Chapter V · THE DIFFERENCING ELEMENTS OF COMMUNAL POETRY (continued 3)

The Lowlands of Scotland, too, had their kirn,^[719] and the English harvest-home, practically the same thing, had merry songs and refrains down to living memory. What must 291these songs have been, when, if Professor Skeat^[720] is right in his estimate and inference, on one estate of two hundred acres in Suffolk no less than five hundred and fifty-three persons were assembled for harvest? At almost any period of English country life one finds the rural philosopher looking back, like the Rev. Dr. Jessopp now,^[721] to kindlier and more communal times, greater harvests, keener jollity, a wider and deeper social sense; so Overbury’s franklin felt that he held a brief for the tempus actum. “He allows of honest pastime, and thinkes not the bones of the dead anything bruised, or the worse for it, though the country lasses dance in the churchyard after even-song. Rocke Monday, and the wake in summer, shrovings, the wakefull ketches on Christmas eve, the hoky or seed-cake, these he yearly keepes.” Of this festal round harvest-home was culmination, since it knitted the bond between labour and rest, and was the pledge of plenty, the high tide of the agricultural year. Three elements may be noted in this harvest-home so far as the refrain is concerned; first, the shouting, the choral cries and songs of the labourers in the field as the last sheaf is cut and bound; secondly, the march homeward with the hock-cart to the cadence of loud refrains and songs, with the thrice-repeated procession about barn and yard; and thirdly, the more elaborate ceremonial of those gatherings which marked the safe accomplishment of harvest. Moreover, in any of these cases a progress may be noted from the rude but cadenced shouts, the refrains and chorals, through definite songs of harvest, up to all manner of offshoots and distortions,—fixed rites, speeches, sermons, pantomime, beggings, what not; but even in the last and worse estate of the communal harvest-song there is everywhere echo of the refrain, everywhere echo of the dance. 292The breaking up of communal labour has left mainly the songs and cries of working folk on any given farm or estate; but the songs of a common festival for harvested crops still linger in customs of the village,—now a traditional march of the elder folk, now some half-understood dance and walk of the maidens, such as Hardy describes in his Tess, and now a mere song of village children coming in a band from the search for berries, as in the Black Forest:—

Holla, holla, reera,

Mer kumme us d’Beere.^[722]

Lithuanians coming back from the field, or in any communal gathering, when they have sung through their traditional stock of songs, call for a new ditty; amid jest and jollity some one strikes up a daina of his own, composing as he sings; the rest repeat in chorus, correct the words, add to them,—and so a new song is made, and, if it finds favour, is handed down, and even passed to the neighbour villages. This custom, however, is fast going out of date.^[723]

In some places the day when harvest begins is still a time of communal and ritual importance; Würtemberg reapers, men and women, gather in the early dawn and sing a choral for blessing on their work.^[724] As they go to the field, the throng still sing choruses, improvised verses, and traditional ballads; and when they march home at dusk to their village, they sing songs, often modern enough, but, as 293Pfannenschmid points out, substitutes for older and doubtless far more communal singing, which indeed lingers in the unintelligible refrain. In many places, however, chorus, refrain and song, whether communal or alien, to be sung at harvest and threshing, are dying out or dead; in Normandy, says Beaurepaire,^[725] at the fête de la gerbe, when the last of the wheat is threshed, no song of any sort is heard, though elsewhere the festival is loud with chorus. A scrap of the refrain sung in another part of France—

Ho! batteux, battons la gerbe,

Battons-la joyeusement, ...

Beaurepaire heard, to be sure, here and there in Normandy; but it was no longer a refrain of labour, and was attached to a love-song.^[726]

The main ceremony, of course, is at the end of harvest. In many places a custom still prevails, that when the last sheaf is to be cut, a portion of grain is left standing, and the reapers now dance about it with repeated cries, sometimes of vague mythological tradition like “Wold, Wold, Wold,” and with songs; now bare their heads, and pour food and drink upon the spot; now let the “bonniest lass” cut this remnant, dress it, and bring it home as the “corn-baby”; now throw their 294sickles at it to see who can cut it down;^[727] and so on, in variety of form, but all to the same purpose. In Flanders they sing, when the last load is taken from the field,

Keriole, keriole, al in!

’t loaste voer goat in.

Keriole, Keriole, al in!^[728]

There is every reason to think that some rite of this sort, accompanied with communal refrain and song, was once universal in agricultural life.^[729] The corn-baby just described as decked in silk and ribbons and brought home with singing, is also known as the kirn-baby, the ivy-girl, and the maiden; so that harvest-home is here and there called the maiden-feast.^[730] The songs belong primarily on the field and with the homeward faring cart; but customs change. In Suffolk at harvest suppers some one is crowned with a pillow and the folk all sing I am the Duke of Norfolk,^[731] though elsewhere in the country the old note remains. Still farther from the field, Hertfordshire countrymen sing The Barley Mow in alehouses after their day’s labour; but in another part of Suffolk this is a festal song chanted at the harvest-supper “when the stack, rick, or mow of barley is finished.” It is a song of repetitions, and holds an old refrain.^[732] For this song at the harvest-home supper, its variations, corruptions, 295survivals, its refrains, and its choruses, one would need a book; a description or two of recent doings must suffice. “At the harvest suppers up to some twenty years ago,” say Broadwood and Maitland, “while the other guests were still seated at the table, a labourer carrying a jug or can of beer or cider filled a horn for every two men, one on each side of the table; as they drank, this old harvest-song was sung and the chorus repeated, until the man with the beer had reached the end of the long table, involving sometimes thirty repetitions of the first verse. After this, the second verse was sung in the same manner.” The chorus—from Wiltshire—ran thus:—

So drink, boys, drink, and see that you do not spill,

For if you do, you shall drink two, for ’tis our master’s will.

What is left here of communal song is the fact of the chorus and the infinite repetition; the song has a poor mixture of the bucolic with the buckish. The older collection of Dixon gives a better song:—

Our oats they are howed and our barley’s reaped,

Our hay is mowed and our hovels heaped,

Harvest Home! Harvest Home!

We’ll merrily roar out Harvest Home!

Harvest Home! Harvest Home!

We’ll ...

with another repetition of the line.^[733] The men who sang this chorus were still in thrall to an old custom at the barley 296harvest. On putting up the last sheaf, which is called the craw, or crow sheaf, the man who has it cries out,—

I have it, I have it, I have it!

Another asks,—

What hav’ee, what hav’ee, what hav’ee?

And the answer comes,—

A craw, a craw, a craw!

Then wild cheering, and off they go to the supper, where they sing a well-known cumulative song about the brown bowl, the quarter-pint, the half-pint, and so on.

These repeated cries, however, take us back to the field. In Devon, as Brand relates, they still cried “the neck”; a little bundle was made from the best ears of the sheaves, and when the last field was reaped, all gathered about the person who had this neck, who first stooped and held it near the ground. All the men doffed their hats and held them likewise and then cried, in a very prolonged and harmonious tone, The Neck, at the same time raising themselves upright, and elevating arms and hats above their heads, the holder of the neck doing likewise. This was done thrice; after which they changed their cry to wee yen,^[734] way yen, prolonged as before, and also sounded thrice; then boisterous laughter, amidst which they break up and hurry to the farmhouse,—a maimed rite, indeed, but of interest when compared with kindred doings. For the words are surely wreckage of an old refrain, full of repetitions, like that song Montanus rescued from the rites of midsummer-eve along the Rhine. Under the “crown,” boys, girls, and their elders dance in a ring and sing as they dance a sort of refrain which is made of incremental repetitions 297into a description of the game they are playing; meantime one person stands in the midst of the ring until he has played his part to the choral suggestion, a common element in other games of children. In these and kindred ceremonies it is clear that a concerted shouting was the main feature, but the shouts were rhythmical and went with the communal dance, not with a disintegrated, howling mob. At Hitchin farmers drove furiously home with the last load of harvest, while the people rushed madly after, shouting and dashing bowls of water on the corn; but this is chaotic, for old Tusser^[735] knew a better way:—

Come home lord singing,

Come home corn bringing.

In Germany the last load of grain is brought home with throwing of water and singing of traditional songs and shouts for the master. So too in English “youling,” when cider is thrown on the apple trees, at each cup “the company sets up a shout.”^[736] Doubtless the elaborate chorus of the Arval brothers had once its wild but cadenced shout of the whole festal throng, as they “beat the ground” in communal consent of voice and step; and this primitive shout recurs in all folksong, not only in the schnaderhüpfl, in the jodel which ends a stanza, but in those cries at the dance which have crept into the ballad itself. But the cadenced shout, the refrain, the infinite repetition of a traditional song, pass with the dance that timed them, and decorous reapers may now depute one of their number to act as spokesman; hence, as in 298Mecklenburg, the recited poem, or the little speech, or even, as in Hanover, a figure made of the stalks is furnished with a letter to be read aloud for the behoof of neighbours; and there are other infamies of the sort. So passes the old Harvest-home.

Of vast importance for agricultural life, and resonant with refrain and song, were those processions about the field, about parish boundaries, to sacred wells,^[737] to woods and groves to bring in the May, and for a hundred other purposes to a hundred other resorts. The solemn procession of a community, along with the festal dance, forms the oldest known source of poetry; and Kögel points out that in German even now the proper word for celebrating a festal occasion is begehen, while the corresponding noun is used in a mediæval gloss for ritus and cultus. The song of the Arval brothers had its origin in such a procession about the fields; and Vergil’s advice^[738] to the farmer shows that this rite was no monopoly of priests, or even of the man skilled in incantations, but a communal affair,—marching round the young crops, and dance and song at harvest:—

... thrice for luck

Around the young corn let the victim go,

And all the choir, a joyful company,

Attend it, and with shouts bid Ceres come

To be their house-mate; and let no man dare

Put sickle to the ripened ears until,

With woven oak his temples chapleted,

He foot the rugged dance and chant the lay.^[739]

299There can be no question of borrowing in these songs and dances, even in the simpler forms of ritual, which are found wherever rudest agriculture has begun. Doubtless only a change of religion deprives us of those songs, or some echo of them, which were sung in the famous procession of Nerthus,^[740] the terra mater, goddess of fertility and peace among the Germanic tribes who lived by the northern oceans two thousand years ago. These people, so Tacitus^[741] records the rite, “believe that she enters into human activity, and travels among them.” Drawn by cows, she is accompanied in her mysterious wagon by a priest; “those are joyful times and places which the goddess honours with her presence, and her visit makes holiday.”^[742]

Tacitus was interested in the mysteries of the rite; would that he had heard and transmitted the songs that rang out in honour of this German Demeter, and had described the dances of the folk about their fields!^[743] For, as Kögel points out, the later procession to bless crops and to ban all things hostile to 300their thriving, a custom still common in certain parts of Europe, is only a repetition of this old progress. Half-way between the time of Nerthus and the present occurs that Anglo-Saxon charm for making barren or bewitched land bear fruit; amid its excrescences of ritual, and under the alien matter, still lingers a hint of the old communal procession, the old communal song and dance; and perhaps Nerthus is dimly remembered in the cries of,—

Erce, Erce, Erce, earth’s mother,

which has a repetition familiar from many survivals,^[744] and in the lines:—

Hail to thee, Earth, all men’s mother,

Be thou growing in God’s protection,

Filled with food for feeding of men!

Again, one has the extremes of shouts, communal cadenced cries, and songs which are often quite irrelevant; thus in Brandenburg on Easter Monday girls march by long rows, hand in hand, over the young corn of each field, singing Easter songs, while the young men ring the church bells;^[745] but one learns that Wends of the fifteenth century greeted the early corn as they ran round it in wild procession, and hailed it “with loud shouting.”^[746]

About the year 1133, and along the lower Rhine, a procession was in vogue which may have been a survival of the 301worship of that goddess recorded by Tacitus and called Isis because her symbol was a ship; for in the mediæval rite such a ship was placed on wheels and carried about the country, followed by shouting bands and hailed at every halt with song and dance.^[747] The songs, turpia cantica et religioni Christianae indigna concinentium, were condemned by clericals,^[748] and the dances of scantily clad women, not unlike the festal dances of savage women in many places at this season of the year, were doubtless not only intrinsically objectionable, but pointed back to the heathen doings from which our Germanic folk were so slowly converted. A glimpse at this older worship is given by Gregory in his often-quoted story of the Langobards who offered a goat’s head to their “devil,” running about in a circle and singing impious songs.^[749] A survival of some such heathen rite, with ridiculous perversion of Christian legend, is the feast of the ass, the festival of fools, on Christmas or on St. Stephen’s day, when during mass the priest brays thrice and the congregation respond in kind; here and there, as in France, a hymn is sung, with refrain from the throng:^[750]—

Hez, Sir Ane, hez!—

and ending in what Hampson oddly calls “an imitation of the noisy Bacchanalian cry of Evohe!”—

302Hez va! Hez va! Hez-va-he!

Bialz, Sire Asnes, carallez

Belle bouche car chantez,—

a very far cry, indeed. After service, crowds marched through the streets, sang Fescennine songs, danced, and ended by “dashing pails of water over the precentor’s head.” It is needless to follow this degenerate choral over Europe, as it blends thus with rites of the church, passes into the song of the waits, and lingers in degraded form with the beggars or children who parade the countryside at Martinmas or in Christmas week, singing refrains that echo older and better song and doggerel that echoes nothing.

A soule-cake, a soule-cake,

was the refrain which Aubrey heard; but in modern Cheshire it is—

A soul! A soul! A soul-cake!

Please good Missis, a soul-cake!^[751]

printed here with full apologies to all outraged friends of the immensities and the eternities, who sought nobler stuff in a book on the beginnings of poetry. On Palm Sunday, near Bielefeld in Germany, the children go about with branches of willow and sing “all day long”—

Palm’n, Palm’n, Påsken,

Låt’t den Kukkuk kråsken,

Låt’t dei Viögel singen,

Låt’t den Kukkuk springen!^[752]

Most stubborn, of course, is this converted or Christian survival, and almost as stubborn the custom of the village and 303of remote agricultural communities; such a procession as Coussemaker^[753] describes, popular throughout Flanders and Brabant, with a fixed refrain, held its place even in the cities. Occasionally Church and State were opposed;^[754] a proclamation of Henry VIII forbade processions “with songes and dances from house to house,” and even carols were forbidden by act of Parliament in Scotland. Wakes^[755] were either abolished, or else passed into that curious communal revival, the love-feast and the watch-meeting of Methodists. But the communal song and procession are fast dying out, and the new century will hear little of them; although early in the old century the Christmas days^[756] heard many a shouting throng, now with cries of an guy, now gut heil, now hogmenay trololay, give us your white bread and none of your gray! 304and whatever other etymological puzzles the scanty records can show. These fragments of festal song are too far gone in corruption for profitable use. Aubrey^[757] felt the lapse, and made such memoranda as these: “get the Christmas caroll and the wasselling song;” “get the song which is sung in the ox-house when they wassell the oxen,” that is, with echo of an old refrain, where they drink “to the ox with the crumpled horne that treads out the corne”; and he has noted a few of these songs. The civil wars, he thinks, made an end of these old customs; “warres doe not only extinguish Religion and Lawes, but Superstition; and no suffimen is a greater fugator of Phantosmes than gunpowder.” But peace has its victories of this sort. Not long ago the procession about village and parish boundaries was common enough; the whole community took part in this festal affair, and all sense as of an individual purpose or individual ownership was laid aside. Shout, dance, song, banquet, even directly ceremonial acts, were the concern of a homogeneous throng, “our village” in strictest communal sense. On the march—for example, the boundary march at Hamelin, in the late autumn,—rose traditional songs, varied by noise of every sort; and at the feast which followed, gentle and simple joined hands in the dance, until, with recent innovations, the gentry withdrew, became mere onlookers, and at last left the old rite to fall, like most communal traditions, into a shabby, vulgar, discredited uproar of the lower classes, a thing common and unclean. A quite similar case of degeneration is quoted by Brand from the Gentleman’s Magazine for June, 3051790, as going on at Helstone in Cornwall.^[758] But where the prosperity of crop and barn is in question, the rites are more stubborn and hold their ground. This Helstone song welcomes summer; but before that was sung, processions of all kinds were wont to go about the fields, and in 1868 what the Times newspaper called a “ritualistic revival” came off in Lancashire, priest and choir making a progress through the fields with cross and banners, and singing as they went. Rogation week is still known as gang-week.^[759] In older times the community itself was priest and choir; the cases are plentiful and may be read in Brand’s account of “parochial perambulations.” Then there is the song of bringing home the May,^[760] the dance and song about the Maypole, with material and survival beyond one’s compass; enough to let them echo in the verses put by Nash into his chaotic but pretty play, where the clowns and maids sing as they dance:—

Trip and goe, heave and hoe,

Up and down, to and fro;

From the town to the grove

Two and two let us rove.

A-maying, a-playing:

Love hath no gainsaying;

So merrily trip and go.^[761]

306The voices of the real maying folk are here, and the steps, lightly touched by art in the transfer to the play; in that Furry-Day Song at Helstone, with its opening about Robin Hood and Little John, there is a rougher but less effective refrain:—

With ha-lau-tow, rumble O!

For we were up as soon as any day O!

And for to fetch the summer home,^[762]

The summer and the May O!

For summer is a-come O!

And winter is a-gone O!

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

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

307Alle ir herren mein,

Der Sommer ist fein!

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

Stab aus, stab aus,

Stecht dem Winter die Augen aus!

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

Nay, Ivy, nay,

Hyt shal not be, iwys;

Let Holy hafe the maystry

As the maner ys.^[767]

These flytings came to be extraordinarily popular, and it is hard to draw a line between the volkspoesie and the volksthümliche; learned allegory, which was early on the ground, has the mark of Cain upon it, and cannot be missed. Probably Böckel^[768] is right in looking on the winter and summer songs as originally communal, with those dialogues between soul and body, which one finds in nearly every literature of Europe, as a learned and allegorical imitation; a combination of the two kinds is not unusual.^[769] So one passes to all manner 308of debates,^[770]—riches and poverty, wine and water, peasant and noble, priest and knight, down to Burns’s Twa Dogs; but it is the old communal sap that keeps holly and ivy green, and an old communal rite, the driving out of winter or of death, lingers in the verses which German children still sing to the dance:^[771]—

Weir alle, weir alle, weir kumma raus,

Weir brenge enk’n Tod hinaus;

Der Summa is wieder kumme,

Willkummen, lieber Summe!^[772]

Refrain and chorus of labour among savages have been noted here and there in the foregoing pages; to collect them to any extent would be useless. They are found everywhere, and show that stage of development at which the repetition of a single sentence, often of a single word, affords unmeasured delight or ease. Individual singing is almost unknown in many savage tribes,^[773] and the refrain in its function as deputy of the older chorus, is less common than the chorus itself.^[774] Where the savage is still mainly a hunter, mainly a warrior, the refrain is insistent whenever a connected bit of description 309breaks away from the choral song, as if artistic poetry could not yet walk by itself; and where he has begun to till the soil, or even merely to gather plants and fruits, there is the chorus and there is the refrain of a rude harvest-home. For the hunter and warrior we may quote Heckewelder’s account.^[775] “Their songs are by no means inharmonious. They sing in chorus; first the men and then the women. At times the women join in the general song, or repeat the strain which the men have just finished. It seems like two parties singing in questions and answers, and is upon the whole very agreeable and enlivening.... The singing always begins by one person only, but others soon fall in successively, until the general chorus begins, the drum beating all the while to mark the time.” Their war-dance is described in the familiar terms; but Heckewelder adds a more interesting account of the feast which under agricultural conditions would be a harvest-home. “After returning from a successful expedition,” he says, “a dance of thanksgiving is always performed.... It is accompanied with singing and choruses, in which the women join.... At the end of every song, the scalp-yell is shouted as many times as there have been scalps taken from the enemy.” As to the rhythm, Heckewelder makes a statement much clearer than the accounts given in Schoolcraft’s question and answer, for he does not undertake to express Indian metres in terms of civilized poetry, but simply says that “their songs ... are sung in short sentences, not without some kind of measure harmonious to an Indian ear.”

These Indians, however, were not in the absolutely primitive stage, and the artist had elaborated dance, speech, song; in short, like European peasants of isolated communities a 310century ago, the redskin was at that point of poetical development where improvisation is a general gift, and every one is expected to compose his bit of song, leaning, of course, on the chorus, on refrain and repetition, and on those traditional phrases which even more than modern speech realized Schiller’s lines about the poet:—

Weil dir ein Vers gelingt in einer gebildeten Sprache

Die für dich dichtet und denkt, glaubst du schon

Dichter zu sein?

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

Crooked ear, crooked ear, walker at night,—

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

311Older views of the American savage show him in the warlike guise, to be sure, but with poetry overwhelmingly choral. Lafitau,^[778] who says that commerce with the white man has materially changed the savage’s customs, is determined to paint him in his unspoiled state. During an eclipse, for example, all the tribe dance in a peculiar manner, filling the air with lugubrious cries; that rhythm is in them, though it is no song in Lafitau’s ear, is proved by the dance, which, of course, compels a rhythm, and by that picture of the girl who shakes pebbles in a calabash, “trying meanwhile to make her rough voice accord with this importunate jingle.”^[779] Singing and dancing are the chief features of Indian social life, and constitute the main charm of the life to come; improvised songs, even speeches, occur, but general singing and dancing make the background of their poetry and fill their festivals.^[780] Everybody improvises, and has his special song,—a trait noted among the Eskimo; the dancers always sing, and apparently the singers always dance; the verse is measured, but has no rime, and individual songs are always supported by an accompanying he! he! in cadence from the throng, a sort of burden. Dramatic songs of war are common; and Lafitau gives a case marvellously like that Faroe ballad of the luckless fisherman, with satirist and victim in full view, although here the latter is passive, and is often forced by the laughter and scorn of the tribe to break away and hide his head in shame.^[781] Song-duels, too, as among the Eskimo, are frequent, with throwing of ashes, which makes Lafitau call on Athenæus for a parallel among the ancient Greeks. But, after all, what sticks in Lafitau’s mind about Indian dances is the fury of them and that wild he! he! which gave them cadence, but which often “made the whole village tremble and shake.” The war-dance is described in terms familiar to the reader of later accounts.

312Lery gives an older story, but in the same spirit as that found in Lafitau. Of great interest is the Huguenot’s account^[782] of a festivity which he and one Jacques Rousseau saw and heard performed by five or six hundred savages in a certain village. The men retired into one house, the women to another; Lery and his friend were shut in with the women, about two hundred in all. From the house of the men came a low murmur, like that of folk at prayers; and the women, pricking their ears, huddled together in great excitement. Then the noise grew in volume, and the men could be heard singing in concert, and often repeating their interjection, he, he, he, he; the women now began to reply in kind, crying, he, he, he, he, for more than a quarter-hour, leaping, meanwhile, and foaming at the mouth, till it was quite plain to Lery that the devil was entering into them. But this was not all. From another house a mob of children now tuned the hallowed quire; and the Huguenot, despite his year and a half in those parts, is free to say he felt a desire to be “en nostre Fort,” doubting the sequel of all this coil. Suddenly the women and children were quiet; and Lery could now hear the men singing and shouting “d’un accord merveilleux,” so that these “sweet and more gracious sounds” heartened him to go near the house of the men. He made a hole in the soft wall and looked in; then, with two friends, he went inside, saw the dance, and heard the songs, which ran on without stop. All the men stood in a close circle, but without clasping hands or stirring from the place, bent forward, moving only the leg and the right foot, each having his right hand on his buttocks, the arm and left hand hanging, and so danced and sang. It seems to have been a communal dance, like that of the Botocudos, save that certain priests—caraïbes—richly arrayed, holding in their hands “little rattles or bells made of a fruit bigger than an ostrich 313egg,” had evidently extraordinary powers. There is a remarkable picture by way of illustration,^[783] showing the naked dancer, bent over, as described, with a priest behind him, a parrot on a perch just above the dancer’s shoulder, and a monkey at his feet,—these doubtless an exuberance of the artist.

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

314Well he foretold this,

Well he foretold this,

Yes, he foretold this,

I, Pitale-Sharu,^[786]

Am arrived here.

Well he foretold this,

Yes, he foretold this;

I, Pitale-Sharu,^[786]

Am arrived here,—

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

The refrain has been considered as the main communal element in songs of labour; here are its functions in communal play, primarily a combination of consenting cries and movements in the festal dance. The song that always went with a dance got its name thence, and was called a ballad; and in the ballad, whether strictly taken as a narrative song, or as the purely lyrical outburst for which there is no better term than folksong, this consenting and cadenced series of words found its main refuge and record. The subject is complicated enough, and asks a volume to put it into any semblance of order; all that can be done here is to group the main facts in their relation to primitive poetry. Unless one holds fast to the idea that refrains represent the original choral song of the mass, one begins to explain them by their modern features, and thus, while accurate as to a certain 315stage of poetry, falls into error on the historic and genetic side. Ferdinand Wolf^[788] gives an admirable account of the refrain, an admirable definition, but with a wrong inference of origins, when he assigns it to the participation of the people or of the congregation in songs which were sung to them by one or more persons on festal occasions, where the throng repeated in chorus single words, verses, whole strophes, or else in pauses of the main song answered the singer with a repeated shout to express their agreement, applause, horror, joy, or grief,—a shout which often lost its real meaning and became a mere conventional choral cry. Hence, says Wolf, it is clear that the refrain is as old as songs of the people.^[789] It has been said that this statement is misleading in any genetic sense; it fails to note the growth of the exarch or foresinger into the poet, and to follow the backward curve of evolution to a point where the voice of the foresinger is lost in the voices of the choral throng itself, that raw material from which all poetry has been made. On the other hand, this definition undoubtedly states the facts of the refrain in its mediæval stage of survival from the chorus. In ballads, for example, it is the part taken by the throng in distinction from the part of the minstrel; but there is great difficulty in deciding how 316the throng actually sang the refrain. Names are no guide; and the terms, chorus, refrain, and burden are used in no exclusive fashion.^[790] Probably one will not stray far from facts if one assumes that whenever a ballad came to be sung artistically, as a part-song in the rough, the refrain—hey-no-nonny, the wind and the rain, or what not—was really a burden, “the base, foot, or under-song”;^[791] as is proved by the scene in Much Ado,^[792] where no man is in the group to sing this base or foot, and Margaret, wishing a song to which they can dance, cries,—“Clap us into Light o’ Love; that goes without a burden: do you sing it, and I’ll dance it.” A passage quoted by many writers from the old play, The Longer thou Livest the more Foole thou art, tells how Moros enters, “synging the foote of many songes”; and bits of them follow, an interesting list; a little later, three of the characters are to “beare the foote,” and there is much testing of the key. On the other hand, in Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair,^[793] there is the same play of getting key and tune, and Cokes “sings the burden” with Nightingale; but this is simply a couplet recurring at the end of each stanza. So Guest^[794] defines the burden as “the return of the same words at the close of each stave.” Is this right? For what one most wishes to know, so far as the singing of ballads is concerned, is whether the refrain, constant or intermittent, was sung as the “foot,” that is, contemporaneously with the regular lines, or after them, either as couplet or in alternation,—as in—^[795]

It was a knight in Scotland borne,

Follow, my love, come over the strand,

Was taken prisoner and left forlorne

Even by the good Earle of Northumberland.

317Here the fitness of things indicates intermittent singing of the refrain which thus makes a four-line stanza out of a two-line stanza; this is Rosenberg’s theory of the evolution of a ballad strophe.^[796] Certainly the refrain came to be used in artistic and late communal poetry to mark off the stanza as the rime marked off the verse. What we now call a chorus, a recurrent stanza, sung after each new stanza, is often a clear case in ballads; for example, in The Twa Magicians,^[797] that provocative and tuneful cadence of—

O bide, lady, bide,

And aye he bade her bide;

The rusty smith your leman shall be

For a’ your muckle pride.

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

Hey with a gay and a grinding, O!

distorted into—

Hey with the gay and the grandeur, O!

The question, as Professor Child acknowledged, is extraordinarily difficult even when narrowed down to ballads. It is discussed at length in an unpublished dissertation by the late Dr. J. H. Boynton, who decides for the simultaneous singing of the ballad strophe and the refrain,^[800] and incidentally 318for the growth of a four-line strophe out of the early strophe of two lines. Icelandic and Faroe ballads show the most archaic elements in the Germanic group, and “a large proportion of their refrains deal directly with the dance.” The “stem” is sung first by the leader of the dance, and is a “lyric in itself,” fit to go “with any ballad.” Now it is clear that whether the ballad and the burden were sung simultaneously, as Boynton believes to have been the case, or alternately, as certain English ballads seem to require, and as Guest assumed in his definition, this question of musical technique cannot affect the inference that the burden, a “lyric in itself” which serves as refrain, is older than the ballad or narrative song, and has most intimate relations with the steps of the dance. In other words, here is the refrain in its passage from a dominant place as choral repetition of the throng, timed to their steps and deriving its existence from these steps and from the expression of festal delight that prompted them, to an ancillary and subordinate place as choral support to the artistic progress of a narrative in song. This agrees with the records of communal song not only under savage conditions but among the homogeneous and unlettered communities of Europe. Neocorus,^[801] a priest who writes about the beginning of the seventeenth century, defending that unschooled song which he still heard at the dances and festivities of his countryfolk of the Cimbrian peninsula, and which still flowed so easily, although much of it was lost that ought to have been recorded and sung, describes their communal dance; it is in a fairly advanced stage, of course, and is led by an expert. First, this leader 319comes forward singing alone, or with a colleague, and begins a ballad. “And when he has sung a verse, he sings no further, but the whole throng, who either know the ballad or else have paid close attention to him, repeat and echo the same verse. And when they have brought it to the point where the leader stopped, he begins again and sings another verse.” This is again repeated. Presently, with the singing thus under way, a leader of the dance comes forward, hat in hand, dances about the room, and invites the whole assembly to join. Facts which have been given already, and facts still to be considered, show clearly that these leaders of song and of dance are deputies of the throng which once danced as a mass to its own choral singing. On the other hand, as Boynton noted, repetition and refrain may take the form of a genuine burden. In Icelandic ballads, the “burden-stem” was often in a different metre from the ballad stanza; it was sung “to support the voice by harmonious notes under the melody,” and “was heard separately only when the voices singing the air stopped.”^[802] But in the Faroe isles “the whole stem is sung first, and then repeated as a burden at the end of every verse.” This is certainly more natural than the process, known in Iceland, where a leader sings the incremental stanzas and the throng keeps singing the burden or accompaniment; although a very familiar ballad might so be sung, and the fact would of course indicate either a shifting of interest toward purely musical ends, as in Elizabethan England, or else a devotion on the part of the crowd to the dance proper and the refrain, while the narrative is left to the leader of the song.^[803]

Apart from the manner of singing it under later conditions, 320the refrain in itself, so far as ballads are concerned, is clearly the recurrent verse or verses sung by the festal crowd; and the nearer one comes to the source of a ballad, that is, to the dancing throng, the more insistent and pervasive and dominant this refrain becomes. That is the fact which nobody has ever denied. Jeanroy,^[804] in a careful discussion of origins, concludes that refrains are really fragments of song for the dance, now and then, as he hints, of songs of labour; he regards them solely in their function as lines sung at the end of a stanza, and like other scholars thinks they were “originally repeated by the chorus in answer to the soloist.”^[805] Elsewhere, however, he grants that this need not have been the universal fashion, and that now and then all the dancers may have sung all the song,^[806] a theory fortified by his conjecture that the refrain was once made up of imitative sounds. However, the modern refrain of the dance, best preserved among French and Italians, is a lively lilting couplet, or the like, to which the other riming verses are prefixed in the growth of the actual song, as in the stanzas quoted from Bujeaud:—

Là haut, dessus ces rochettes,

J’entend le haut-bois jouer,

Et vous autr’, jeunes fillettes,

Qui allez au bal danser,

Allez, allez, tenez vous dreites,

Prenez gard’ de n’ pas tomber.

321The transition is very evident. In another case^[807] the leader calls on the dancers to make some cry imitative of animals, which now serves as refrain; but, wherever found, the test of a really popular refrain, as Jeanroy insists, is that it was made for the dance. Read “in the dance,” and communal conditions are even better satisfied.

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

A l’entrada del tems clar, eya;^[808]

and so one may trace these invocations of nature to their later form at the beginning of a narrative song like Robin Hood and the Monk. This dancing of the round as an expression of feeling on the part of a throng—dancing in pairs, we know, did not reach Neocorus’s country, for example, until the middle of the sixteenth century—meets one everywhere in mediæval records, and it has died a reluctant death; 322unless observation be at fault, even children are ceasing to play the old round games common not many years ago, a city of refuge that seemed at one time so secure. But in those mediæval days one danced in throngs on almost any occasion; and impossible as the story may be if taken literally, there is truth enough for our purpose in that account^[809] of Leicester’s army in 1173 pausing on a heath, where they “fell to daunce and singe—

“Hoppe, Wylikin, hoppe Wyllikin,

Ingland is thine and mine.”

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

I can you thank; that is done well;

It is pity ye had not a minstrel

For to augment your solace.

and Sensual Desire replies:—

As for minstrel, it maketh no force,^[810]

Ye shall see me dance a course

Without a minstrel.

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

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

Ignorance says it “is the best dance without a pipe he has seen this seven year.” But Humanity inclines to think “a kit or taboret” would improve the dance; and the dancers retire to a tavern where they are sure “of one or twain of minstrels that can well play.” Humanity now proposes “to sing some lusty ballad”; but Ignorance is against all such 323“peevish prick-ear’d song,” and when he is told that prick-song in church pleases God, makes the often-quoted reply that there is no good reason why it is “not as good to say plainly Give me a spade, as Give me a spa, ve, va, ve, va, vade.” No; if a song is wanted, one of the good old sort will do; and there follows a list not unlike that of Moros in the play or that of Laneham in the letter, with the trifling exception that this runs into a helpless sort of burlesque. “Robin Hood in Barnsdale stood” is probably a genuine first line, and so are some of the other titles. The main thing is that ballad singing is opposed to prick-song and the new fashions generally, and that a refrain from all lusty throats is better for the dance than pipe or minstrel. The refrain in this case is just the old exhortation to dance. This exhortation is common enough in folksong, alone or as a refrain:^[811]—

Springe wir den reigen ...

Saute, blonde, ma joli’ blonde ...

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

324Here we go the jingo-ring,

The jingo-ring, the jingo-ring,

Here we go the jingo-ring

About the merry-ma-tanzie.

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

A monk went walking along the strand,—

Hey! ’twas in the May!

He took his sweetheart^[815] by the hand,—

Hey! ’twas in the May!

So gay!

Hey! ’twas in the May!

325Here the dance has held its own with the story; but in most cases, as the foresinger or exarch takes command, the new verses, beginning as incremental repetition in the dance, grow bolder and learn to walk alone; singing is still a condition, but the dance is only an occasion, not a cause; and finally the crowd passes over the bridge of chorus and refrain into a quite passive state of audience, with intermittent echo and applause, utterly disappearing at last behind the sheets of a broadside.

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

Me promenant dans la plaine,

(Tir’ ton joli bas de laine)

J’ai trouvé un Capitaine.

(Tir’ ton, tir’ ton, tir’ ton bas,

Tir’ ton joli bas de laine,

Car on le verra.)

Then, “il m’a appelé’ vilaine”; “je ne suis point si vilaine;” “le plus jeun’ fils du roi m’aime;” “il m’a donné pour étrenne”—“une bourse d’écus pleine,” “un bouquet de marjolaine;” “je l’ai planté dans la plaine;”—and, for good last, and with that touch of pathos common in these things, 326despite the gay tone, “s’il fleurit, je serai reine”; and so, with the refrain, an end. Full of communal elements, this song is nevertheless of an artistic type and of an aristocratic origin, an offshot of the pastourelle and its kin; popular enough, of a certain simplicity and beauty, it is not directly communal in its tone; it has gone among the people, and yet, though it was imitated from purely communal refrains, like other and older songs treated so successfully by Jeanroy, it has not come directly from the people. In fact, the communal refrain of the dance is seldom in such independent case as this infectious lilt; when it is not a survival, as in children’s games, its best chance for life is as parasite to a narrative ballad or even to a “lyric of sentiment and reflection,” as anthologies call them. Thus Ten Brink is undoubtedly right when he takes the refrain as old, traditional, communal, and the stanzas as new and artistic, in that pretty English lyric, Ichot a burde in boure bryht, which has the refrain at the beginning, as in many Provençal ballads:—

Blow, northern wind,

Send thou me my sweeting!

Blow, northern wind, blow, blow, blow!

Compare this with the artistic refrain of Alisoun, from which it differs so widely, and with the refrain of the Cuckoo Song, in its recorded form part of an elaborate composition, but doubtless taken from the “nature” refrain of a dance. The ballads and folksongs of Europe are of course in the transitional stage. They ought to be sung, but many of them may have been recited; they echo the cadence of a dancing throng, and have often timed the dance, though they are separable from such company. It must be borne in mind, however, that many ballads in which one would not now suspect such uses, were employed to regulate the slow steps of a dance. Narrative ballads were in great favour for the purpose; 327Faroe islanders danced to the stories of Sigurd, and the Russians, whose folksongs are always choral and without instrumental music, dance the khorovod to a narrative song,—in fact, the word means a blended song and dance; while even the Robin Hood ballads, if we may believe the Complaynt of Scotland, as well as some ballad of Johnny Armstrong, were sung at the dance of the shepherds. Savages sing narrative poems to the dance, and so do Melanesians.^[817] One can therefore understand the statement made by Steenstrup,^[818] that every genuine ballad has a refrain, though this may not be recorded; for the refrain is the tie which binds a ballad to its parent dance. As one retraces the path of the ballad, the refrain grows in importance, slowly pushing the leader or soloist nearer and nearer to the throng, until he is lost in it; and a repetition of cadenced choral cries becomes the main factor of poetry. As every one knows, those cadenced cries were regulated by the dance; and to this important factor in early poetry, already considered under the head of rhythm, we must now turn.

Dancing, most momentary of all the arts, as A. W. Schlegel called it, in Wagner’s words “the most real,” seeing that the 328whole man is concerned in it, “from head to foot,” with motions and gestures that give it tone, and rhythm that gives it speech,^[819] was also the primitive and universal art, the sign of social consent; consenting steps, with mimicry of whatever sort, timed a series of rude cries which expressed the emotion of the moment, and so grew into articulate language. But the song detached itself from dancing long before dancing could shake off the choral cries and the refrain. Among Tasmanians and Australians songs already existed apart from the dance; but there was no dance without a song, and the dances were prevailingly of the whole horde or clan. Survivals of this primitive stage, and the early history of dancing in all quarters of the world, afford good warrant for the conclusion of Böhme;^[820] “no dance without singing, and no song without a dance,” is his axiom for earliest times. Moreover, this proof of the connection of song and dance in the primitive horde, a bond which one or two writers have lately tried to sever, but without success, disposes of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s attempt^[821] to explain the dance as a modification of the old movement of obeisance.

Dancing is universal among savages; and if a few cases occur which make against this doctrine, one may safely assume, as Ribot does, and even Wallaschek,^[822] that they are 329due to insufficient observation,^[823] or else, at the worst, that they belong to tribes with hardly any claims of humanity, degenerates, retrogrades, who have no social order and consequently no dance. Again, the primitive form of the dance is to be found in the choral throng; but it must be borne in mind that even rudest tribes can develop an art of complicated, traditional, and ritual character,^[824] which in its turn breeds the solo and the professional artist in dancing. However, the choral dies hard even under civilized conditions; among savages it is prominent everywhere and in full vigour. Waitz,^[825] speaking of tribes in the South Seas, says that song there is mainly choral, and dancing, affair of the community as a whole, is as universal as song, often passing into mimicry and a rude drama. Everywhere, too, song is accompanied by dancing, and when women thus dance and sing they clap hands or slap the hip in time with their steps and words, after the manner of their sisters in mediæval Europe. Musical instruments are few. Chamisso noted now and then what he took to be degeneration of song into mere howling; but we know there is a more excellent way to explain these festal and cadenced cries. Dancing is in order at each important moment for the community,—when strangers arrive, when war is imminent, at feasts of every sort. As with these natives of the South Sea, so with other and more savage tribes. It is useless to insist in detail upon the African love of dancing, which goes on every evening and in every village for hours at a time. “The natives of Obbo began their dance by all singing together a wild but pleasant-sounding melody in chorus,^[826]” is only one of many descriptions 330of this favourite communal diversion; but the legends and the complicated artistic dances which exist side by side with the choral song and the communal dance warn one that while primitive ways survive on the Dark Continent, there is a lower stage of song and dance to be found elsewhere. Like the Botocudos in South America, the Australians are on a quite elementary level with regard to dance and song; they attach more importance to the gesture than to the articulate word, so far as the telling of stories or the describing of events is concerned, and they know scarcely any individual performance.^[827] Dance and song are of the horde, the clan, as a whole. Choral shouts, refrains which repeat a word or a short phrase indefinitely, and so time the steps of the throng, make the original social art; with the aid of gesture, mimicry of labour, of feats of hunting, this passes into kangaroo-dances, erotic pantomimes, sham fights, and all the rest. Perhaps, as Hirn^[828] suggests, the dance of the Weddas, or Veddahs, in Ceylon is as primitive as anything of the kind; although Ehrenreich’s account of the Botocudos^[829] shows little if any advance. A spear is stuck into the ground to serve as centre for the ring of dancers, who move with swaying of legs and arms to the cadence of their own singing,—call it rather shouting,—while they keep exact time by slapping the naked stomach.^[830] From this communal dance and song, emerges after a while, as in the case of the Botocudos, an individual performer; and it is clear that elaborate dances, such as those 331given for the benefit of Captain Cook and other foreign visitors, are an outgrowth of this primitive huddling in mass with concert of cries and movements. It is significant that instinct of the clan calls for some concerted dance and song as necessary preface for war or any similar doing of the community as a whole; in long range of development this is the war-dance of our own Indians, often described, where a general chorus serves as background and stimulus alike to the volunteers who step forward singly and promise, in chanted and improvised song that times their steps, deeds of individual valour in the impending fight. So, perhaps, the gab of romance, the gilp or gilpewide^[831] of Germanic warriors, was originally made not only, as we know it, in the mead hall, but to the chorus of the tribes and with the steps of a dance. At close range, however, and with the foe in sight, it was a communal and general gab, a choral performance; witness the interesting account of Captain Cook.^[832] In the first voyage, some four hundred islanders, about to attack the captain and his friends, but hesitating, at length “sung the song of defiance and began to dance.” Such was a particular case; and in his general statement, Cook says that New Zealanders, before they begin the onset, “join in a war-song, to which they all keep the exactest time”; and while he does not mention the dance here, it is evidently implied, for his scattered accounts of skirmish and fight are full of it. A curious case is what would seem to be a war-dance in a boat which was attacking Cook’s ship; as it approached, the savages in the boat varied menaces with peaceful talk, “till, imagining the sailors were afraid of them, they began the war-song and dance, and threw stones on board the ship.” Then Cook goes on: “In the war-dance their motions are numerous, their limbs are distorted ... they shake their darts, brandish 332their spears ... they accompany this dance with a song, which is sung in concert; every strain ending with a loud and deep sigh. There is an activity and vigour in their dancing which is truly admirable; and their idea of keeping time is such that sixty or eighty paddles will strike at once against the sides of their boats, and make only one report.” Concerted singing, this communal initiative, goes not only before war, but before embassies, messages of peace, greetings, and the like; and the dance is clearly an original prop of this song, now and then retained, but often omitted. In Cook’s last voyage,^[833] “a double canoe, in which were twelve men, came towards us. As they drew near the ship, they recited some words in concert, by way of chorus, one of the number first standing up and giving the word before each repetition,”—a “solemn chant,” Cook calls it. Readers of these and other voyages in the South Seas, know how singing rather than speaking takes the foreground of private as well as of tribal life; a chief coming on board the ship hails it with a song to explain his visit, and there is the case of the islander who told in song his story of life aboard an English ship, and, asking the native who had met him what news there was from home, put his excited questions in rhythm and got the equally excited answers in rapid chant. Behind this individual song is the chorus; with the chorus is nearly always the dance; wherever the dance, there is song. Musical instruments the islanders knew, of course,—drums, perhaps, best; but as Cook says^[834] of a great dance which was given for him, it did not seem “that the dancers were much assisted by these sounds, but by a chorus of vocal music, in which all the performers joined at the same time.”

333Indians of the Western continent have the same tale to tell, and it has been told in part already by Lery, Lafitau, and the older travellers. A century and more ago, Carver^[835] noted that the savages of North America “usually dance either before or after every meal”;^[836] and “they never meet on any public occasion, but this makes a part of the entertainment.... The youth of both sexes amuse themselves in this manner every evening.” At the feasts and other dances, “every man rises in his turn, and moves about with great freedom and boldness, singing, as he does so, the exploits of his ancestors. During this the company, who are seated on the ground in a circle, join with him in making the cadence, by an odd tone, which they utter all together, and which sounds ‘Heh, heh, heh.’” This they repeat “with the same violence during the whole of the entertainment.” “The women dance without taking any steps ... but with their feet conjoined, moving by turns their toes and heels.... Let those who join in the dance be ever so numerous, they keep time so exactly with each other that no interruption ensues.”

In recent times the intricate dances, ritual and ceremony which, of course, reach back in far tradition, have been studied and recorded; but this is not a primitive phase of the art,^[837] and even among the Moqui and Navajo tribes of 334New Mexico, where instrumental music is common, now and then the dancers furnish their own music, each one rolling out “an aw, aw, aw, aw, in a deep bass tone.”^[838] So in ancient Mexico, where civilization of a sort had long held sway, the dances “were almost always accompanied by singing”; this, however, was “adjusted by the beating of instruments.”^[839] But this public dance is no longer communal in the old way; ritual of the clan becomes a state religion, while dance and song are not only lifted but expanded. There is a sense of ritual, to be sure, about the dance of a small community, as when among the Bechuanas, to ask a man “what he dances,” is the same as asking to what clan or tribe he belongs, a phrase curiously akin to Gosson’s remark^[840] that “to daunce the same round” means to be of the same flock. But all this belongs only to the primitive horde or the late homogeneous community; the dance of such a little clan about their growing crops yielded to traditional and solemn rites, and the spontaneous singing and dancing which Vergil recommends to his farmers^[841] is really a more primitive stage of the art than the seemingly older ceremony of the Arval brothers, which had already hardened into ritual and belonged to a close corporation under control of the state. Tribal dances become expiatory 335and religious acts at a very early stage of culture; it is easy to see that the records would preserve such a dance only when it had lost some of its spontaneous character, and taken on a ritual form. Germanic, Slavic, and Romance peoples have the communal dance surviving as a religious act; and it was one of the hardest tasks for councils and bishops to stop this dancing of the congregation within the church itself. Often they allowed it in a modified form. As a part of ritual, choristers still dance before the altar of the cathedral at Seville; sixteen boys in blue and white form “in two eights,” facing each other, and the priests kneel in a semi-circle round them. Then “an unseen orchestra” begins to play, the boys put on their hats and sing the coplas in honour of the Virgin:—

O mi, O mi amada

Immaculada!—

“to a dance measure.” After this they begin to dance, “still singing,” a “kind of solemn minuet.”^[842] This is done at the feast of the Immaculate Conception. In the sixteenth century boys and girls danced about an image of Christ set upon the altar of German churches, singing Christmas songs, while their parents stood by, also singing and clapping their hands in time with the dance.^[843] From these good folk to the German barbarians “running in a circle” round the goat’s head and “singing diabolical songs,” as seen and heard by Gregory,^[844] is no long step backward in development if it is in chronology. When the children were at last driven from the churches, and when the old ring-dance was at last forgotten by their elders, even in the fields and about the fires of St. John’s Eve, the little ones made a brave rescue and kept up 336the ritual in their games. Now even these are vanishing. Outside of Europe, sacred and even national dances of the throng go this same path of development and decline. The Hebrew communal dance passed into traditional forms;^[845] and there are other dances, outside of religious cult, which acquire a fixed form and are passed down as of tribal and even national significance. One thinks of the Pyrrhic dance;^[846] indeed, a study of the sword-dance in all its varieties, and from this double point of view, communal and national, would be of great interest. Savages, as Donovan remarked, imitate in their dancing now the movement of animals, now the clash of arms in war, and again, though not to the extent asserted by Scherer, erotic gestures.^[847] For the second sort, a gymnastic motive, the sense of preparation and drill for future fighting, and a festal or reminiscential motive, combine to produce such an exercise as the sword-dance, a convenient name for this group, although the sword itself is not always in evidence. Chronology is here of no account; for earliest 337records may show a well-defined and almost national exercise such as Tacitus noted among the Germans, and very late examples can be found of the purely communal sword-dance, with flyting, songs, refrain, and rustic acting, as in the Revesby Sword Play;^[848] while Xenophon tells of a little drama, enacted by soldiers of the ten thousand, combining the weapon dance, the imitated fight, and other elements, in terms which could be matched by many an account given by traveller or missionary of a similar affair among quite savage tribes.^[849] It is easy to see how one of the many paths from this dance of mimicry, exercise, and rhythmic shouting, would lead to the narrative song or ballad, and how such a ballad would long cleave to a particular traditional dance. The Phæacians have a narrative song sung to them as they are dancing, and when two dance alone, tossing the ball,^[850] “the other youths ... beat time”; but an older and more communal habit is found in the dances of the Faroe islanders, where the gestures and expression of face show how keenly the folk feel what they sing;^[851] in the Icelandic rimur, narrative songs which went with the dance; on the Cimbrian peninsula, where ballads about the battle of Hemmingstede were used for the same purpose; in scattered rural communities^[852] of Europe; and among savage tribes the world over. It has 338been made clear to probation how the narrative ballad grew out of a tribal or communal dance; and it is equally clear that there was an even shorter path from dance to drama.^[853]

From this point of view, it is easy to understand why the dance plays such a part in the beginning of nearly every national literature, not only in the Dionysian origins of Greek drama, but in less obvious ways. The same ecstasy, indeed, appears again and again in a kind of panic dance; in the summer of 1374 along the Rhine and in the Netherlands, and again in 1418 at Strassburg, communal excitement went quite mad in the St. John’s or the St. Vitus’s dance, vast crowds of men and women leaping and shouting, garlanded, singing, as they reeled, a refrain which might belong to the usual dances of St. John’s Eve:—

Here Sent Johan, so, so,

Vrisch ind vro,

Here Sent Johan!

until they fell exhausted, but still raving.^[854] These panic dances reproduce in some features the mad dance of mænads and all that “wild religious excitement,” that “Bacchic ecstasy,” which lay behind the Hellenic drama, and anticipate as mad a dance of as wild an ecstasy, though not religious, when the mob of Paris dances the carmagnole to its own singing; but all this belongs to the pathological side of the case, and one turns to the harvest-field, and to the village oak, where merry dances often set a rhythm heard in later and nobler verse. Not long ago, poetry of every kind was thought to start in some religious rite, and a god or goddess lay hid under the most harmless rime of the yokel; of late, however, a wholesome tendency has prevailed to stop the 339search of sky and storm-cloud and other far-away haunts for an explanation of the rustic dance and of the rustic refrain. On one hand, the chase, war, whatever concerned the routine of nomadic life, and on the other hand, among agricultural folk, the round of seedtime and harvest, days of plenty or of want, and in both cases, the common joys and sorrows of mankind, are now thought to be a better reason for communal dance and song. Primitive man did not go about with his eyes fixed upon the heavens; and it is not the goddess of spring and sunshine transferred to those harvested crops as signs of her presence which explains a Nerthus or a Ceres, but rather a slow inference from local delight in harvest up to a great feast of gathered and related tribes, involving wider ideas of divinity and arriving by easy stages at the abstraction of one beneficent deity sending out her largess of sun and quickening showers. The dance, then, with nomadic tribes was a triumph, an outburst of communal elation, dealing in its mimicry with scenes of the war or hunt, and cadenced by shout and song that echoed a clash of arms; with the agricultural community it was a harvest-home, with recapitulation of the rural year, imitated acts of sowing, planting, watching, reaping, storing, which survive in some sort to this day. In both kinds of life, nomadic and agricultural, the dance was an essential part of such rites as the wedding and the funeral, and is still considered in this way by peasants in remoter Europe. Thus in Dalmatia and Montenegro,^[855] the kollo, that is, circle, “the figure of all their dances, though the steps differ,” is danced at weddings. “Twelve or thirteen women ... danced in a circle, singing a slow and rather plaintive song ... while waiting for the bride.... In the meantime, the men ... walked in procession to the court before the church door, and danced in a circle.” Evidence of this sort is everywhere; it has been studied under the refrain; 340but the festal idea may be repeated here in comment on the meaning of our old English word and suffix lâc, and the related Gothic laiks,^[856] German leich, originally the combination of word, song, and dance—or march—in one communal act,^[857] with an easy transition into the idea of battle, the “play of spears,” where, indeed, this communal act always served as prelude, as well as into the idea of feast, ceremony, merriment. A festal song and dance after the fight, easily turned into ritual and thanksgiving to the gods, but once mere fighting the battle over again, was called in Norse the sigrleikr.^[858] Further philology would not be in place; enough that the earliest songs and poetry of Europe appear everywhere hand in hand with the dance,^[859] and that this dance is partly the triumph of victorious war, partly a triumph of peace and plenty, always, however, a festal and communal affair.

In considering this communal dance of Europe, one finds that it is practically inseparable from song, and the song is mainly sung by those who dance. In modern Greece, even, Fauriel^[860] found that “every new dance was the result of a new song, of which it formed the mimicry; it was never danced without this song, and fell with it into oblivion.” A study of the refrain showed how close this bond between song and dance must have been; and one sees how slowly and reluctantly the separation takes place, most reluctantly, of course, in the games of children. It must also be borne in mind that dancing by pairs is of comparatively recent date; Neocorus, one will remember, says it was unknown among 341his peasant neighbours between the German ocean and the Baltic until the middle of the sixteenth century, while Bladé makes this way of dancing a stranger to the Gascon countryfolk as late as seventy years ago. What they knew and practised was the old round, danced once to the songs of the dancers, but now dominated more and more by instruments;^[861] the song, when used, is led by a soloist who improvises a line or so which is repeated by the dancers in chorus, with a refrain for all stanzas. This round, of course, is the carole^[862] of Romance literature, known later as the branle, a dance or march of many, hand in hand, with chorus or refrain to time the steps;^[863] it was the main amusement of aristocratic folk, but derived directly from popular usage. Such an aristocratic dance is described in the Romaunt of the Rose.^[864] Dante refers^[865] 342to the practise of singing with the dance; and if we had his chapter on the ballata, we should have riches. On the dance-song of these Romance nations, and its absolutely communal origin, enough has been quoted already from such authors as Wolf and Jeanroy; and it would be waste of time to heap up evidence of the English ballad^[866] as it was danced in Elizabethan fields, and when the youth went out to “mix their songs and dances in the wood.” Dances of this sort we have already noted not only among shepherds, but in the Elizabethan theatre; besides the refrains of labour and merriment to which the actors danced, ballads were in demand. A good instance is in the old play of Like Wil to Like,^[867] where Nichol Newfangle, the Devil, and Tom Collier are on the stage. Says Nichol,—

Godfather, wilt thou daunce a little before ye go home to hell?...

Then, godfather, name what the daunce shall be.

“Tom Coliar of Croydon hath solde his cole.”

Why, then, haue at it by my father’s soule.

[Nichol Newfangle must have a gittorn or some other instrument (if it may bee), but if hee haue not, they must daunce about the place all three, and sing this song that followeth, which must bee doon also althoug they haue an instrumenth.]

And the song follows. Jigs were songs, largely improvised, and sung by actors as they danced; they came after the play.^[868] It was the fiddle, says Mr. Baring-Gould,^[869] “which 343banished the ballad as a song-accompaniment to a dance. Nevertheless, as a very aged fiddler told me ... in his early days the lads and maids always sang whilst dancing to his music.” On the stage this substitution was more immediate and thorough; so that in the days of George II, when Nancy Dawson “produced the novelty of singing as she danced,” she took the town by storm; though one may conjecture that it was the survival, not the “novelty,”^[870] in the case which thus aided her charm as a woman and her grace as a dancer. For rural England, like rural Europe, showed reluctance enough in giving up the good old way; a Scottish parson, moreover, writing in 1793, tells of a large stone, set up in one of the islands, about which he saw “fifty of the inhabitants” gathered on the first day of the year, and “dancing in the moonlight” with no other music than their own singing.^[871] About such stones, but by preference about the village linden,^[872] folk danced to their own singing in Germany down to modern times; and as the dance was an even movement in a ring, the dancers hand in hand, it was quite possible for them to sing the ballads which seem to us grotesquely unfit for the lively springing of single performers as well as for the rapidly gliding couples. Leaping, and livelier motions generally, followed the dance in a ring; but it was to the latter that ballads were sung and in the first instance composed.^[873] The dances which go mainly to a refrain represent of course an older stage than those 344which are danced to a ballad, to a narrative song; the early dance knows only present action, and exhorts or describes, as in the Flemish dances^[874] now mainly relegated to children.

As Mr. Thomas Hardy is so fond of reminding his readers, this is a merry, dancing world no more; even youth can hardly make shift “to revel in the general situation” as all men used to do. Weltschmerz is to blame, no doubt, and there is Mr. Baring-Gould’s fiddle, which has done a deal of mischief. Rivals to the human voice, successful rivals, were early at the dance,—harp, lyre, pipe, what not. South Sea islanders were fain, not of these, but of the drum. With the dominant note of alien music came a desire to break up the ring, to dance in pairs, or even to listen and look on. Meddlesome bishops and officials of every sort were bound to destroy this communal dance as a place of scandal; and we have seen how the chimney and the clean, warm fireside and the lamp drew sober folk from the village dances and left these to the baser element. One can take quite seriously that petition^[875] of the would-be peasant to restore legal sanction to the village dance; and one is interested to hear the petitioner complain that it is the violin now where once was the bagpipe,—and once, too, he might have added, the echoing refrain. No, the dance as well as the dancing song, the ballad proper, is going out of date;^[876] and not only the dance in this communal and social meaning, but the very fact of rhythm, which is the soul of the dance. Children play these games less and less, although the kindergarten makes some stand in the matter; 345and even in music, as Bücher^[877] points out in those pages to which we have so often referred, teachers and artists are fain to give rhythm an ancillary place and put melody, harmony, in the foreground. One feels little displeasure, says Bücher, at the sight of unrhythmic movements; and what would be said of an orator who, like his Athenian brother, should address a political assembly as his “fellow dancers”? But the decline set in early; even in Sir Thomas Elyot’s day,^[878] dancing is “that exercise whiche of the more parte of sadde men”—serious folk, that is—“is so litle estimed.” So, too, in imperial Rome. When the Romans hired mimes to dance for them, some lover of the old ways might have said of the communal dance, expression of social union and social equality and the strong, compact state, what the stern old orator said of his profession when he first heard hired applause in the courts of law: centumviri, hoc artificium periit,—“judges, oratory is doomed!” In both cases one is dealing with the decline of communal force and the growth of individual power.

Our business, however, is with the past. It is clear that movements of labour, particularly in a reminiscent festal act, and movements of the communal dance, furnished the raw material of poetry. In all cases the primitive dance, or what seems to come nearest to that state of the art, is a dance of masses of men for one purpose and to one exact rhythm.^[879] Equal sets of movements gave the verse, and sets of these sets gave in time the strophe. Communal interest, 346resulting in the communal expression, added contents to form; and shout, movement, cadence, are all born of this absolutely social and communal impulse. To use the good old word, here is the poetry of nature; facing this communal material, what are we to say of the changes wrought upon it by individual art?^[880]

347