbot heard these songs of an iterated word. Lafitau[598] says that Father Marquette saw Indians dance the calumet dance, and was surprised “that the slave in singing said nothing but the single word Alleluia,”—of course an accidental coincidence of sounds,—“pronouncing the u after the Italian fashion, and dividing the word into two parts.” 253The iterated word in primitive song has its meaning somewhere, but often shades back into an inarticulate sound, and shades forward into a traditional and unintelligible cry, mere relief of emotion. Perhaps words of this sort went with the “detestable air” which Mary Shelley heard at the festas near her house in Italy.[599] The countryfolk, “like wild savages, ... in different bands, the sexes always separate, pass the whole night in dancing on the sands close to our door, running into the sea, then back again, all the time yelling one detestable air at the top of their voices,—the most detestable air in the world.” The favourite song of the Botocudos, their lyric mainstay, was just Kălăuīā ahā́, repeated indefinitely. The chorus of Indian war-songs, in North America, “consists for the most part of traditionary monosyllables which appear to admit often of transposition, and the utterance of which, at least, is so managed as to permit the words to be sung in strains to suit the music and dance.”[600] Dr. Brinton, in a summary of the characteristics of American aboriginal poetry,[601]—which was always sung,—noting that repetition is the groundwork, says that this element of iteration has two forms: a verse is sung repeatedly, which of course makes some statement, or there is a repeated refrain; but this refrain is wholly interjectional and meaningless. The Fuegians often sing not so much as a word, but only a syllable repeated forever. Progress is in the text, and by the individual; communal reminiscence is in the refrain: it is clear, then, that the refrain is the 254original “poem,” and to the refrain one must look for an idea of beginnings. A. W. Schlegel[602] conjectured that the earliest forms of lyric poetry were due to an “effort of the human heart to express a feeling or mood and to give it permanence by tone and rhythm,” this effort resulting at first “in simple words and interjections often repeated.” These are kept in the chorus or refrain; incremental repetition, as was shown above, works its way in the text. The chorus, to be sure, rises soon to the dignity of a coherent sentence; but its communal and retrograde force still is strong, and it insists on naked repetition, while individual singers cherish the increment. Miss Kingsley[603] heard the Bubis sing in chorus over and over for hours this verse and nothing more,—
The shark bites the Bubi’s hand.
A more advanced stage is seen in the cautious but distinct incremental repetition of a singer among the North American Indians; we quote from Schoolcraft:[604]—
Ningah peendegay aindahyaig:
We he heway ...[605]
That is, “I will walk into somebody’s home.” The following words proceed very cautiously. “The composer appears to commence with delicacy ... singing that he would walk into some indefinite home. The next line implies that he will walk into his or her home. In the third line ... he 255will walk into her home during some night. He then informs her that he will walk into her dwelling during the winter. In the fifth line”—it is really a stanza, with that eternal chorus—“he becomes decisive and bold, and says he will walk into her lodge this night.” So, too, the warrior sings:[606]—
I will kill, I will kill,
The Americans I will kill!
But the repeated air of that “cereal chorus,”[607] when a girl gets a crooked ear at the husking, has the stricter note:—
Wagemin, wagemin,
Paimosaid:
Wagemin, wagemin,
Paimosaid.
The work of developing poetry from a rhythmic chaos of wild and repeated cries up to a chorus of this kind was a communal achievement; art is responsible for increment and variation. Communal consent in rhythm caused the repetition of more or less articulate sounds, and so developed that most important element in primitive speech now known as emphasis. Repetition, which is modern emphasis in sections, marks the event or sensation which it records as something out of the common, holds it in the ear and before the mind as something to note and to keep noting, and so makes for memory, not idly called the mother of the muses, while it heightens the actual emotional state. Just as certain early efforts of plastic art expressed great wisdom by several heads, great strength by a number of hands, great fecundity by many breasts, so early man by the iteration of a word gave it poetic force; a better art seeks perfection of the single feature, and fitness of the single word. It has been shown already how poetry made a gain when repetition of a 256certain number of sounds gave ease to the instinct for harmony, and a yet greater gain when the regular recurrence of a louder sound or a longer sound satisfied the craving for finer distinctions;[608] it has been shown how the mere zeal of repetition was crossed by increment and variation, until the oldest element of poetry was made superfluous in the plainer form and was almost utterly driven out of diction, with no refuge but rhythm and certain forms of lyric sacred and profane. In this plain and outright form of repeated words, however, it lingered long in ballads, in festal rites, and of course among the savages; it is in the refrain, therefore, that one can still find some hints of the actual beginnings of poetry. The refrain has been touched incidentally in the treatment of repetition; it is now to be considered for itself.[609] Important as it is in ballads, the refrain has even weightier meanings when studied in what may be called the occasional poetry of the people.
The refrain, which in its communal function survives as 257repetition pure and simple practised by the throng, and in its artistic function has come to be the means of marking off a strophe or stanza, is really the discredited and impoverished heir of that choral song which by general consent stands at the beginning of all poetry. This choral song, under the influence of art and the reflecting, remembering, individual mind, was developed into such forms of epic, drama, lyric, as meet us, more or less divested of communal traits and conditions, on the threshold of every national literature. Greek tragedy is a well-known case in point. The refrain, however, is not a development but a survival,[610] so far, at least, as communal conditions are involved; and even in ballads what is called the refrain or the burden is a slowly yielding communal element fighting hopelessly against invading elements of art. In other words, as the ballad recedes into primitive conditions, the refrain grows more and more insistent, so that for the earliest form of the ballad, now nowhere to be found, but easy to reconstruct by the help of an evident evolutionary curve, one must assume not the refrain as such, but rather choral song outright. Different altogether from this communal survival is the artistic use of the refrain. The extreme of art and often of artifice is reached in those forms of verse which were developed out of the older minstrelsy of France, and are known as ballade, rondel, triolet, chant royal, with a refrain as their distinguishing feature; it is conceded, however, that in the first instance this refrain was everywhere taken from popular song.[611] 258Learned poetry of the Middle Ages,[612] to be sure, imitated not the vernacular refrain, but the refrain of classical verse; this, however, in its turn had been taken from the poetry of the people, and, whether one considers the Hymen, O Hymenaee of Catullus,[613] or the later Cras amet qui nunqnam amavit, which trips so featly through the Pervigilium Veneris[614] and keeps such true step with the popular rhythm of its stanzas, is at no great remove from communal song.
But refrains of artistic poetry are of subordinate interest for our study of primitive verse; and it is clear that all investigations which neglect the older and more popular phases, which neglect the primitive choral song and the primitive communal conditions, can lead to no valid conclusions about the refrain. It is something, of course, when Bujeaud explains this or that refrain of a modern song as imitated from sounds of some musical instrument, or taken from the argot of the streets;[615] but when Rosières[616] undertakes to tell the whole 259story of the refrain, and settle its origins beyond doubt, saying now that it “springs from the periodic return of full sounds,” now that it is a tra-la-la to take the place of musical instruments, now that it is “a little poem stuck in all the fissures of a big poem,” and now, with a passing recognition of communal conditions, but with sufficient vagueness, that it voices popular song, then, indeed, one feels the vanity of dogmatizing to the full.[617] The need of comparative, historical, and genetic study is also evident in a similar essay on the refrain in Middle High German. Freericks[618] regards the original refrain not as repetition of the words of a singer but as an expression of sentiment which they evoke, coming back in cries of sorrow or of joy. “When utterances of this sort continually interrupt the song, there is the refrain in its simplest form.” So too Minor,[619] in his book on German metres, calls the refrain “the original cry of the throng in answer to the song of the singer.” Against all this, Dr. R. M. Meyer, in two essays,[620] makes emphatic and successful protest. With an eye on conditions and not on theory, Meyer shows the refrain to belong to the oldest poetry of man,—inarticulate cries at first, in rhythmic sequence, to express fear, wonder, grief, affection. The refrain, for example, is the original part of a threnody, as we have seen very plainly in our study of the vocero; in short, so far from being an aftergrowth of communal song, this refrain is declared by Dr. Meyer to be the very root of the matter. With more attention to choral 260song in the horde or clan, Posnett has come closer to the facts than Meyer, who failed to appreciate all the communal conditions of such early verse; for while Meyer referred to inarticulate cries as a beginning of the refrain, it is evident that these immediately formed the chorus, and that the refrain is rather survival and deputy of this old chorus than the chorus outright. The refrain, in other words, allows one to feel one’s way back to the choral song of the horde,[621] but is not to be transferred to those primitive times even in its unintelligible and inarticulate forms. To make this clear, we must study the refrain in its various communal survivals.
Records of early literature and early religion show the refrain in its original guise as a part of the choral song, and it echoes audibly the steps of the dance. Nowhere is this echo more insistent than in that hymn of the Arval brothers, sung, of course, with a dance that was confined to the priests, and already come a long way from the shouting and leaping throng of primitive time; nevertheless, as a hymn used in processions about the fields, it is to be connected with the survivals of similar rites and the songs still heard from European peasants at the harvest-home. In the inscription which preserves it, each verse, except the last, is given thrice.[622] A free translation[623] follows:—
Help us, O Lares, help us, Lares, help us!
And thou, O Marmar, suffer not
Fell plague and ruin’s rot
Our folk to devastate.
261Be satiate, O fierce Mars, be satiate!
Leap o’er the threshold! Halt! now beat the ground!
Be satiate, O fierce Mars, be satiate!
Leap o’er the threshold! Halt! now beat the ground!
Be satiate, O fierce Mars, be satiate!
Leap o’er the threshold! Halt! now beat the ground!
Call to your aid the heroes all, call in alternate strain;
Call, call the heroes all.
Call to your aid the heroes all, call in alternate strain.
Help us, O Marmar, help us, Marmar, help us!
Bound high in solemn measure, bound and bound again,
Bound high and bound again![624]
Refrain and iteration are here in thrall to religious ceremony, and the priest has laid hands upon the rough material of the throng; but the throng is present, takes part,—even if, in later time, by deputies,—and invention is at a minimum, appearing only in its regulative, and not in its originating force. It is easy to see how question and answer, strophe and antistrophe, are simply a development and division out of the crowd with one voice, as in the Greek chorus. So, too, in an Assyrian hymn:[625]—
Who is sublime in the skies?
Thou alone, thou art sublime.
Who is sublime upon earth?
Thou alone, thou art sublime.
The Hebrew psalms[626] show very clearly a more or less artistic use of the refrain sung under congregational and therefore 262to some extent communal conditions.[627] These communal conditions can be guessed in their older and simpler form from such an account as is given of David and his dancing before the ark, when he “and all the house of Israel brought up the ark of the Lord with shouting and with the sound of the trumpet”;[628] the personal song detached itself from the rhythmic shouts of the dancing or marching multitude precisely as the song of the wife and sister over their dead came out clearer and clearer from the wailings of the clan. So, if D. H. Müller be right, following in the path marked by Lowth, the form of Hebrew prophecy was at first choral, then was divided into strophe and antistrophe, yielding in time to an impassioned solo of the prophet himself. In any case, this single prophet, in historical perspective, lapses into the throng, into those “prophetic hordes” which Budde compares with modern Dervishes, “raving bands” now forgotten or dimly seen in the background of a stage where noble individuals like Amos, still in close touch with the people, play the chief part, and hold the conspicuous place.[629] As Amos and his brother prophets yield to the later guild whose prophecies were written, so one goes behind Amos to the “bands,” to communal prophecy, to the repeated shouts and choral exhortation, and so to the festal horde of all early religious rites. The backward course would be from a prophecy written 263to be read, to the chanted blessing or imprecation of the seer; thence to a singing and shouting band under the leadership of one man, with constant refrain; and at last to the shouting and dancing of purely communal excitement, the real chorus. Moses and the children of Israel “sang a song unto the Lord, saying, I[630] will sing unto the Lord.... And Miriam the prophetess ... took a timbrel in her hand, and all the women went out after her with timbrels and with dances. And Miriam answered them, Sing ye to the Lord.” Here is certainly no premeditated verse; and it must be borne in mind that refrains, except where they have a sacred tradition behind them and are kept up by the priests, as in the Arval “minutes,” easily drop from the record. Oral tradition, on the other hand, is fain to hold fast to all these vain repetitions; they are the salt of the thing. Now and then an unmistakable refrain is preserved. “And it came to pass as they came, when David returned from the slaughter of the Philistines, that the women came out of all the cities of Israel, singing and dancing, to meet King Saul, with timbrels, with joy, and with instruments of music. And the women sang one to another in their play, and said:—
“Saul hath slain his thousands,
And David his tens of thousands.”[631]
That women in all nations and at certain stages of culture make songs of triumph like this, as they dance and sing, is known to the most careless reader; one or two chorals, 264strangely similar to these songs of the Hebrew women, may be noted from mediæval Europe. Now it is the singing of Gothic songs of welcome by those maidens who come from their village, as the women of Israel from their cities, to meet and greet Attila,[632] dancing as they sing. So the daughter of Jephtha greeted her sire with the singing and dancing maidens; and so in Cashmere a stranger is still met by the women and girls of a village, who form a half circle at the first house where he comes, join their arms, and sing eulogies of him, dancing to the tune of the verse. Malays and even Africans do the same.[633] Again, it is in the seventh century, and an obscure saint, Faro by name, has won the gratitude of a community; straightway a song is made and sung “by the women as they dance and clap their hands.”[634] It was not often that a saint’s name lent grace to these songs of the women and saved them from clerical wrath; the decrees of councils, the letters of bishops, refer 265perpetually to the wicked verses and diabolical dances in which maids and even matrons indulged at the very doors of the church. Sometimes, however, national glory covered the shame. In the chronicle of Fabyan,[635] who is here telling no lies, it is said that after Bannockburn songs were made and sung with a refrain “in daunces, in the carols of the maidens and minstrels of Scotland, to the reproofe and disdaine of Englishmen”; and Barbour,[636] mentioning a fight in Eskdale where fifty Scots defeated three hundred English under Sir Andrew Harcla, says he will not go into details, seeing that any one who likes may hear—
Young wemen, quhen thai will play,
Syng it emang thame ilke day.
One is even fain to believe that Layamon[637] was thinking of the women when he said that after a treaty of peace,
Tha weoren in thissen lande blisfulle songes.
That the record of these refrains is so meagre and baffling need cause no surprise. The histories of national literature are disappointing to the student of beginnings, for the reason that they almost invariably[638] study these beginnings as conditioned by the habits of authorship in modern times; they are always looking for original composition, for expression 266of individual feeling, for a story, and therefore turn aside from these stretched metres of an antique song. But the story, and the expression of personal emotion, are precisely what one seldom if ever finds at the beginning of a literature; one finds there, when one finds anything, the chorus or its deputy the refrain. The refrain was a constant element in early Greek song, “an essential mint-mark”;[639] not only the early melic verse, but a study of the chorus[640] in dramatic survival, proves this beyond doubt, and one is amazed to find Rosières, in the essay quoted above, saying that the ancients, particularly the Greeks, had no need of the refrain, and hardly used it at all. How important, on the contrary, this refrain must have been, how it works back through the alternate strains of chorus and solo to the throng of communal singers and dancers, could be shown for classical poetry, and can be proved by mediæval and modern refrains, some already noted under the vocero, and others presently to be considered in songs of labour and of the harvest. True, the records are scanty; and the unwary historian of English poetry in the early stage, reviewing his material, announces that, with the exception of some insignificant charms, there is just one poem with a refrain, the “Consolation” of Deor, the king’s minstrel out of place,—taking, that is, a lyric of individual and artistic reflection as the only example of that part of poetry which above all belongs to the communal and spontaneous expression of the throng. Recorded poetry has here a poor tale to tell, and even that is usually marred in the telling. Where, then, is the old refrain of the English folk, and where was the chorus? Had they no dances, no ballads, no communal singing? If the evidence of ethnology from tribes and communities of men in 267every degree of culture is to be accepted, it is certain that Englishmen of that early day had dance, ballad, chorus, and refrain. We know that their old heathen hymns went with the dance; and the dance means a strophic arrangement. What, then, has become of this refrain? So far as the old English poetry has found record at the hands of the monk, it is in a fixed alliterative metre, without strophes,[641] suited to epic and narrative purposes, suited to recitation and a sort of chant, but not, in its literary shape, suited to refrain and chorus.[642] One does not dance an epic, or sing it; it is chanted or recited; and even Anglo-Saxon lyric, barring that little song of Déor, is elegiac and highly reflective. The refrain, says Dr. R. M. Meyer,[643] is to be assumed for oldest Germanic poetry, although it was thrown out by the recited alliterative verse, only to come again into recorded literature with the introduction of rime; but no one supposes that Englishmen ceased in that interval to dance and sing. It is a defect of the record. The chorals and refrains, even the ballads of which William of Malmesbury speaks as crumbling to pieces with the lapse of time, were simply deemed useless if not harmful, and had no claim whatever to the life beyond life. Nor is this chorus, this refrain, simply assumed for oldest Germanic poetry; it is proved, and nowhere proved so well as in Müllenhoff’s essay.[644] Many conclusions of this sturdy and often too intolerant scholar have been rejected by later investigation; 268but his assertion in regard to choral poetry as the foundation of every literature remains an article of faith among those who deal at first hand with the material involved, and writers since his day who have undertaken to describe the different kinds of Germanic choral song have done little more than follow in his steps.[645] There is no need, then, to rehearse this proof of the existence of refrain and chorus as main form[646] of poetry among the ancient Germans; it is in order simply to trace these and other choral songs in the later fragments and the surviving refrains, whether sung at the solemn procession round the fields, or sung to the festal dance at harvest-home, or in whatever survivals they may be found, and to compare them with kindred refrains and kindred customs elsewhere. From this point of view, even the blackness of thick darkness which broods over Anglo-Saxon communal song, that darkness of superstitious fear felt by monks who knew these customs and these songs to be of the devil himself, and would not write them down, is lifted a little. We look, then, at refrains of labour, refrains of actual work, too trivial usually for record, and at those refrains and chorals of the harvest feasts, of plantings, sowings, reapings, which had the taint of heathendom upon them, and so were either left in silence or coaxed into a harmless formula; we look, too, at refrains and chorus of the dance, the sunnier side of life, and still more provocative than labour as an occasion of communal song. For the refrains of war, and even for the choral raised by a whole army as it marched 269to battle, an occasion which Müllenhoff calls the supreme moment of all Germanic life, the fierce and clamorous words needing no leader,[647] and the wild rhythm asking no aid from trumpet or drum, there is ample evidence; and indeed these war chorals might be connected by easy stages with the ridiculous marching songs already noted above. From the barditus to “ma poule a fait un poulet” were a pretty journey; but we will keep to the ways of peace, and the saure wochen, frohe feste of everyday life will yield material enough in regard to this communal refrain.
Songs of labour are found everywhere; but there is a great chasm between the actual refrains, the survivals of communal or even solitary song which come from the real scene of labour and from the real labourers, and those songs which are made for the labourer. Nowhere is the difference between volkspoesie and volksthümliche poesie so evident; and we have here no concern with poetry, however successful, which has been written for the edification of “honest toil.”[648] It is the song of actual labour to which we now turn, as it has abounded in all the activities of life, and which, like the ballad, is fast vanishing from the scene. Sometimes the labour was solitary, and the song was a plaintive little lyric when it was made by the lonely maiden grinding at her hand-mill:
Alone I ground, alone I sang,
Alone I turned the mill....[649]
270but often even this grinding of the mill was social, as in Poland, where it was the manner of the women to repeat a word in chorus.[650] Plutarch has preserved an old Greek “song of the millstone,”[651] which he heard a woman sing; from the older Scandinavian literature[652] comes a lay, sung by two maidens, Menja and Fenja, as they grind out King Frodi’s fortune, which may hold bits of the actual refrain of labour, and has, too, its touch of folklore, explaining “how the sea became salt”; but the real and primitive choral of such labour is sufficiently attested by those women in Poland, and by a similar case among the Basuto tribe,[653] where, as Cassilis says, to relieve the fatigue of solitary grinding, “the women come together and grind in unison, by singing an air which blends perfectly with the cadenced clinking of the rings upon their arms.” There is plenty of evidence for this choral of the grinding women in places and times so widely sundered as to forbid all idea of borrowing, and to leave the conditions of communal labour and communal consent as the only explanation. 271Originally there was a spontaneous chorus or refrain[654]—in the strictly choral sense, that is, and not in the technical meaning presently to be considered—suggested by the movements, cadence, and sounds of the work itself; improvisation added words at will, until at last art seized upon the material and gave now a song like that of Fenja and Menja, now even a jolly refrain such as one finds in an audacious song of Beaumont and Fletcher’s Maid of the Mill.[655] Everywhere labour had its refrain and song, and even the scanty remains of Hellenic communal poetry tell of songs for reaper, thresher, miller, for the vintage, spinning, weaving, for the drawers of water, oarsmen, rope-makers, watchmen, shepherds, and for the common labourers marching out to their work. Rome itself, in the old silent period, has something of this song for the attentive ear;[656] and allusions scattered throughout the Bible show that the Hebrews sang at their work in house and in field. A few echoes of such singing come from Egypt; while darker and darkest Africa, along with savage tribes over the world, shows yet more elementary, and hence more insistent and necessary[657] connection between work and song. With the breaking up of communal conditions, with the advance of individual and initiative art, these songs of labour, like the ballad, like all communal poetry, tend to disappear or yield to alien verse. Often the individual works in silence, when his labour demands intelligent thought, but where labour is automatic or monotonous, wherever 272it is collective, the labourer sings, and always will do so; the important fact is that he now ceases to sing the old refrain or song of the labour itself, born, as Bücher[658] shows so plainly, of the very movements and sounds which it called forth. For good reason, andere zeiten, andere lieder. Neus[659] noted that the Esthonians, a century ago, sang their own songs, and sang always as they worked in the fields or came together for festal occasions; now,—and “now” is fifty years ago—he says that either the song is silent, or else it is changed for an imported German ditty. All the more need, then, to collect and study such survivals of the refrains of labour as can be found. Speaking of the decline of folksong in Germany, not only of the making but even of the singing, Professor E. H. Meyer[660] remarks that collective labour still has some power here and there to stir the old instinct into a fitful activity. Now it is in the spinning-room,—where Böckel[661] a few years ago could hear Hessian folksongs in the making—now at the berry-picking in Nassau, at the flax-breaking, and elsewhere in cases where companies of peasants still ply the monotonous tasks of their forefathers. And in all these cases, as in the beginning, so in the end, women are the mainstay of communal song.[662]
Of particular trades and callings, perhaps sailors, oarsmen, and watermen generally, would furnish more refrains than 273could be found in any one industry of the land. Sailors’ chanteys are still heard in every ship;[663] but they are now apt to echo those songs of the street and the dance-hall which have been picked up at port, and they have seldom a traditional interest. Here and there, however, the genuine refrain is clear enough, and attests itself by its power to withstand the discrimina rerum and the changes of time; it is said that modern Greek sailors, when reefing sails, have nearly the same melodious calls as those preserved in a play of Aristophanes.[664] Negro roustabouts on the Mississippi sing interminable refrains, while a capable leader improvises stanzas on the work in hand or on current events; a process which is matched by refrains and songs of manual labour in every part of the world. A well-known passage in the Complaynt of Scotland[665] gives the cries and songs both of weighing anchor,—where a leader sings and the rest answer “as it had bene ecco in an hou heuch,” like the echo in a hollow ravine, mainly in repetitions,—and of hoisting sail, with iteration of short running phrases such as:—
Grit and smal, grit and smal,
Ane and al, ane and al,—
and not stopping here, undertakes to set down the “chorus” of guns heavy and light as a spirited sea-fight begins. In 274the old play Common Conditions occurs a pirates’ song, the stanzas in quatrains, with a jolly refrain or chorus:—
Lustely, lustely, lustely let us saile forthe,
The wind trim doth serve us, it blows from the north.
Hoisting, pulling, however, and work of the sort on shipboard, yield in importance, so far as refrains are concerned, to the regular cadence of the oar, where voices have kept tune and oars have kept time from earliest days. Not only in the classical period, where actual song and music came to take the place of the refrain,[666] but with Egyptians, Africans, Tonga Islanders, wherever rowing is practised, these refrains are known; the Maoris, for example, “row in time with a melody which is sung by a chorus sitting in canoes.” The same thing is told of the Indians of Alaska.[667] A refrain already noted seems to have served in England both for hoisting and for rowing; Skelton mentions it:—
Holde up the helme, loke up, and lete god stere,
I wolde be mery, what wynde that ever blowe,
Heve and how, rombelow, row the bote, Norman, rowe!
and D’Israeli says that sailors at Newcastle in heaving anchor still have their Heave and ho, rumbelow; while it is recorded that in 1453, Norman, Lord Mayor of London, chose to row rather than ride to Westminster, and the watermen made this roundel or song:—
Rowe the bote, Norman,
Rowe to thy Lemman,—[668]
so that two refrains are confused in the laureate’s account, and the exquisite reason, with a Lord Mayor in the case, is no 275more probable than such stories of origins are wont to be. For example, Cnut is credited[669] with a little song, which he is said to have composed as he rowed by Ely and heard the chanting of the monks; “ordering the rowers to pull gently, and calling his retinue about him, he asked them to join him ... in singing a ballad which he composed in English and which begins in this way:—
“Merie sungen the muneches binnen Ely,
Tha Cnut ching rew ther by.
“Roweth, cnihtës, noer the land,
And herë we thes muneches sang.”
Several things here are noteworthy; both Grundtvig and Rosenberg have pointed out[670] that this song is composed in a two-line ballad strophe of four accents to the verse, the kind afterward so common in Scandinavia and in England; and whatever Cnut’s share in the making of it, it is at least of the eleventh century, and is the first recorded piece of verse to break away from the regular stichic metre of our oldest poetry. Moreover, it is said that Cnut improvised the song, and that he called on the others to join him; the lines quoted then, so Grundtvig infers, are the burden or chorus of the song itself; and it is interesting to know that in the days of the chronicler, say about the middle of the twelfth century, this refrain as well as the song was sung in the choral dances of the English folk. Doubtless it was sung to the oar itself; and that may have been the first of it, with royalty as an afterthought.[671]
276Coming to land, one would think that the blacksmith, rhythmic as his work may be, must have little breath to spare for song; and, indeed, Bücher could find but one specimen which seemed to hold the genuine rhythm of the anvil. Had he looked to the English, however, he would have met more; an old “Satire on the Blacksmiths”[672] preserves a refrain probably sung to the work itself, or, at worst, imitated from its cadence:—
Thei gnaven and gnacchen, thei gronys togydere....
Stark strokes thei stryken on a stelyd stokke,
Lus! bus! Las! das! rowten be rowe,
Swych dolful a dreme the devyl it todryve!
The mayster longith a lityll, and lascheth a lesse,
Twineth him tweyn and towcheth a treble,
Tik! tab! hic! hac! tiket! taket! tyk! tak!
Lus! bus! Las! das! swych lyf thei ledyn.
St. Clement is the patron of blacksmiths, and while Brand’s account of the festivities gives no refrain, but only poor doggerel and mimicry, it is clear that processions, songs, and dances were a feature of the saint’s day,[673] once regarded as the beginning of winter; so that communal origins may even lurk in the traditional anvil song, quoted by Dickens,[674] “that 277imitated the measure of beating upon iron, and was a mere lyrical excuse for the introduction of Old Clem’s respected name”:—
Hammer, boys, round—Old Clem,
With a thump and a sound—Old Clem.
Again, there is the tinker with his catches, which moved Overbury[675] to a theory of origins; “from his art was music first invented, and therefore is he alwaies furnished with a song,” to which his hammer keeps time. Of course, the only point of interest in these songs of the trades is the survival of a refrain which carries the sound and cadence of the work itself. Thus in the old play of Tom Tiler and his Wife, it is probable that an actual refrain has crept into the lively song of which Dame Strife sings the first staff, with its
Tom Tiler, Tom Tiler,
More morter for Tom Tiler, ...
clearly an echo from the roof. But there is more of the communal strain in spinning-songs;[676] for here is the home of balladry, a city of refuge even to this day,[677] and here the women make as well as sing the song. Echoes of the wheel itself[678] are not infrequent; perhaps they are too close to art in that pretty song of sewing, knitting, and spinning, sung by three women in the first act of Roister Doister:—
278Pipe mery Annot, etc.
Trilla, trilla, trillarie,
Worke Tibet, knitte Annot, spinne Margerie:[679]
Let us see who shall winne the victorie....
although, what with incremental repetition in other stanzas, and the audible whir of the wheel, this is like the songs which still move women to emulation under like circumstances in the spinning-rooms of Europe. “In Northamptonshire, when girls are knitting in company, they say”—surely sing?—
“Needle to needle, and stitch to stitch,
Pull the old woman out of the ditch;
If you ain’t out by the time I’m in,
I’ll rap your knuckles with my knitting-pin.
The ‘old woman,’ ‘out,’ and ‘in’ are the arrangements of the wool over and under the knitting-pins.”[680] The same authority gives other rimes of this sort, more or less suggested by the movements of the work; for instance, a song of Cumberland wool-carders:—
Tāary woo’, tāary woo’, tāary woo’ is ill to spin,
Card it well, card it well, card it well ere you begin.
Slightly different is the song of Peterborough workhouse girls in procession, where the refrain is quite primitive in form:[681]—
And a-spinning we will go, will go, will go,
And a-spinning we will go.
279Bell[682] records what seems to be a real refrain of the spinning-wheel in the Greenside Wakes Song:—
Tread the wheel, tread the wheel, dan, don, dell O.
The flyting that goes with this refrain is negligible,—a man and a woman on horseback with spinning-wheels before them, singing alternate stanzas in the midst of the fair, with its dancing and merriment, a sort of side-show; but the refrain may well be old.
Songs of the crafts, however, are less likely to hold the festal, gregarious, communal note than those old refrains which took their cadence from the movements of workers in the field. An agricultural community, whether in its rudest stages, a horde that lives in fertile river bottoms as distinguished from the nomadic, predatory bands of the plain, or in the civilization of feudal Europe, always tends to homogeneous conditions and always fosters communal song. Where these conditions survive, this song in some degree survives with them. Corsican labourers in the field, says Ortoli,[683] still sing so at their work; the Styrian threshers, eight together, make their flails chorus thus:—
Hiwer, hawer, hawerhaggl,
Hiwer, hawer, hawerhaggl,
while Silesians, with two, three, four, five, six, hear as many different refrains made by the strokes of the flail;[684] and Bladé[685] prints a song of Gascon peasants which seems to give again all the stages in the culture of the vine,—a stanza or two may follow for example of the repetition and the refrain:—
280Plante qui plante,
Voici la belle plante;
Plante qui plante,
Voici la belle plante
Plantons, plantin,
Plantons le bon vin.
Voici la belle plante en vin,
Voici la belle plante en vin.
De plante en taille,
Voici la belle taille;
De plante en taille,
Voici la belle taille.
Taillons, taillin,
Taillons le bon vin.
Taillons la belle taille en vin.
Taillons la belle taille en vin.[686]
Early English drama was evidently fond of songs not unlike this, and in Summer’s Last Will and Testament Nash brings harvesters on the scene singing what appears to be a song of harvest-home, if one may judge by the refrain of Hooky, Hooky, said by a Dodsley editor[687] to be heard still in some parts of the kingdom. “Enter Harvest,” run the directions, “with a scythe on his neck, and all his reapers with sickles, and a 281great black bowl with a posset in it, come before him; they come in singing:—
Merry, merry, merry, cheary, cheary, cheary,
Trowl the black bowl to me;
Hey, derry, derry, with a poup and a lerry,
I’ll trowl it again to thee.
Hooky, hooky,[688] we have shorn,
And we have bound,
And we have brought Harvest
Home to town.”
The tendency to put popular and traditional songs into a play was common everywhere. Hans Sachs[689] used a May-song for the ring-dance which is clearly made in its turn out of a lusty old refrain:—
Der Mei, der Mei,
Der bringt uns blümlein vil.
Best of all, however, George Peele, who in his Old Wives’ Tale gives tryst to countless waifs of folklore and popular stories, makes room there for a pretty song of harvesters. “Ten to one,” cries Madge, when they first enter upon the stage, “they sing a song of mowing,” but they are sowing, it seems; and once again they come in, this time with a song of harvest. The present writer has ventured[690] to change the first song so as to make it agree with the second, not an audacious 282feat when one considers the case. The songs, with an interval between, would then run as follows:—
Lo, here we come a-sowing, a-sowing,
And sow sweet fruits of love.
All that lovers be, pray you for me,—
In your sweethearts well may it prove.
Lo, here[691] we come a-reaping, a-reaping,
To reap our harvest fruit;
And thus we pass the year so long,
And never be we mute.
The refrain is easy to detach from the rest; and it is clear, too, that actual imitation of sowing, reaping, binding, often went with the song, probably in this case a combination of gesture and word known still in games of modern children.
These songs, particularly the Gascon vintage chorus, are simply a festal recapitulation of the rustic year, with more or less echo of actual refrain sung to the labour in its various stages. From the moment when communal labour began to sow the seed—in Japan[692] the peasants still plant their rice in cadence with a chorus, and in Cashmere[693] the onions are sown with accompaniment of “a long-drawn, melancholy song,”—through process after process, down to the picking,[694] reaping, harvesting, and so to the festal imitations just noted, even to the ritual of priestly thanksgiving, every stage is marked by communal singing, except that in the function last named the 283community turns passive, the guild replaces the throng, and art has begun its course. Hence it is that most of the survivals of song and refrain come down to our day with more or less magic in the case. Rites are performed by the head of a family, and are even transferred from the field to the home; as when[695] at flax-planting a German wife springs about the hearth and cries, “Heads as big as my head, leaves as big as my apron, and stalks as thick as my leg!” In Silesia,[696] again, husband and wife sing together a song with the refrain,—
Om Floxe, om Floxe, om Floxe!
Even in the field itself, song is mingled with these symbolical and even religious rites; incantations, such as that Anglo-Saxon charm[697] for making barren or bewitched land bear again, are strongly tinged with clerical lore, and in this case involve a visit to the church altar. The Romans, too, had spells and charms for restoring fields to fertility when other spells and charms had bewitched them; harmful rites of this sort were forbidden in the laws of the twelve tables.[698] Corruption 284is rife in these things; but in a charm[699] for the old English peasant to get back his strayed or stolen cattle, amid the hocus-pocus of Herod and Judas and the holy rood and scraps of Latin, a few lines echo the old repetition, but have no refrain:—
find the fee[700] and drive the fee,
and have the fee and hold the fee,
and drive home the fee.
A thousand things of the sort survive, but seldom touch the refrain; perhaps the charm to make butter come from the churn, common in 1655,[701] had a choral element:—
Come, butter, come!
Come, butter, come!
Peter stands at the gate
Waiting for a butter’d cake,—
Come, butter, come!
We turn back to the actual labour of the fields, and the songs and refrains that went with it. A refrain[702] has come down to us from the harvesters of ancient Hellas,—“Sing the sheaf-song, the sheaf-song, the song of the sheaf,” which is not unlike the type just considered in George Peele’s “Lo, here we come a-reaping”; while that waif of Germanic myth,[703] the story of Scéaf, where the “sheaf” is made the 285name of an agricultural god, or culture-hero, as one will, reminds us of Phrygian countryfolk who at their reaping sang “in mournful wise” the song of Lityerses, itself said to be the outcome of an old refrain, lapsing into a vocero for the hero’s death. Burlesque laid unholy hands upon the custom and the myth; the story growing out of the song passed into a tradition which coldly furnished forth the satire and comedy of a later day; since any song of the harvest-field or the threshing-floor came to be called a Lityerses,[704] the name was seized upon for certain comic features, and grew to be a symbol of an insatiable eater. Yet dramatic allusions and uses of more serious nature, like the song recorded by Peele, were doubtless common in Greece and throughout the Orient. It has been said already, in speaking of the vocero, that the song of Maneros was sung by Egyptian reapers, just as they sang on the threshing-floor the song of the oxen treading out the corn; while at the harvest-home Greek husbandmen, if Mannhardt’s surmise[705] is right, sang a variant of the Maneros; and Homer is witness for the singing of the Linos at the time of vintage.[706] If, now, one seeks for similar songs in the fields of modern Europe, one finds, to be sure, hints in plenty, descriptions by this and that traveller, and fragments of actual verse; but conditions of religious ceremonial have broken up the old refrains and barred any handing down of a Germanic Linos or Lityerses. Customs, too, 286have changed; and few are the places where folk at harvest-home do as their forbears did, when “the whole family sat down at the same table, and conversed, danced, and sang together during the entire night without difference or distinction of any kind” as between master and man, mistress and maid.[707] Add to the case that great transfer of vital interests upon which economists lay such stress, from open-air life to home-life, from the throng with its indiscriminate dance and merriment, often, too, its indiscriminate morals, its communal habit of thought and expression, to the individual responsibility, the sober pleasures and the stricter morals of the fireside, from the delight in movement, noise, cadence of many voices, to lamplight and the printed page and meditation: add this to the account, and one sees how ill it must have fared with the communal refrain of work, feast, and ceremonial rite. Reactions come, of course, and no one denies a constant market for cakes and ale; but what is a church fair, even a camp-meeting, to the old vigil? The wife of Bath is still with us, but she has to make shift with an afternoon tea. Disintegration, due to the lapse of communal feeling, has either broken up the traditional refrains, leaving only Hooky, hooky,[708] and unmeaning things of the kind, or else has favoured the making of doggerel which may or may not mean something, and which in any case threatens the student with perils of a too curious interpretation 287of chops and tomato-sauce. Even where there is neither corruption nor distortion, there is unblushing if often innocent substitution of modern mawkishness. Precisely as one boggles, when reading Herd’s Scottish Songs, to find under the title “I wish my Love were in a Myre” the familiar translation of Sappho’s “Blest as the Immortal Gods,”—so, in coming to the “Cornish Midsummer Bonfire Song,” in Bell’s collection, a title to make any student of communal poetry get out a fresh pen, and in reading, too, that here “fishermen and others dance about the fire and sing appropriate songs,” one pulls up with a rude shock at—
Hail! lovely nymphs, be not too coy,
But freely yield your charms,[709]
which, while appropriate in sentiment, has not the note of simplicity that one expects from Cornish fishermen dancing round the bonfire of heathen tradition. True, this is a very bad counterfeit; but many a verse quite as alien at heart, if not on the face, has been foisted upon communal and traditional song.
The best survivals come from the harvest field, and mingle refrain with improvisation. Very common in old times and in new is the note of ridicule, particularly for the wayfaring man, converted temporarily into a fool, who passes by the labourers; such a man even now gets rude handling as well as rude rimes, and this was the case in Hellas.[710] In an often-quoted Idyll of Ausonius there is reference to the exchange 288of abusive lyric compliments between workers in the field and the boatmen on the Moselle; while any one can note how this instinct for a flyting between labourers in a band and the spectator ab extra, alone or in company, holds always and everywhere, while, on the other hand, the solitary labourer and the solitary wanderer are wont to pass the time of day with full courtesy and often with an inexplicably kindly feeling. German peasants breaking flax in the fields still sing to the rhythm of their strokes; as in the old days, a stranger who passes by them is sure to be hailed in improvised verses not of a complimentary kind. Particularly if the stranger be a young gentleman, a possible suitor for one of the daughters at the great house, sarcastic song greets him from twenty or thirty throats, mainly a refrain, and that partly of an imitative character, with derisive lines like:—
Too fat is he quite,
And he isn’t polite,
with the refrain for conclusion,—
Hurrah, let him go![711]
All this, of course, to the exact time of the work in hand. When no stranger offers, mutual flytings will serve. Near Soest all the young people shout and sing throughout the entire process of preparing flax,—“unsung flax,” they say, “is good for nothing,”—and songs are improvised in satire of one another, with a refrain rummel dumm dum or rem sen jo jo. Travelling in Wales, by the bye, had once these chances of 289satire, and Aubrey tells about them, thinking doubtless of his favourite time “before the civil warres.” For in Wales there were not only “rymers ... that upon any subject given would versify extempore halfe an hour together,” but “the vulgar sort of people ... have a humour of singing extempore upon occasion: e.g. a certain gentleman coming to ——, the woemen that were washing at ye river fell all a singing in Welsh, wʰ was a description of ye men and their horses.”[712] How facile the black fellows of Australia, Africans, and savages everywhere, can be with this improvised ridicule, mainly practised on the march, or at some sort of labour, all travellers testify. Samoans sing instead of talking “as they walk along the road, or paddle the canoe, or do any other piece of work. These songs often contain sarcastic remarks, and in passing the house or village of parties with whom they are displeased, they strike up a chant embodying some offensive ideas.”[713]
We must keep to the harvest fields. Wordsworth’s solitary reaper called forth an exquisite lyric; but there is material more attractive for the student of refrains, however it lack poetic merit, in Boswell’s and Johnson’s stories of a Highland harvest, and one would be glad indeed if the doctor, who had all of Wordsworth’s curiosity on this point, could have made the reapers tell him what they sang.[714] He was coming close to Rasay in a boat, while, as Boswell says, the boatmen “sang with great spirit,” and Johnson remarked that “naval music was very ancient”;[715] then the 290men were silent, and from the near fields was heard the song of reapers, “who seemed to shout as much as to sing, while they worked with a bounding activity.” Johnson’s own account[716] of reaping on Rasay may refer to this or to another occasion. “I saw,” he says, “the harvest of a small field. The women reaped the corn, and the men bound up the sheaves. The strokes of the sickle were timed by the modulations of the harvest-song in which all their voices were united. They accompany in the Highlands every action which can be done in equal time with an appropriate strain, which has, they say, not much meaning;[717] but its effects are regularity and cheerfulness.” These hints from the Highlands are of peculiar importance because of the undoubted homogeneous conditions of life in the clans, keeping songs of this sort in an almost primitive state. Significant is the rhythm of shouts, significant the preponderance of the refrain. Lady Rasay showed Johnson “the operation of wawking cloth. Here it is performed by women who kneel upon the ground and rub it with both their hands, singing an Erse song all the time.” Boswell speaks of their “loud and wild howl”; and Dr. Hill[718] quotes Lockhart that women at this work screamed “all the while in a sort of chorus. At a distance the sound was wild and sweet enough, but rather discordant” at close quarters.