Chapter V · THE DIFFERENCING ELEMENTS OF COMMUNAL POETRY

Survival of primitive and communal poetry as it can be detected in the ballads and the popular rimes of Europe, in the songs of those savage tribes which seem to come nearest to conditions of prehistoric life, and in the beginnings of national literatures so far as any trustworthy record remains, must now be studied analytically, not as poems, but rather with a view to the elements which difference poetry of the people from the poetry of individual art. That a considerable body of verse, European as well as savage, represents the community in mass rather than the solitary poet, is universally conceded; it is generally but not universally conceded that the making of such communal poetry is under modern conditions a closed account. If this view is correct, a curve of decline and extinction can be drawn corresponding to that curve of the developing artistic and individual type considered above. With this assertion of a closed account, however, must go a caution of great weight; the actual traditional ballad of Europe is not to be carried back into prehistoric conditions. A process of this sort brings ridicule upon arguments which ought to be made in rational terms; and it is to the elements of prehistoric poetry surviving in a ballad, and in kindred verse, that one must look, not to the whole poem, which is a complex of communal and artistic materials. One may say without fear of a contradiction in terms that the ballad has in it elements which go back to certain conditions of poetic production utterly unknown to the modern poem of art. These elements also occur as fragments 164in popular rimes; but the ballad has drawn chief attention because it is a complete and readable poem in itself.

These ballads of Europe have a large literature both of collection and of criticism;^[339] and in some cases, notably the English, collection of material has the melancholy advantage of being final. Despite arguments of Mr. Joseph Jacobs and Dr. John Meier,^[340] the making of ballads is a closed account; that is, a popular ballad of to-day, even if one allows the term to pass, is essentially different from a ballad such as one finds in the collection of Professor Child. Conditions of production in the street, the concert, the café-chantant, even in the rural gatherings^[341] controlled by that “bucolic wit,” are different from the conditions of production which prevailed in a homogeneous and unlettered community of mediæval Europe. A. E. Berger, in a popular essay^[342] which may go with that of Dr. John Meier as representing an extravagant rationalism now in vogue about poetry of the people quite as extreme as the extravagant 165romanticism of Grimm, limits the difference between this poetry and the poetry of art to the difference of oral and of written record; but he quite concedes the closed account. Here, however, the two rationalists get into a deadlock. Dr. Meier will not allow the closed account, goes back to Steinthal, and against the modern view asserts that dichten des volks, the ownership of a poem by the folk at large, who sing it into a thousand changing forms. The process according to Meier is now what it always has been, first an individual composition, then oblivion of the individual and popularity for the song, which is felt by the people—“a necessary condition of folk-poetry”—to be their own, with manifold changes due in no case to any artistic purpose or deliberation. Now in all this Dr. Meier puts himself at odds with the defenders of oral poetry as held apart from written and printed verse, a distinction which he ignores. He agrees with them that, in the words of Berger, “there is no organic difference between poetry of the people and the poetry of art;” but the difference that does exist for Meier prettily contradicts the difference assumed by the others, Berger and the rest regarding the ballad, a thing of oral tradition, as now out of date. Not only does one test neutralize the other test, but both parties to this deadlock take a point of view fatal to any real mastery of the subject. They fail to look at the conditions under which communal poetry was produced, and they fail to study it in its essential elements. From this proper point of view, however, it is clear that traditional ballads were not made as a song of the street or the concert-hall is now made, and it is clear that ballads of that communal kind are not made under modern conditions. It has just been shown that the difference between mediæval poetry at large and poetry of the day may be best expressed in terms of the guild and the community as against the individual and subjective note. Poetry of the guild, if the 166phrase will pass, was composed by poets of the guild and found a record; we are wont to think that sort of thing made up all mediæval poetry; but the community itself had a vast amount of song which was composed in public and for the occasion, found no written record, and is recovered only in varying traditional forms. The conditions of modern life forbid the old communal expression, free and direct; but of course the throng is still bound to voice its feelings, and takes the poetry of art, masters it, owns it, changes it, precisely as Dr. Meier contends, but with no very edifying results. Every collection of ballads, even of folksongs, with their dignity, their note of distinction, compared with sorry stuff of the streets, bears witness to this difference between old and new. Landstad^[343] in 1848 noted that ballads were fast vanishing from Norway. Bujeaud^[344] complains that in France “new” and fatuous verses supplant traditional song; and he gives as example a “chanson nouvelle dédiée à une jeune fille.” Ralston,^[345] for Russia, comments on the new popular verse “laboriously produced in the towns and unblushingly fathered upon soldiers and gypsies.” Save in a few dialects, the old runes, and with them the power to make popular song, are dying out in Finland; communal poetry there is going to pieces, and the process confirms what was said above about the relations of feeling and thought in verse.^[346] Throughout Germany^[347] the current ballads and folksongs 167are seldom even traditional; hardly anywhere are they made in field and spinning-room as they were made half a century ago. At the annual dinner of the border shepherds, held at Yetholm in the Cheviots, so Sir George Douglas^[348] relates, “there is no longer any thought of native inspiration; the songs sung after dinner are of the type familiar in more vulgar localities, and known as ‘songs of the day.’ Even the old ballads are neglected.” Traditional native songs of the countryside have vanished from the fields and villages of Europe, and are replaced by opera airs, sentimental ditties, and the like; Loquin’s attempt^[349] to refer the old songs to similar sources is anything but a success; indeed, as one hears the new and thinks of the old, one is reminded of an ignoble analogy in the habit of many farmers here in eastern America, who sell their fresh fruit and vegetables, or neglect to raise any, and use with relish and a kind of pride the inevitable “canned goods.” On many farms the kitchen-garden has vanished like the old songs.^[350] Apart from these base respects, however, it is clear that the throng is powerless to revive even mediæval conditions; and the traditional ballad, as every competent editor either asserts or implies, is no longer to be made. Ferdinand Wolf, Grundtvig,^[351] Talvj, and a number of others, declare that the homogeneous and unlettered community, now no longer with us, is the only source of a genuine ballad. True, communities can still be 168found which have something of the old conditions and of the old power. Mr. Baring-Gould notes that in divers places English folk still sing, perhaps even make, the good and genuine song. A correspondent of the New York Evening Post, in a pleasant letter^[352] describing the Magyar dance and song, notes that these people prefer singing to talking, and makes the statement that “there is scarcely a stable-boy or a kitchen-maid who has not, at some time, been the creator of at least one song—both words and music. The favourite time for launching these ventures on the part of the young women is when they gather to spin in the evenings.” Sir George Douglas, in the note already quoted, says that ballads of tradition have retreated from shepherds to “a yet shyer and less sophisticated set of men, to wit, the fishermen of the smaller fishing towns.” It is said, too, that conditions quite analogous to those of the old Scottish border, and ballads of corresponding quality, some of them, indeed, very ancient ballads of tradition, may be found in the mountains of Kentucky. But this is all sporadic and dying activity. In favoured places it is still true, as Professor E. H. Meyer says of Germany, that communal singing lingers,^[353] but even this is moribund; and communal making, so he admits, is dead.^[354] More than this: no modern poet, however great, has yet succeeded in reviving the ballad in imitation. Scott, not to 169speak of the failures of Leyden and Sharpe, made poems in some respects as good as the old ballads, and made a beautiful bit of verse—Proud Maisie is in the Wood—very like a folksong; but they are not the real ballad, the real folksong, and Scott would have been first to deny the identity. As for the street songs and that sort of verse, from the wheezing sentimental ditties down,^[355] one has only to compare them with genuine old ballads to see how utterly they fail to meet any test of really communal poetry. Even three centuries ago, when earth was nearer the ballad heaven than now, broadsides, “garlands,” trash of the street and the hawker’s basket, all balladry of trade, were sharply sundered from the good old songs. One knows what Ben Jonson thought of “ballading silk-weavers” and the rest; one also knows the saying attributed to him by Addison that he would rather have been author of Chevy Chace than of all his own works.^[356]

A word is needed, however, before one passes from this matter of the closed account, in regard to a notion that people hold about modern communal song. It is still made, they say, by the lower classes, but it is too indecent for currency, and is conventionally unknown. Now it is 170a fact which may well get emphasis here, that the real ballad of tradition, while it never boggles at a plain name for things now rather understood than expressed, is at a vast remove from the obscene, and from those hulking indecencies which, along with the vapid and the sentimental, make up the bulk of modern unprinted and unmentioned song. Herd printed a few high-kilted ballads,^[357] but even age refuses to lend them the appearance of communal and traditional; and the chasm grows wider when one deals with an audacious collection like that of Mr. Farmer,^[358] where “high-kilted” is a mild name for nearly all the specimens. Here, now, are those “songs of Burns”—to which Blémont appealed for proof that the popular muse is still prolific—running to a favourite tune, but on the forbidden ground; here are obscenities, drolleries, facetiae, such as grooms and the baser sort still sing everywhere, and such as the Roman scratched on a wall. Here are the songs in cold print, and with the label “national”; it is no answer to ignore them. But when some one nods his head shrewdly, and stands with arms encumbered, and says one could, if one would, show this same old ballad still made by bards of the people and sung up and down the land as aforetime, only it is not fit for ears foolishly polite, and all the rest,—then, indeed, it is well to bring the matter to book. For these songs are not really traditional ballads, and never belonged to the community as a whole; the ballad of old oral tradition did belong to the community as a whole. Quite apart from ethics, with no rant after the manner of Vilmar, it is to be remembered that communal poetry, sung in a representative throng, cannot well be obscene; made by the public 171and in public, it cannot conceivably run against the public standard of morality. Australian songs such as Scherer studied shock the European; maypole songs of older England were an offence to the Puritan; mediæval doings on Shrove-Tuesday night were not to edification; crowds as well as individuals even now like at times to give voice to their belief in cakes and ale; but notwithstanding all these allowances, it is clear that a song made and sung by a really communal crowd will give no room to private vices and to those events and situations which get their main charm from a centrifugal tendency with regard to public morals. This hole-and-corner minstrelsy is no part of communal song; for further proof, one may note the few genuine old ballads, quite free from indecencies, which Mr. Farmer prints, and which are such a foil to the superfluity of naughtiness before and after. They are of a different world. In short, the main thing is to remember the protest made so strongly by Herder and by Richard Wagner. “Folk,—that does not mean the rabble of the street,” ran Herder’s formula^[359] for the past; while Wagner^[360] describes the united “folk” of the future for whom and from whom alone art of a high order may be expected. But Wagner’s folk of the future can never be that homogeneous, unlettered folk of a mediæval community from which sprang our communal verse of tradition. “Many epochs,” says Bruchmann,^[361] “give one the impression as if in old times singing and the making of poetry were universal gifts. This is psychologically conceivable. The more uniform the intellectual life of individuals ... the more we may expect uniform utterance of that life. So the poetry of such a time would be entirely 172poetry of the people.” It is clear that such conditions are far removed from the present,^[362] and that the making of communal poetry in any appreciable quantity or quality must now be a closed account.

So much for the curve of evolution by which these communal elements of poetry decline as they approach our time, and increase as one retraces the path of poetry and song. But one is by no means to suppose that the ballad of tradition, as it lies before one now, can be taken as an accurate type of earliest communal song. Sir Patrick Spens and Innsprück, ich muss dich lassen are not perfect examples of the songs which primitive man used to sing, not even of the original mediæval ballad such as the women made about St. Faro in France or as those islanders made a hundred years ago about the frustrated fisherman. Improvisation in a throng cannot give the unity of purpose and the touch of art which one finds in Spens; that comes partly from individual and artistic strands woven in with the communal stuff, and partly from the process by which a ballad constantly sung in many places, and handed down by oral tradition alone, selects as if by its own will the stanzas and phrases which best suit its public. What one asserts, however, is that in this ballad of Spens, although in less degree than with other ballads, the presence of artistic elements is overcome by the preponderating influence of certain communal elements. These communal elements are to be studied in all available material, and consist, taken in the mass, of repetitions of word and phrase, chorus, refrain, singing, dancing, and traces of general improvisation; and all these elements, except for imitative purposes, are lacking in the poem of art, or if present, are 173overwhelmed by the artistic elements. Even in the ballads which have gone on record, and are made artistic to some degree by this very act,—killed with kindness,—there are still more traces of the throng than of the individual artist; this transfer from conditions of communal making and tradition to conditions of artistic record must always be taken into account. The collector of oral tradition, particularly ballads, finds it nigh impossible to write them down in their uncontaminated state; he gathers flowers, but what he puts into his book is only a hortus siccus. Anecdotes in proof of this abound; one may be quoted from the account given by Hogg^[363] of a visit from Scott in 1802, soon after the publication of the Border Minstrelsy, where Scott printed some ballads which the Ettrick shepherd had taken down from his mother’s singing. Now the mother was face to face with Scott, and sang him the ballad of Old Maitlan’; delighted, Scott asked her if it had ever been in print. No, she said; never one of her songs had been printed till Scott had printed them, and in doing so he had entirely spoiled them. “They were made for singing an’ no for reading; but ye hae broken the charm now, an’ they’ll never be sung mair.” And Hogg adds: “My mother has been too true a prophetess, for from that day to this, these songs, which were the amusement of every winter evening, have never been sung more.”—And now to these vanishing or vanished songs themselves.

We are to examine the European ballad or traditional narrative song, and compare its elements with such shards of communal verse as are still found here and there, and with ethnological material; lyric of the people and refrains for the dance will be studied in another place. The lyric, though simple and “popular” enough, is mainly an affair of the lover and his lass, and has the centrifugal more than the 174communal tendency even in that jolly little song, now six or seven hundred years old, which jumps so easily into English, the Du bist mîn:^[364]—

Thou art mine, I am thine,

Of that right certain be!

Locked thou art within my heart,

And I have lost the key:

There must thou ever be!

Refrains for the dance,^[365] of course, are communal and express communal joy; one of them, with both the interjectional and the full refrain, leaves no doubt at all; it is a song for the dance of May:^[366]—

A l’entrada del tems clar,—eya,

per joja recomensar,—eya,

e per jelos irritar,—eya,

vol la regina mostrar

qu’el’ est si amoroza.

Alavi’ alavia, jelos,

laissaz nos, laissaz nos,

ballar entre nos, entre nos.

To these refrains of the dance we shall return in due time; the bulk of popular lyric is simple, rural, but not communal. There remain the epic survival, the ballad, and popular rimes. Epic in the larger sense is not to be considered here; for it comes down to us at the hands of art, communal as it may have been in its beginnings, and it is not a simple contemporary note of deeds which have a merely local and social interest, a stage of development common to most 175traditional ballads.^[367] One sees, if one will glance at the actual ballad, why theories of Niebuhr and of Buckle about the foundation of history in artless chronicles of this communal type must be taken with great reserve^[368] and reduced to very slender assertion. Not in early history, not even in the great epics, not even by help of the Homeric question, can one study communal elements to the best advantage, but rather in simple ballads of tradition, in the communal narrative song.^[369] It is sung, danced,—hence the rhythm of it; it tells of some communal happening—“the germ of folksong is an event,” says Böckel,^[370]—hence the narrative.

176What, now, are the tests and characteristics about which writers on the ballad are agreed? All agree that it is a narrative song usually preserved by oral tradition of the people. With few and unimportant exceptions, it is agreed that a ballad must be the expression and outcome of a homogeneous and unlettered community;^[371] the dispute is about origins. Grimm and sundry of his day declared that the community itself made the ballad; Grundtvig said the same thing, and Ten Brink, following certain modifications of Steinthal, held the people, and not an individual poet, responsible for the making as well as the singing. Ferdinand Wolf^[372] was sturdy enough in his scorn for the “nebulous poet-aggregate called folk,” although he clung to the homogeneous community as absolute condition; and his task was to find a representative who could make the ballad to express such a community. Since ballads deal mainly with knights and persons of rank, he concluded, as Geijer had done, that they were due to “a person of quality”; Prior, the translator,^[373] went even a step farther and was inclined to think that for Scandinavian ballads, and presumably other poems of the class, one is indebted “to the ladies.” Prior is negligible. But Wolf was careful in his statement; and when he noted the predominance of aristocratic persons in the deeds which these ballads sing, he knew that it was a common trait in all heroic and early epic. Germanic poems of this class, the Béowulf, the Hildebrand Lay, what not, regard only such characters and not the common man. As Dr. R. M. Meyer points out, this is even carried into the lifeless world, and all things are in superlative; all is splendid, unusual, extreme.^[374] 177Even Icelandic sagas deal only with the representative man, with distinguished and notable folk.^[375] So Wolf simply said that the ballad was made in this class of society, in a homogeneous class, a volk von rittern as he calls it,^[376] who mainly “sang their own deeds,”—an important concession. Even if one granted this, and allowed the court poet himself to appear in an impersonal way as deputy of the knights in singing about their deeds, it would still be far from individual and deliberate poetry of art, but rather poetry of the guild with a definite theme, traditional form, and recurrent phrases from the common poetic stock.^[377] However, the homogeneous and unlettered conditions of a ballad-making community are in themselves enough to account for this preference of rank; the knight, chieftain, warrior, represented his folk, and was hardly raised above them in any intellectual way. Not only were all the members of a community consolidated, at first, against hunger, cold, and hostile tribes, the primitive homogeneity of the horde, but even later, in mediæval civilization, the same roof often covered the knight and his humblest retainer, the same food fed them, and both were marked by the same standards of action, the same habit of thought, the same sentiments, the same lack of letters,^[378] of introspection, of diversified mental employment. Even in rural England 178such conditions lingered long; Overbury’s franklin^[379] “says not to his servants, Goe to field, but Let us goe;” and at the harvest home, where old songs prevail even in modern times, there is “no distinction of persons, but master and servant sit at the same table, converse freely together, and spend the remainder of the night in dancing and singing, on terms of easy familiarity.”^[380] How this state of things is intensified in the Highland clan, every one knows; and in going back to the horde there can be no doubt in regard to the sharp curve toward communal conditions and communal expression. Now as to those aristocratic personages of the ballad, the canticles of love and woe which come from such a community would of course put in the foreground of action persons who actually filled the foreground of its life. The ballad represented a compact communal life, and this passed into song in the person of its best representative; hence the panegyric found in all early poetry, the praise of great men who are made one with “the fathers who begat us,” not to be explained away as work of Scherer’s primitive minstrel, liar and entertainer passing about his hat for primitive pence. It is with modern conditions of life, and with the diversity of modern thought, that art comes down to the middle classes,—what throes were needed to bring the domestic or citizen tragedy to light!—then to the artisan, to peasants, and finally to the outcast, the criminal, the degenerate, as in sundry clever sketches of Alexander Kielland. Homogeneous conditions are first broken by cities, and linger longest in the country; they were particularly strong in primitive agricultural life;^[381] and it is in communities of this sort, remote, islanded in the sea of civilization, that most of the traditional ballads 179have been found. When one thinks of this poetry at its best estate, one must have the old continent and not these sinking islands before one’s thought. Nor is the lowest form of culture, degraded and sordid, even when of this homogeneous kind, to be taken as model for the past. One is loath to think of the old ballad community in terms of Zola’s Terre.

There is, however, another way by which one could account for aristocratic personages and doings of the ballad; this wayside strolling muse may be dressed in the clothes cast off by her high-born sisters of epic and romance. This, as was said above, F. Wolf^[382] denied; but J. F. Campbell^[383] defines the ballad somewhat in such terms. Mr. Newell^[384] thinks the folk-tale a degenerate form, in low levels of culture, of something composed on higher levels and at an earlier time; as if once D’Urberville, now Durbeyfield. Often true for the material of an individual ballad, this is not true of its real elements, of the ballad qua ballad, and of its form and vital characteristics. The pattern of ballads whence one will;^[385] the stuff of 180the ballad is communal. If the ballad as a form of poetry were a mere ragbag of romance, one would find in it tags of old phrases, ambitious figures, tricks and turns of speech, change in metrical structure, and all manner of crumbs from the literary table; but these are conspicuous by their absence. The ballad as ballad is original. Count Nigra^[386] gives an important reason for this point of view when he notes that the materials of a ballad go anywhere, pass all borders, while metre, rime, and form in general, are borrowed only from popoli omoglotti. The ballads employ speech at first hand, no borrowed phrases, a simple, living language; and always the feeling and the expression are coördinate. The ballad is no foul and spent stream that has turned millwheels, run through barnyards, and at last found its way to a ditch; it is wild water, and not far from its source in the mountains. One proof lies in the drinking of it. Ballads still hold their own as the nearest approach to primitive poetry preserved among civilized nations, scanty as the records are; and after infinite discussion of Homeric and other theories, the ballad remains in its old position at the gates of every national literature.^[387] The farther one comes into the conditions which made for the ballad, this homogeneous community, this unlettered and undeliberative habit of mind, so much wider one finds diffused the power of improvising and singing verses in a style which is easy to bring into line with the style of traditional ballads. For the ballad in its purity was always sung, and singing is a primary process; romances were recited. 181In other words, power to make poetry of this sort does not begin with the rich and foremost few, and spread slowly among the lower classes; it begins, this is beyond all doubt,^[388] as a universal gift, and only with the rise of classes and the diversity of mental training, lettered against unlettered, is the power restricted to a narrow range.

Well, the ballad as species is no making of mediæval aristocrats, ladies or knights, no shards of chivalry and romance; but what of the minstrel? Bishop Percy, Scott, and of late Professor Courthope and Mr. Henderson, have looked to the minstrel to explain the ballad and all its ways. Doubtless many a minstrel made ballads, or rather sang them into modern shape; but the minstrel is merely a link between later artistic poetry and older communal song. He cannot explain this communal song, for he cannot explain the elements of it,—festal crowd, dance, singing, rapid and universal improvisation, repetition, refrain; he inherits what these leave as they vanish from living poetry; and that is all. He does not explain them, but they explain him. Professor Child distinguishes between the “minstrel ballad” and the “popular ballad”;^[389] but one is willing to hand over better stuff to this amiable rover and allow him a share in many good songs, without prejudice of any kind to the real communal theory. Gustav Meyer, however, one of the ablest scholars that modern Germany has produced, puts^[390] the wane of balladry at the point where improvisation by men and women in the fields and round the village linden ceases, and where the minstrel brotherhood, whether blind singers, rhapsodes, or what not, begins.^[391] The minstrel ballad is only a stage on that broad road which ends in the stalls; while, conversely, 182a ballad of the stalls may often hide real poetry of tradition under an ignoble garment. It is clear, then, that the “I” of a ballad ought to disturb the idea of communal origins as little as the borrowed subject does; but when one forgets the singing, dancing, improvising crowd, and thinks of poetry only in terms of modern literary composition, inference is made that ought not to be made at all. Professor Francke,^[392] for example, thinks that the “I” of a German folksong, or that tag at the end which declares the song to have been made by a student, a pilgrim, a fisherman, is proof positive that ballads had individual authorship. The song is a folksong, he says, simply and solely because folk take it up and sing it; thus the often quoted Limburg Chronicle noted that “this year” the folk sang so-and-so, and all men know that in 1898 the American “folk” sang by preference There’ll be a Hot Time. Böhme,^[393] indeed, thinks that a leprous monk^[394] mentioned in the Limburg Chronicle, whose tunes and songs had such a vogue five hundred years ago, brings to light the secrets of the origins of popular poetry. It is odd, however, that Böhme goes on to show how popular poetry differs from the poetry of art, and asks, with great naïveté, why one should ever ask for the author of a folksong, seeing that it was never really composed at all! “It was a masterless and nameless affair,” he says; and proceeds to quote—Jacob Grimm. But 183for serious answer, it is plain that folksong is an equivocal term. Most of the popular songs, by their nature, must be individual; the universal appeal, the fact that all the world loves a lover, does not make them communal. It was a lad and a lover who sang Innsprück, ich muss dich lassen; and it needs no signature. But from this ich to the “I” of the tags which one finds at the end of narrative ballads of tradition, is a far cry; indeed there is a gulf between them. When one comes to the refrain, which always expresses or implies a “we,” there is absolutely no chance for “I”; but writers on ballads give the refrain a wide berth. However, leave this refrain out of the reckoning; even in actual ballads the “I” is oftenest a mere recorder’s signature, and simply mediates between the reader and communal origins. With most English and Scottish ballads there is no “I” in the case; but even if one could find for each and all of these ballads signs of such a singer, editor, recorder, there would still remain behind this “I” certain facts, certain elements, which demand a totally different explanation. Let us look at another declaration of authorship. A Breton song,^[395] called The Good Old Times and sung by workingmen, ends with these verses:—

This song was made on the eve of Lady Day after supper.

It was made by twelve men dancing on the knoll by the chapel.

Three are ragpickers; seven sow the rye; two are millers.

And so it is made, O folk, so it is made, and so it is made, this song!

Suppose, on the other side of the account,^[396] one should proclaim this as a great find to offset the leprous monk; here, by explicit statement, is a ballad made by twelve labourers of one 184mind,^[397] here is the communal song,—and so forth! But the statement, interesting as it is, does nothing for any theory of authorship; what concerns one here is the evident dance, the folk assembled, the knoll by the chapel, the repetition, and the refrain, which is more prominent in other parts of the long ballad: in a word, the communal elements. Let us hear what these elements really are. “So,” runs Villemarqué’s note to this ballad, “so the mountain folk sing, holding one another by the hand, and continually making a half-circle from left to right, then right to left,^[398] raising and dropping their hands in concert to the cadence, and leaping after the fashion of the ritornello.” In fact, as Villemarqué had already said in his preface, “the greater part of these songs and ballads of the people are made in the same way. Conversation stirs the throng to excitement; ‘let us make a dance-song!’ cries some one, and it is done.... The texture, due to the general mood, has unity, of course, but with a certain variety of parts. Each one weaves in his flower, according to his fancy, his humour, his trade.” This matter will be regarded more closely under the head of Improvisation; but the gemeinsames dichten is a fact, and the communal background is cleared of at least a part of the haze which hides it from modern view. In any case, these signatures^[399] prove nothing either way; one must go below the surface and behind the signature, if one will come at the differencing qualities of communal poetry. Once more be it said that the present object is not to assert communal authorship, 185in any literal sense, for the ballad of the collections, but to show in it elements which cannot be referred to individual art, and which are of great use in determining the probable form and origins of primitive poetry. True, one might go farther; there are some strong statements made by scholars of great repute which definitely deny individual authorship, in any modern sense, for the ballad. Böckel,^[400] speaking of more recent ballads, rejects, of course, the theory of Grimm, but makes the ballad spring from improvisation of a stanza or so in connection with traditional stanzas of the communal stock. That one ballad has one author, and is made in the way of modern composition of poetry, Böckel, who has studied the remains of rustic balladry with great care and thoroughness, denies again and again. Count Nigra, in the work just quoted, is very emphatic on this point. “This popular narrative song,” he says, “is anonymous. It is not improvised by a popular poet more or less known.” It requires “a period of incubation, upon which follows a long elaboration, which goes on with divers phases and changes, until the song falls, little by little, into oblivion, or else is fixed in the record.” All popular verse, he declares, like language, “is a spontaneous creation, essentially racial.”^[401] M. Gaston Paris, too, would not lay much stress upon the “I” of a ballad; early popular poetry, he asserts,^[402] is “improvised and contemporaneous with its facts”; and such songs^[403] are not only “composed under the immediate impression of the event, but by those and for those who have taken part in it.” In line with evidence to be set forth below, he^[404] cares little for the professional minstrels as a source of 186early popular song, and doubts their existence among the primitive Germans; for the skill to make and sing verses was as common then as the skill to fight, and warriors sang the songs which they themselves had made.^[405]

But there is not only this negative evidence to dispose of the “I” in ballads. Hebrew poetry has been thought to touch the highest individual note in the “I” of the Psalms; but the best Hebrew scholars^[406] now accept to a greater or less extent the notion that in many places, if not in all, this “I” is communal, and means the house or congregation of Israel. Smend^[407] goes so far as to take the “I” throughout in this sense, and doubtless he goes too far; Budde^[408] is on safer ground. But the consent of the best scholars is that “I” often means the community, and this, so Smend insists, not as a deliberate “personification” of Israel as a church, but in the unconscious and communal spirit of a homogeneous and intensely emotional body of people. So the Greek chorus, not simply the leader but the whole chorus,^[409] speak often as “I”; and Smend quotes a stanza to the same effect from Horace’s Carmen Sæculare. It is clear that one is on the traces of a primitive habit which seems impossible to us only because we have no homogeneous conditions to bring about 187such a state of mind. Now and then a hint is gained from some survival, however faint, of these conditions. It is said that a Scot of the Border coming home to find his house plundered, could tell by sundry signs what hostile band had done the deed, and would invariably call them by the place where they lived: “Ettrickdale has been here!” One thinks of the tribes of Israel and of the way in which their names were used. Reuben, runs the text, “Reuben had great searchings of heart.” But here is theological ground, and we hasten back to the “I” of folksong. To this subject Professor Steenstrup devotes the third chapter of his book on Scandinavian ballads,^[410] which are mainly heroic and strongly objective, in contrast to the more subjective and deliberate ballads of Germany. Now many of the Scandinavian ballads begin with the familiar phrase, “I will sing you—or tell you—a song,” and proceed in the second stanza with actual narrative; a comparison of manuscripts, however, shows that it is mainly late copies which begin with this “I” stanza, while earlier copies omit it. In English ballads the “I” is quite as separable and negligible; sometimes, in songs and catches, it is used for mystification:^[411]—

He that made this songe full good,

Came of the northe and of the sothern blode,

And somewhat kyne to Robyn Hood,—

Yit all we be nat soo.

And the refrain follows. In the Gest of Robin Hood, and in the other ballads of this cycle, “I,” that is to say, the singer, now bids hearers “lithe and listen,” or throws in an aside or a gloss,—“I pray to God woo be he,” about the “great-headed monk”; with which compare the delightful ejaculation in Young Beichan, “And I hope this day she sall be his bride,”—now 188notes the end of a canto, as in the Cheviot, “the first fit here I fynde”;^[412] and makes other detached and alien remarks of the sort. In Russian ballads, as Bistrom^[413] points out, the singer addresses his hearers only at the beginning and at the end, often not at all. Evidently, here is a mere singer and recorder, a link between the old singing and dancing throng and the new listening throng; in no case is he a maker, so far as traditional ballads go, and in Scandinavian ballads Steenstrup has proved him to be an impertinence.^[414] This is said with due allowance for the functions of a leader in communal dance and song, where the “I” little by little got his foothold and his importance; he steps forward with uplifted beaker and begins a new movement, singing a subjective verse or two, then effaces himself from the narrative ballad which now goes with the dance.^[415] “I bid you all dance,” he cries, “and we will sing of so-and-so.” This introductory stanza, of course, has got into the ballad; and the lyric opening of many a ballad, often touching on the time of year, the place, what not, and often, too, of great beauty, is in most cases to be referred to such an origin. When the ballad is recited, the leader turns recorder, editor, improver, commentator, improvising bard. That damnable iteration in long-winded epics and romances and in later ballads, “this is true that I tell you,” belongs to the reciting stage;^[416] it is an alien 189in balladry. More than this, it is to be pointed out that historical ballads, meant to be recited and not sung, are no ballads at all in the communal sense.^[417] They are on the way to epic, and no better study of this process can be made than in the Gest of Robin Hood.

So much for the absence of any direct trace of personal authorship in the ballad. It is strange to see critics going everywhere to fetch a reason for this fact, except to the most obvious place to find a reason,—in the singing and dancing throng, where at least the elements of a ballad were made. The subjective, the reflective, the sentimental, are characteristics impossible in throng-made verse. Even now when throngs are to be pleased, say in the modern drama, there is a strange mixture of communal bustle and “situation” with those sentimental ditties meant to touch the private heart. Such a play is a monstrosity, to be sure, sheer anarchy of art; but in its formless, purposeless racket it hits communal taste and excites the Dionysian sense, until the crowd is shouting, leaping, and singing by deputy. Going back, now, to the active throng, and to the ballad which in many ways represents that throng, let us see what communal elements are to be noted in its diction, its form, and its surroundings. The diction of a traditional ballad is spontaneous, simple, objective as speech itself, and close to actual life. The course 190of artistic poetry, as was shown in the preceding chapter, is away from simplicity of diction and toward a dialect. According to the temper of the time, this dialect of poetry will be broadly conventional, as with Waller, Dryden, and Pope, narrowly conventional, as in the puzzle style of the Scandinavian scaldic verse and in certain mannerisms of Tennyson, or individual, as with Tennyson in his main style and with Browning; but in any case it will be a good remove from the speech of daily life. True, certain features of both primitive and ballad poetry seem to make against this assertion. Dr. Brinton^[418] says that all the American languages which he examined had a poetic dialect apart from that of ordinary life; but these records are clearly not of the communal type, not spontaneous, but rather fossil forms and ceremonial rites. Peasants in France, so Bujeaud notes, compose few ballads in their patois; Hebel pointed out the same fact for German song;^[419] and there is other evidence. But this is no objection whatever to the theory of ballad simplicity; for as these writers concede, peasants do make their improvised songs, their couplets, schnaderhüpfl, rundâs, songs of labour, songs of feasts, in their own dialect and in nothing else. The traditional songs are often retained, as refrains or the like, in incomprehensible or difficult phrase; but that is another matter, and so far as one deals with communal elements, so far one finds simple and everyday speech, entirely different from the conventional or individual dialect of the poetry of art. Lack of simplicity is held to be a proof of false pretences, of forgery. More than this. The ballads lack figurative language and tropes; they rarely change either the usual order of words or the usual meaning. They lack not only antithesis, but even the common figure of inversion,^[420] the figure which 191one would most expect to meet in ballad style. In the ballad itself, inversion is vanishingly rare, and in the refrain, significant fact, it is as good as unknown. Again, any wide word, any mouth-filling phrase, even such a term as “fatherland,” which opens a glimpse into the reaches of reflection and inference, is alien to the ballad of the throng. Now it is significant that this lack of tropes, characteristic of ballads no less than their stanzaic form, sunders them from our old recorded poetry; earliest English poetry is a succession of metaphoric terms.^[421] All Germanic verse, in fact, laid main stress upon the trope known as “kenning”; the ocean is the “whale’s bath,” the “foaming fields,” the “sea-street”; a wife is “the weaver of peace”; so, in endless variation, the poet called object and action by as many startling names as he could find in tradition or invent for himself.^[422] Like the recurring phrase of the ballad, these are often conventional terms; but they differ in quality from it by a world’s breadth. For the mark of this trope, in its deliberate or conscious stage,^[423] is a palpable effort of invention, a refusal to catch the nearest way; the ballad is rarely figurative. What figures one does find in it, and they are few enough, are unforced and almost unconscious. As Steenstrup says, the Scandinavian ballad “talks like a mother to her child,” and has “scarcely a kenning.” Faroe and Icelandic ballads, to be sure, have a few kennings, 192but they are not frequent. J. F. Campbell^[424] speaks of the simple Gaelic ballads as poor in figures, while the epic made from these lays riots in trope. The ballad hardly essays even personal description.^[425] A modern Greek song ventures no farther than the conventional comparison of the maiden with a partridge; and no English ballad undertakes to give a picture of the heroine,—only a traditional epithet or so. The heroes are fair or ruddy, have yellow hair; and that is all. There is no realism, as one now calls it. Minute description of nature increases in direct ratio to the increasing individuality of the poet; and one distrusts those German folksongs which bring the sunset, or a fading leaf, or more subtle processes of nature, into line with the singer’s feeling,—a trait of German minnesang. One will search ballads in vain for a superb touch like that word for the disturbing sunrise which Wolfram puts into the watcher’s call to the lovers, “his claws have struck through the clouds,”—as if a bird of prey to rob them of their love;^[426] for in the ballads nature is a background and rarely gets treatment in detail. Save in chronicle song like the Cheviot, it is spring, summer, evening, it is the greenwood, no more definite time or place; and so too it is bird or beast, not a special kind, until conventional rose and lily and deer and nightingale come to their monopoly. It is 193not communal verse, but poetry of art, which, without mythological intent, transfers a distinctly human motive to nature, as where Romeo sees those “envious streaks” in the east, or where, in the Béowulf, old Hrothgar describes the abode of Grendel, with that picture of the hounded stag, and with the “weeping” sky. In the ballads, reference to nature is conventional, though by no means insincere. Though the natural setting is often an irrelevancy, as in Lady Isabel:—

There came a bird out o’ a bush

On water for to dine,

And sighing sair, says the king’s daughter,

“O wae’s this heart of mine,”—

still, there are touches of nature, sincere and exquisite and appropriate, to be found in sundry ballads, notably at the opening of Robin Hood and the Monk.^[427] However, ballads are mainly for the action, not the setting of the stage, and a throng of festal dancers would not care for a bill of particulars. It is the poet, fugitive from throngs, who turns to nature and studies her charms with a lover’s scrutiny.

On the other hand, what ballads lack in figurative and descriptive power, they supply in an excess of iteration, of repetition, of fixed and recurring phrases. The recurring phrase, along with the standing epithet, one finds, to be sure, in the great epic as well as in the ballad of tradition; repetition in the simpler sense, however, is peculiar to the ballads. Epithets in the ballad are of a modest type; the steed is “milk-white” or “berry-brown,” the lady is “free,”—that is, “noble,”—while now and then an adjective cleaves to its substantive in defiance of fact, as when the “true-love” 194is palpably false, or when the newborn infant is called an “auld son.” As for the phrases, when a little foot-page starts off with his message, when two swordsmen fall to blows, when there are three horses, black, brown, and white, to be tested, any reader of ballads can shut his eyes and repeat the two or three conventional lines or even stanzas that follow. Of course, as poetry grows artistic, recurring phrases vanish; the artist shuns what is traditional and evident, seeking to announce by independence and freshness of phrase the individuality of his own art. Tobler notes that while the more communal epic of old France used the same terms and the same general apparatus for a fight here and a fight there, Ariosto contrives, however one fight is like another, to give an individual character to each.

To say that these recurring phrases are due to the need of the improvising singer for a halting-place, a rest, in order to think of new material, is distortion of facts. Undoubtedly the minstrel used these traditional passages for the purpose, but they are due to the communal and public character of the poetry itself, and belong, so far as the question of origins is concerned, to that main fact in all primitive song, the fact of iteration. This is now to be studied not so much in the actual recurrence of identical passages, as in that characteristic of ballad style which may be called incremental repetition. One form of this is where a question is repeated along with the answer, a process radically different from that of Germanic epic, where the zeal for variation has blotted out this primitive note of repetition, and, against all epic propriety, forced a messenger to give his message in terms quite different from the original. Again, each slight change in the situation of a ballad often has a stanza which repeats the preceding stanza exactly, save for a word or two to express the change. Lyngbye^[428] found the Faroe ballads 195so laden with this kind of repetition that in the record he omitted many of the stanzas, giving them all only here and there, to show the general style. Side by side with incremental repetition, which is usually found in sets of three stanzas, runs a refrain, either repeated at the end of each stanza or sung throughout as a burden. Moreover, with all this iteration goes a tendency to omit particulars and events which modern poetry would give in full, so that a very ill-natured critic might define ballads as a combination of the superfluous and the inadequate. But these traits can best be seen in an actual ballad, Babylon, or the Bonnie Banks of Fordie, familiar not only to Britain, but “to all branches of the Scandinavian race.”^[429] It is an admirable specimen of communal elements and traditional form blended with incipient art:—

There were three ladies lived in a bower,

Eh vow bonnie,^[430]

And they went out to pull a flower

On the bonnie banks o’ Fordie.^[430]

They hadna pu’ed a flower but ane,

When up started to them a banisht man.

He’s taen the first sister by the hand,

And he’s turned her round and made her stand.

“It’s whether will ye be a rank robber’s wife,

Or will ye die by my wee pen-knife?”

“It’s I’ll not be a rank robber’s wife,

But I’ll rather die by your wee pen-knife.”

He’s killed this may,^[431] and he’s laid her by,

For to bear the red rose company.

He’s taken the second ane by the hand,

And he’s turned her round, and made her stand.

196“It’s whether will ye be a rank robber’s wife,

Or will ye die by my wee pen-knife?”

“I’ll not be a rank robber’s wife,

But I’ll rather die by your wee pen-knife.”

He’s killed this may, and he’s laid her by,

For to bear the red rose company.

He’s taken the youngest ane by the hand,

And he’s turned her round, and made her stand.

Says, “Will ye be a rank robber’s wife,

Or will ye die by my wee pen-knife?”

“I’ll not be a rank robber’s wife,

Nor will I die by your wee pen-knife.

“For I hae a brother in this wood,

And gin ye kill me, it’s he’ll kill thee.”

“What’s thy brother’s name? Come tell to me.”—

“My brother’s name is Baby Lon.”

“O sister, sister, what have I done!

O have I done this ill to thee!

“O since I’ve done this evil deed,

Good sall never be seen o^[432] me.”

He’s taken out his wee pen-knife,

And he’s twyned^[433] himsel o his ain sweet life.^[434]

The simple “plot” of this ballad might be wrought into a long romance after the mediæval fashion, might be made a modern drama, a modern short story,—Maupassant tells something of the sort in a pathetic but repulsive sketch; the manner of Babylon, however, is all its own, carrying one miles from romance and drama and tale back into the communal past. Two stanzas open with the ballad commonplaces,—ladies in bower, the conventional summons of an outlaw by breaking a branch, pulling a flower, or otherwise disturbing the peace, and his appearance on the scene. Then comes swift action; then the lingering, fascinating incremental repetition; then the crash, and the leap into tragedy. True, the sudden turns and the lack of connecting and explaining passages are less marked than in other ballads, say at the end of Child Maurice, where the almost bewildering swiftness, the daring omission, roused Gray to enthusiasm beyond his wont;^[435] but the trait is evident enough and strong enough, even here, to show that one is far from the garrulity of the romances,^[436] far from the forward-and-back 198of a Germanic epic. It is not to be explained by any abbreviation in the record. Zell long ago pointed out^[437] that this habit of leapings and omissions is characteristic of what may be regarded as the remains of Hellenic popular verse. Like the ballad repetition, which is incremental, the ballad omission is progressive, and has nothing of that strain and doubling which makes Germanic epic, in Ten Brink’s phrase, spend such a deal of movement without getting from the spot. Yet it is chiefly in the incremental repetition that the ballad shows its primitive habit as compared with the merely retrospective repetition of the romances. The ballad stands close to that spontaneous emotion which rises in a throng and relieves itself in a common, obvious, often repeated phrase; it stands close to the event, and hence the abruptness, the process, due to sight at close quarters, of immediate expression. The æsthetic value of repetition is high when interest is held and concentrated upon a single strong situation, as in Babylon; its value is low when the action is a trivial sequence of details, as in a Russian ballad quoted by Bistrom:^[438] “He set up his linen tent; when he had set it up, he struck fire; when he had struck fire, he kindled [the camp-fire]; when he had kindled, he cooked the porridge; when he had cooked the porridge, he ate it: when he had eaten it, he lay down,”—and so on, in the strain dear to children.^[439] Another variety of incremental repetition, which brings one closer to the conditions under which ballads were made, is found in the account of Porthan^[440] 199about the singing of Finnish songs by a leader who improvises, and a second singer, a sort of echo, a dwindled chorus, who joins him and helps to carry the ballad along its way. The leader^[441] sings a line; but before he comes to the end of it, his partner catches the idea and joins him in the final measure,^[442]—a word or two; then, while the other is silent, this helper repeats the whole line, often with a slight change of words, mainly an adverb or the like thrown in,—“surely,” “in truth,”—and with an even slighter change of tone; then the leader sings another verse, the helper falls in, repeats, and so to the end of the song. The two sit face to face with clasped hands, and round them are the people arrectis auribus. It is fair to conjecture that the folk were not always silent hearers, and that the helper is deputy of a choral throng which has come to silence in the enjoyment of a superior art;^[443] Porthan admits that all sorts and conditions of Finns were once able to make these ballads, and he goes on to tell of the universal custom of the women to improvise little 200songs as they grind at the hand-mills. The trick of singing in pairs is not uncommon, and is seen elsewhere upon a historical background of choral song; Castrén says that the Samoyedes improvise their magic songs in the same fashion, a conjurer of the first class beginning the verse, and joined in the final words by the humbler shaman, who then repeats the whole alone. The song consists of but a few words.^[444] Similar methods, on a higher plane, are found in Denmark and Iceland. Ethnological evidence, too, is at hand; in Africa, Captain Clapperton heard two singers sing an artless ballad, one doing the verses, the other the refrain.^[445] Often two dancers lead a dance.^[446] It is only a step, moreover, from the twain with clasped hands, to the two singers of a flyting, Eskimo song duels, strife between Summer and Winter, amœbean verse of all kinds; see, for example, the Carlin and little boy in the Swedish ballad, or Harpkin and Fin in the English,^[447] where one verse suggests the reply in the next. From these to the schnaderhüpfl, when one after another steps out and sings, and so back to the chorus, as in Lyngbye’s case of the Faroe fisher, is but another easy inference; in short, it is clear, by overwhelming proof, that the individual performers are a survival of the singing, dancing throng with its infinite repetitions and its unending refrain.

Still another form of incremental repetition will occur to the reader as based on old custom but bare of all save the rawest æsthetic ministrations, and nowadays used only for jocose ends. The same line or stanza is sung indefinitely, with the use of a new name, number, fact, in each repetition; or else the repetition is cumulative, a test of memory, somewhat 201as in “The House that Jack Built.”^[448] There is a German student song, still popular, where the names of those present are rimed, one after the other, into a fixed formula; while degenerate and silly verses of one’s youth, nursery songs,^[449] counting-out rimes and the like, will occur to one by the dozen, and seem less negligible, get, indeed, an æsthetic lift, when one finds in them distinct hints of some old incantation, some choral song to bless house and field, as well as echoes from the dance and the labour of primitive man. Counting-out rimes in Germany are often epic,^[450] with a spice of adventure, thus working into ballad territory; and these, as with children’s games at large, hold to the dance. F. Wolf sunders the dramatic dances of the Catalan peasantry, with lives of saints, battle of Christian and Moor, robber tales, and 202so on, as their theme, the work of professional singers, from those simple dances of the country folk and of the children, some of which are of the type now under discussion. He gives^[451] a pretty little incremental specimen of this latter sort. But labour is also in the game. In Gottschee^[452] there is a ballad of a servant maid who served one year and earned a chicken; chicken hatched chickens: served second year and earned a duck; duck stands on big, wide feet, chicken hatches chickens: served a third year and earned a turkey; turkey said Long Ears, duck stands, and so on: and then lamb, kid, pig, calf, pony, little man (the husband) who says Love Me, and finally “a youngster” who says Weigh Me,—and then back through it all to the chicken. This is sung of course by the girl; but from the cumulative song, with more or less refrain, it is an easy step to the choral song of labour, which is naturally incremental. Such is the song^[453] of women weeding the millet, which combines the old refrain of labour in the field with the incremental repetition of a hardly coherent ballad. Prettier is that song^[454] which the playmates of a bride sing during the weaving of her bridal wreath.

To-day a maiden has been joyous,—

Joyous she now nevermore;

Joyous surely she shall yet be,—

But as maiden nevermore.

203To-day a maid has handed garlands,^[455]—

Hand them shall she nevermore;

Hand them shall she surely yet,—

But as maiden nevermore.

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

She is seated, she has sobbed!

She has ridden away, she laughed!^[456]

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

204Nine are washing the lye,

Nine.

Nine are washing it,

Nine are rubbing it,

Pretty Marion in the shade,

Pretty Marion,—

Let us to the fountain go.

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

Ma poule a fait un poulet,

Filons la route, gai, gai,

Filons la route gaiment.

Ma poule a fait deux poulets ...

Bücher^[459] traces all these marching songs back to a primitive form such as one still hears in Africa, where “for hours at a time” the natives on the march keep singing a half-dozen words or phrases in monotonous repetition, and with no increments. The development hence through incremental stanzas up to the Tyrtæan lyric of battle, verses of the Chanson de Roland, and so on, is evident enough. Repetition of the incremental and cumulative sorts, moreover, is easily connected with religious rites. “It seems a fair inference,” says Mr. E. B. Tylor,^[460] “to think folklore nearest its source where it has its 205highest place and meaning.” At the end of the book of Passover services used by modern Jews, as Mr. Tylor and others have noted, there is a poem which curiously resembles the nursery tale of the old woman and her pig; the angel of death is dignified enough, and is slain by the Holy One, but cat eating kid, dog biting cat, and so on, are something ludicrous. Mr. Tylor thinks all this the original of the nursery tale itself. Again, in the same book there is a solemn counting poem; one is God, two are the tables of the covenant, and so on up to thirteen, when all is reversed in order back to one. Watchmen’s songs counting the hours will occur to every reader. Germanic heathendom, doubtless, had this counting song in its ceremonial rites;^[461] while incremental repetition in the charms, that oldest form of recorded poetry, is often found, witness the highly interesting charm against a stitch in the side, or rheumatism, from an English manuscript of the tenth century;^[462] here are not only the recurring line of incantation, and the epic opening usual in charms, but a trace of something like the repetition with increments: “There sat a smith and made a knife,” and again, “six smiths were sitting, warspears working;” why not caetera desunt?

Repetition is not an invention and grace of artistic poetry, as the books are fond of saying; it is the most characteristic legacy, barring rhythm, which communal conditions have made to art. Its artistic expression, in which, to borrow Emerson’s phrase, it comes back to the passive throng “with a certain alienated majesty,” no longer the simple iteration of a refrain or an incremental ballad, takes noblest form in tragedy and monody, shading down into artifice, however effective, 206in Maeterlinck’s Princesse Maleine and Pelleas et Mélisande^[463] where it almost makes rhythm of the prose, and into clever but legitimate tricks in Molière’s famous galère passage and in his other passage, almost as famous, of the sans dot. It is used to give simple effects; probably it constitutes the charm of Hiawatha, as well as of that imitated ballad by Hamilton, the Braes of Yarrow, which Pinkerton ill-naturedly called “an eternal jingle.” We may therefore divide poetic iteration into two great classes,—one natural or primitive, which is as much as to say communal, the other artistic, with a No Man’s Land or Siberia whither one banishes the artificial. This artificial iteration of poetic style is perhaps nowhere so insistent as in those interesting but exasperating oddities known as Greenes Funeralls,^[464] published “contrarie to the author’s expectation.” Of course, the step from art to artifice is not too obvious. Every one knows the smoothness, the fluidity, as Arnold calls it, which Spenser gave to his verse, often by this delicately managed iteration—say in Astrophel;^[465] Donne softens his roughness with it in many a poem; but it becomes a tiresome trick at R. B.’s hands:—

Ah, could my Muse old Maltaes Poet passe

(If any Muse could passe old Maltaes Poet),

Then should his name be set in shining brasse,

In shining brasse for all the world to show it,^[466]

207and it grows worse than tiresome in Gabriel Harvey’s variation of the ubi sunt theme:—

Ah, that Sir Humphrey Gilbert should be dead,

Ah, that Sir Philip Sidney should be dead,

Ah, that Sir William Sakevil should be dead,

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

multi illum pueri, multae optauere puellae ...

nulli illum pueri, nullae optauere puellae ...

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

Adam lay ibowndyn, bowndyn in a bond,

Fowre thousand wynter thowt he not to long;

And al was for an appil, an appil that he toke,

As clerkes fyndyn wreten in here book.

Ne hadde the appil take ben, the appil taken ben,

Ne hadde neuer our lady aben heauene qwen.

In fact, early literature is full of repetition which suggests a recent transfer from the dancing and singing throng. So even the mediæval clerk^[469] had not only Latin jingling in his 208head, but also songs of the country folk buzzing in his ears; and it is no classical tone, despite the tongue, that sounds in his—

veni, veni, venias,

ne me mori facias,

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

Come, my darling, come to me!

I am waiting long for thee:

I am waiting long for thee,

Come, my darling, come to me!

Lips so sweet of red-rose grain,

Come and make me well again:

Come and make me well again,

Lips so sweet of red-rose grain!

Incremental repetition, then, as it is found in traditional ballads, lies midway between two extremes, one communal and one artistic. Behind it is the indefinite iteration, unchanged, of primitive song; before it is the repetition of artistic parallelism which is crossed by variation, mainspring 209of the poetic dialect. Iteration is the spontaneous expression of emotion, and begins in the throng; it lies at the root of all rhythm, cadence, and consent; variation is the assertion of art, of progress, of the individual. These are the two great elements of poetry. Variation could take place in two ways. The communal singer had his stock of communal refrains and the like, derived from tradition of the singing and dancing throng; for communal purposes he could have added his own stanzas, just as Burns did in modern days. There was the chorus:—

Bonnie lassie, will ye go,

Will ye go, will ye go,

Bonnie lassie, will ye go

To the birks of Aberfeldy?

To this, and many a chorus like it, Burns added his own words.^[471] But the early artists who worked out the scheme of national poetry went about their task by a different method. Their material was the unchanged repetition, probably in couplets corresponding to the forward-and-back of a dance, either in line, like some children’s games now, or in a half circle, like that dance of the Botocudos. Out of this repetition they made the artistic parallelism found alike in Germanic epic and in Hebrew psalms, as well as the variation which Heinzel has so neatly compared for this same epic and for the Sanskrit hymn. As regards Germanic verse, Dr. R. M. Meyer^[472] notes that repetition of words yielded to the necessity, imposed by rigid metrical law, to take a synonym which would rime with the principal word, thus ending in a mass of kennings or verbal variations. It is clear that the strophic ballad is based upon older conditions, as is proved 210by preceding examples, and by the lack of variation in typical verses such as this, the opening of a pretty dance-song:^[473]—

La rauschen, lieb, la rauschen!

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

O where hae ye been, Lord Randal, my son,

O where hae ye been, my handsome young man?

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

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

turns at the end to—

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

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

Sigh nó more, ládies, sigh no móre...

Weep nó more, wóeful shépherds, wéep no móre

may have had its counterpart in far older and far ruder verse of the throng. If the earliest form of poetry was the 211iterated single verse, a statement of a fact, or, in the first instance, a fact stated not formally but by the repetition of words in a rhythmic period which was itself exactly repeated, it is clear that the progress of poesy may have begun by making a proposition of the single verse and then proceeding to add some new elements in the repetition of it. Artistic skill next fell upon the single verse,^[475] fixed its cadence, curbed its repetition by syntactic relations, and, as in Germanic poetry, rang the changes on this law of variation. Now it is evident beyond all doubt how great a part incremental repetition must have played, and it is also evident that this can be studied best in a collocation of communal survivals, like the ballads, and primitive survivals, such as are found in savage songs. Let us look first at certain songs which belong between these two classes, then at a form of verse which is found in both, and finally at the ethnological or primitive material.

Radloff^[476] collected an admirable series of songs and ballads in southern Siberia. Here are the homogeneous community, the oral and traditional verse, and the slow but sure ruin^[477] of both due to importation of Mahometan learning, books and poets; here too are those fashions of making and keeping a song, half communal, half artistic, which yield to the conditions of written poetry. The gregarious song still lingers in chorus and in improvisations; while individual singers are 212working free from the throng, and are diverting the old broad current of repetition into channels and courses of art. But this individual artist^[478] has a very short tether, and he is close to the community not only in fact but in the character of his work. Improvisation is the rule; composition of the deliberate modern sort is almost unknown. Festal throngs, not a poet’s solitude, are the birthplace of poetry; and the folk, if they must listen and may not sing in chorus, choose a pair of singers to compete. “Some one present steps forward and challenges to a flyting. If no one appears in answer, the challenger sings improvised stanzas making fun of the people before him; but if a match is made up, then the two wage their duel in song until one fails to respond, loses the game, and gives a present to his conqueror.” As with the Faroe islanders, so here on the Tartar steppes, and on the slopes of the Altai, if these rival songs show conspicuous merit, they are remembered, repeated, and sung as traditional ballads.^[479] Radloff has several instances. A girl who enters such a flyting with a young man named Kosha, now flouts, now praises, and finally—another world-old trick of traditional song—falls into a series of riddles. What was first created,—who was so-and-so’s father,^[480]—when do the waters freeze? Kosha answers them all; the girl gives up, and presents him with a coat. Another pretty flyting^[481] is also between youth and maid; the girl holds her own until the boy says he has wounded her brother, whereupon she sits down and weeps. 213In all these, and in the solitary improvisations, there is constant repetition. Two verses of a challenge—all go by quatrains—are repeated in the answer; while in the continuous ballad, song oscillates, as Ten Brink says of this stage in the development of poetry, between memory and improvisation, production and reproduction. The singer has a mass of verses in his head, and puts his own thought only into the third and fourth lines of a quatrain,^[482] the first and second coming from the common stock. That is the recurrent passage, the “ballad slang”; but actual repetition, in its incremental phase, is stronger here than in any poetry on record except that of the Finns. A fine example of this repetition and variation is in the Kangsa Pi, one of the historic songs;^[483] mostly the stanzas are interlaced in pairs. Often the changes are mere emphasis, not progress; for example:—

If I had a white hawk,

He would scream behind me;

If I had relatives on my father’s side,

They would follow behind me.

If I had a blue hawk.

He would scream behind me;

If I had relatives on the Old One’s side,

They would follow behind me.

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

214O Myrat mine, Myrat mine,

A sea is coming,—

How will you cross it?

On its border dwells a tribe,—

How will you come through it?

O Myrat mine, Myrat mine,

A stretch of water is coming,—

How will you cross it?

On its banks dwells a tribe,—

How will you come through it?

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

What has scattered the golden-seeming leaves?

Is it the white birch? It is indeed!

She whose hair streams down her back,

Is it my wife? It is indeed!

What has scattered the silver-seeming leaves?

Is it the blue birch? It is indeed!

She whose hair streams down her neck,

Is it my betrothed? It is indeed!

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

As the meadow fire in spring,

Warms this heart of mine;

As the bird that comes in spring,

Implores this eye of mine.

As the fire that burns in autumn,

Burns this heart of mine;

As the bird that comes in autumn,

Mourns this eye of mine.

215Improvised or not, these songs are not only of the individual lover, but of the artist, the bard, still close to his throng, to be sure, but with a clear notion of his dignity and a good care for his singing-robes. As one of these bards, though in another tribe,^[485] prettily puts it:—

When the wind blows from the right hand,

Bends and bows the poplar;

When I sit and sing,

May there follow thirty songs!

When the wind blows from the left hand,

May the poplar move and quiver!

When I thus sit and sing,

May my own breast move and quiver!

Presently pen and paper will be found for the singer, and at last printer’s ink to spread his songs; the days of communal chorus and communal repetition are numbered. One other effect of the old communal impulse, however, may be noted along with this trick of style. The rhapsode, singer, leader, where he is first seen detaching himself from the throng, has neither the individuality nor the artistic importance of what one now calls a poet. Every one knows the solicitude of Germanic singers to base their song upon tradition, to put their own invention into the background and appeal to the common stock: “we have heard tell of the Spear-Danes,”—“I heard tell of Hildebrand and Hathubrand.” This meant that the tale to be told had the communal stamp, and was worth hearing.^[486] Egger^[487] notes that the oldest Greek rhapsodes, like their songs, differed not one from the other in glory; the best song was simply the last which had been heard,^[488] and there was no trace of rivalry among the bards, no 216trace of partiality among the hearers. With the next age, the time of Hesiod, came the stress and struggle for a poet’s crown; and since the crown was to be awarded to the best singer, judges were in demand, and so a rough criticism. It is easy to see that this stage would be reached in any growth of poetry when the bard began to talk of his thirty songs and of his quivering bosom; behind that stage lies the stage of the poets as deputies and mouthpieces of the throng; behind that, the throng itself.

We have now to look at a second class of material where primitive repetition, born of strong communal emotion, gets artistic control and so passes into new phases of development; this, confined to no one epoch of culture, must be sought in some universal human impulse. Birth, marriage, death, ought to give rise to such songs. Obviously, however, the first of these will be of the least value, and in point of fact songs of the sort were rarely recorded in early times, and perhaps rarely if ever made. Marriage and death, from the terms of the case, promise far better; and of the two,—for to treat them both would demand excessive space,—we shall take the songs of death, the voceri.^[489] A brief glance at the marriage-songs, however, which are mainly sung in communal dance and procession, shows repetition everywhere, increasing with the older stages of culture. In German villages the whole community still has a share in the bridal;^[490] while in Tyrol, if a girl goes outside the village for a husband, the youths mob her, tie her to a dung-cart, and lead her through the place, all singing derisive songs, until her father rescues her.^[491] 217Of course, the mobbing of unchaste women who marry is common enough; while in other cases of local indignation, crowds and derisive songs are always in order,^[492] being represented under conditions of print by the “ballad,” which can be used as a threat, like the modern reporter’s interview or “exposure.” Gretchen, in her terror, seems to hear these mocking songs. Poor Pamela hoped she would “not be the subject of their ballads and elegies,” if she put an end to herself. But this is the other side of a joyous page. The later epithalamy was sung on private family occasions outside the bridal chamber and Puttenham gives a lively description of such festivities; but public and communal features are the older fact. In Greece^[493] the bridal song comes from the festal crowd and accompanies the communal dance; the bride throws bits of food into the village fountain, about which the dances begin,—dances “which are regarded as the last act of the wedding ceremony.” The songs for these dances, moreover, along with verses composed and danced at other stages of the affair, “form a considerable part of the national poetry.”^[494] In Albania^[495] the bridal bread is baked on Thursday, and the kneading of it is begun with choral songs made for the occasion; on Sunday the marriage takes place, and from the procession of the groom and his friends down to the departure of the pair all is song and dance. The formal dance is opened by bride and groom, when a song is sung: “Raven 218stole a partridge.—Partridge? What will he do with the partridge?—Play with her, toy with her, and spend his life with her.” English marriage customs, with communal dance and song, were of the same sort;^[496] and “the poore Bryde” had to “kepe foote with al dauncers and refuse none, how scabbed, foule, droncken, rude and shamles soever he be,”—an early puritan view of the case. Song and dance, communal rites throughout, were certainly characteristic of the Germanic wedding in its old estate, as is proved by divers names cited by Müllenhoff in his essay on our old choral verse,^[497] and by the fact that a wedding was often called outright “the bridal song.”^[498] Neocorus,^[499] too, tells of the customs in his time among the folk of the Cimbrian peninsula. In the East, again, down to this day, a wedding, like a funeral, is celebrated by the entire village for a full week; it was on communal epithalamies of the sort that one based the artistic bridal poem such as Budde^[500] sees in Solomon’s Song. The modern custom is said to keep many primitive traits. After a wedding,^[501] which is usually in March, the pair are treated for seven days “as king and queen,” and songs, now of communal victory and the like, now erotic, are sung by the folk; a great dance, moreover, is 219danced to the wasf, a song which praises the charms of bridegroom and bride. The chorus is naturally insistent and incessant, and a main characteristic of the songs is repetition.^[502] But all folksong of the wedding tells this tale of dance and song, with repetition as the chief feature of the poetical style; and repetition is studied to even better advantage in that communal song of lamentation for the dead, which, for convenience, may pass by its Corsican name of vocero.

Mourners for the dead, now, save in the case of public characters, restricted to kin and friends, but once the whole community, are only mutes or audience to the act of burial; it is clear, however, that the priest and the service, or, as in France, the oration at the grave, along with the reticent group, are deputy for older and indeed still surviving songs of lament improvised and uttered by a near relative, and these again are but a development from the rhythmic wailings of a whole community or clan. Antiquity is no test whatever. A husband who advances to the coffin where his dead wife is lying and gives her a passionate farewell, after the manner of the French, while the funeral guests stand now in sympathetic silence, now with audible manifestations of grief, is doing precisely what Lucian describes as common in his day, barring the extravagance of the previous scene and the violent demonstrations made by Grecian women. Lucian thinks both demonstrations and oration ridiculous,^[503] and he gives a kind of parody of the speech which a father makes over the body of his son. So too with the poetical lament, the elegy, mere antiquity goes for nothing; and the question is one of stages of evolution, 220regardless of chronology, from the communal and choral wail up to the highly individualized and intellectualized monody of grief. The elegy of Simonides over the dead at Marathon was doubtless in its way as artistic as Tennyson’s Ode on Wellington; and the same perspective must be kept in dealing with private outbursts of sorrow. Tennyson’s own lines on the death of his brother are not a whit more modern in tone than the Ave atque Vale of Catullus which inspired them. The more primitive obligation was not to hear in respectful sympathy, not to read with intellectual approval, the oration or the poem, but to weep with them that weep and so to sing with them that sing. Uhland^[504] cleverly notes the mythological projection of this older custom in that lament for Balder shared by all animate and inanimate creation. We are not, however, to think of the vocero as sprung from the ceremonies of a primitive funeral. Historians of literature are fond of such a process, and fix upon this or that religious rite as the source of some poem or song; Kögel,^[505] for example, traces epic to a ceremonial rite as to its ultimate origin, and, for this particular case, insists that the vocero of a Germanic wife over her husband was a song of magic, a kind of incantation, asserting, wildly enough, that choral lament for the dead was unknown to the Germans of Tacitus, while magic songs had long been in vogue. This is distortion of facts and reversal of natural evolution. By the very terms of social organization, social consent must precede social institutions, and a ceremonial must usually be regarded not as the beginning but as the end of a social process. The prime factor in social expression was consent of rhythm; rhythmic cries at wedding^[506] and at funeral do 221not spring from the religious rites, although this or that wedding-song, this or that threnody, may have had such an origin; the rites are rather themselves an outcome, under priestly control and the hardening of custom into law, of this festal excitement, this communal grief. The priest, even the shaman, is deputy of that throng which was once active and is now passive; and when one considers the literature of death, one finds the earliest stages of funeral lament in that half chaotic chorus of repetition and tumultuous cries which cannot be derived from any ceremony, strictly so called, but is rather on the way to ceremony. At this literature we are now to look.

Homer has preserved in an artistic form echoes of primitive wailing, of primitive repetition and choral cries, when he describes the funeral of Hector.^[507] “And the others ... laid him on a fretted bed, and set beside him minstrels, leaders of the dirge, who wailed a mournful lay, while the women made moan with them.” Andromache then leads the lamentation, “while in her hands she held the head of Hector, slayer of men. ‘Husband, thou art gone young from life.’ ... Thus spake she wailing, and the women joined their moan.” Then Hecuba; and again the line like a refrain, “Thus spake she wailing, and stirred unending moan.” Lastly Helen; and again, “Thus spake she wailing, and therewith the great multitude of the people groaned.” Wailings of the throng are echoed also in choruses of Greek tragedy;^[508] but it is these epic passages and their details which carry one back into the communal realm, quite away from 222the satire of Lucian,^[509] however some of the features which he describes may seem to be repeated here. The song of lament, whether a domestic duty or a professional act, was mainly a matter for the women, and was originally improvised; at the funeral of Achilles,^[510] it is his mother and “the deathless maidens of the waters” who wail about his pyre, and it is the muses themselves who raise the clear chant. So Hildeburh at the funeral pile, in that episode of the Béowulf:^[511]—

Sad at his shoulder sorrowed the woman,

Moaned him in songs.

That a wailing chorus answered her wailing there can be no doubt, though nothing is said of it; that the song is not quoted, that the record of these rites is brief, can be explained easily enough, when one remembers the monk who set down this fine old epic with pagan delight in his heart but a crucifix before his eyes, and constant thunder of ecclesiastical denunciation in his ears. Those neniae inhonestae, the singing of diabolical songs and the dancing of diabolical dances^[512] about 223a corpse, all the “payens corsed olde rites,” were denounced by bishops and councils of the church with a fervid iteration which at once accounts for the silence of the poets and testifies to the stubborn vogue of the ceremony. The dance is of course a survival of very primitive rites, as will be seen in the study of the actual vocero, and as can be learned from ethnology; for the epics it has been developed into funeral games, although in the Béowulf one finds an older stage of these ceremonies than in Homer. Besides Hrothgar’s lament over Aeschere, a lament intensified by the absence of the dead body,^[513] and the moanings of old Hrethel for his son,^[514] there is the hero’s own funeral, where, when all the clan, presumably, have mourned their lord, presumably in song, and when the wife has sung, like Hildeburh, her giomorgyd, her song of lamentation, at last the ashes are placed in the barrow, and twelve noble youths ride round it chanting the praises of the dead king. A close parallel to this ceremony is found far to the eastward. In what is now known to have been a Gothic rather than a Hunnish rite, warriors rode, “as in the games of the circus,” round the body of Attila where he lay in state, and as they rode sang also a funeral song of praise; Jordanis^[515] gives a Latin version of it, but as it stands in this guise, it has a very artistic and even artificial ring. The clan-grief and the clan-praise at Beowulf’s funeral are nearer to the facts. As regards the riding, it is clear that this takes the 224place of an older dance or march, just as the song takes the place of older wailings and cries. The processions of a whole community, at times of planting and of harvest, round the field, the barn, the village, to which we shall presently refer when considering the refrain, are matched by similar rites of marching with dance and song round hearth, grave, altar, in the ceremonies of wedding and burial. On the Isle of Man a wedding party goes three times round the church before it enters; and in many places the corpse is carried in the same way for a funeral. In the latter case, the solemn march is only a repetition of the dance round the corpse itself, the mourners going hand in hand, now slowly, now tumultuously, to the sound of their own wailing. Ethnological evidence, again, puts the songs and dances for the dead, as found among savage tribes throughout the world, in line with these survivals among the peasantry of Europe; no chain of evidence could be more complete. To this ethnological material we shall presently return; meanwhile it is in order to note the evidence in literature.

We have seen obvious cases of the vocero in oldest English, and it could be followed in other Germanic records. Probably many of the English and Scottish ballads began as a kind of vocero, something like the coronach of Highland clans: one thinks of Bonny George Campbell, with its repetition and refrain, and of The Bonny Earl of Murray, with its triad of incremental repetitions, ballads which follow close upon the death of their hero; of ballads less immediate but still memorial, like The Baron of Brackley, and perhaps The Lowlands of Holland; even of the widely spread ballads of a condemned criminal, the Good Nights, and such admirable precipitates of this kind as Mary Hamilton. For more direct evidence, the refrain line Ohon for my son Leesome Brand!^[516] is promising; but it is only a line. One vocero, however, has come down 225to us, although considerably changed from the normal and original pattern. In Aubrey’s Remains of Gentilisme and Judaisme,^[517] mention is made of “Irish howlings at Funeralls, also in Yorkshire within these 70 yeares (1688)”; and again, quoting the song, This can night, Aubrey says it is from Mr. Mawtese, “in whose father’s youth, sc. about sixty years since (now 1686), at country vulgar Funeralls was sung this song,” by a woman like a praefica. Scott has a like account; it was sung a century ago^[518] “by the lower ranks of Roman Catholics in some parts of the north of England. The tune is doleful and monotonous.” The refrain, or, as Scott calls it, the chorus, is very insistent and belongs to genuine communal tradition; he quotes an account of Cleveland, Yorkshire, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, which was found by Ritson in a manuscript of the Cotton library: “When any dieth, certaine women sing a song to the dead bodie, recyting the journey that the partye deceased must goe.” The following stanzas will serve as specimens of this highly developed but interesting vocero:—

This ae nighte, this ae nighte,

Every night and alle;

Fire and sleete and candle-light,

And Christe receive thye saule.

When thou from hence away art paste,

Every night and alle,

To Whinny-muir thou comest at laste,

And Christe receive thye saule.

In Germany, the vocero lingered long, but is dying or dead; it was an improvised farewell in “free” rhythm.^[519] A very interesting communal survival akin to the vocero was known 226in Flanders down to the year 1840,—The Maids’ Dance^[520] at the funeral of a companion; it was sung and danced by the young girls of the parish. When the coffin had been lowered into the grave, all these girls, holding by one hand the cloth which had covered the corpse, went back to the church singing this “dance” with a force and a rhythmic accent which roused the hearer’s surprise.^[521] The two stanzas and the refrain are, of course, partly modern; but they show traces of the old dance and vocero noted below as surviving among the Corsicans:—