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 in 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 romanticism 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 phrase 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

are 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 found 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 speak

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 a

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 and 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_ _poetry 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 overwhelmed 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 communal

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 traditional

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.

What, 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] Even

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

such 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 have 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 the 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. In 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, a 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 for 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 mind,[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, in 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 early 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 such 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 notes 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 in

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 of 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 one 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, but 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 not 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” is 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 so 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.

“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 of a Germanic epic. It

is not to be explained by any abbreviation in the record. Zell long ago

pointed out[437] that this habit of leapings and omissions is

characteristic of what may be regarded as the remains of Hellenic

popular verse. Like the ballad repetition, which is incremental, the

ballad omission is progressive, and has nothing of that strain and

doubling which makes Germanic epic, in Ten Brink’s phrase, spend such a

deal of movement without getting from the spot. Yet it is chiefly in the

incremental repetition that the ballad shows its primitive habit as

compared with the merely retrospective repetition of the romances. The

ballad stands close to that spontaneous emotion which rises in a throng

and relieves itself in a common, obvious, often repeated phrase; it

stands close to the event, and hence the abruptness, the process, due to

sight at close quarters, of immediate expression. The æsthetic value of

repetition is high when interest is held and concentrated upon a single

strong situation, as in _Babylon_; its value is low when the action is a

trivial sequence of details, as in a Russian ballad quoted by

Bistrom:[438] “He set up his linen tent; when he had set it up, he

struck fire; when he had struck fire, he kindled [the camp-fire]; when

he had kindled, he cooked the porridge; when he had cooked the porridge,

he ate it: when he had eaten it, he lay down,”—and so on, in the strain

dear to children.[439] Another variety of incremental repetition, which

brings one closer to the conditions under which ballads were made, is

found in the account of Porthan[440] about the singing of Finnish songs

by a leader who improvises, and a second singer, a sort of echo, a

dwindled chorus, who joins him and helps to carry the ballad along its

way. The leader[441] sings a line; but before he comes to the end of it,

his partner catches the idea and joins him in the final measure,[442]—a

word or two; then, while the other is silent, this helper repeats the

whole line, often with a slight change of words, mainly an adverb or the

like thrown in,—“surely,” “in truth,”—and with an even slighter change

of tone; then the leader sings another verse, the helper falls in,

repeats, and so to the end of the song. The two sit face to face with

clasped hands, and round them are the people _arrectis auribus_. It is

fair to conjecture that the folk were not always silent hearers, and

that the helper is deputy of a choral throng which has come to silence

in the enjoyment of a superior art;[443] Porthan admits that all sorts

and conditions of Finns were once able to make these ballads, and he

goes on to tell of the universal custom of the women to improvise little

songs as they grind at the hand-mills. The trick of singing in pairs is

not uncommon, and is seen elsewhere upon a historical background of

choral song; Castrén says that the Samoyedes improvise their magic songs

in the same fashion, a conjurer of the first class beginning the verse,

and joined in the final words by the humbler shaman, who then repeats

the whole alone. The song consists of but a few words.[444] Similar

methods, on a higher plane, are found in Denmark and Iceland.

Ethnological evidence, too, is at hand; in Africa, Captain Clapperton

heard two singers sing an artless ballad, one doing the verses, the

other the refrain.[445] Often two dancers lead a dance.[446] It is only

a step, moreover, from the twain with clasped hands, to the two singers

of a flyting, Eskimo song duels, strife between Summer and Winter,

amœbean verse of all kinds; see, for example, the Carlin and little boy

in the Swedish ballad, or Harpkin and Fin in the English,[447] where one

verse suggests the reply in the next. From these to the _schnaderhüpfl_,

when one after another steps out and sings, and so back to the chorus,

as in Lyngbye’s case of the Faroe fisher, is but another easy inference;

in short, it is clear, by overwhelming proof, that the individual

performers are a survival of the singing, dancing throng with its

infinite repetitions and its unending refrain.

Still another form of incremental repetition will occur to the reader as

based on old custom but bare of all save the rawest æsthetic

ministrations, and nowadays used only for jocose ends. The same line or

stanza is sung indefinitely, with the use of a new name, number, fact,

in each repetition; or else the repetition is cumulative, a test of

memory, somewhat as in “The House that Jack Built.”[448] There is a

German student song, still popular, where the names of those present are

rimed, one after the other, into a fixed formula; while degenerate and

silly verses of one’s youth, nursery songs,[449] counting-out rimes and

the like, will occur to one by the dozen, and seem less negligible, get,

indeed, an æsthetic lift, when one finds in them distinct hints of some

old incantation, some choral song to bless house and field, as well as

echoes from the dance and the labour of primitive man. Counting-out

rimes in Germany are often epic,[450] with a spice of adventure, thus

working into ballad territory; and these, as with children’s games at

large, hold to the dance. F. Wolf sunders the dramatic dances of the

Catalan peasantry, with lives of saints, battle of Christian and Moor,

robber tales, and so on, as their theme, the work of professional

singers, from those simple dances of the country folk and of the

children, some of which are of the type now under discussion. He

gives[451] a pretty little incremental specimen of this latter sort. But

labour is also in the game. In Gottschee[452] there is a ballad of a

servant maid who served one year and earned a chicken; chicken hatched

chickens: served second year and earned a duck; duck stands on big, wide

feet, chicken hatches chickens: served a third year and earned a turkey;

turkey said _Long Ears_, duck stands, and so on: and then lamb, kid,

pig, calf, pony, little man (the husband) who says _Love Me_, and

finally “a youngster” who says _Weigh Me_,—and then back through it all

to the chicken. This is sung of course by the girl; but from the

cumulative song, with more or less refrain, it is an easy step to the

choral song of labour, which is naturally incremental. Such is the

song[453] of women weeding the millet, which combines the old refrain of

labour in the field with the incremental repetition of a hardly coherent

ballad. Prettier is that song[454] which the playmates of a bride sing

during the weaving of her bridal wreath.

To-day a maiden has been joyous,—

Joyous she now nevermore;

Joyous surely she shall yet be,—

But as maiden nevermore.

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

Hand them shall she nevermore;

Hand them shall she surely yet,—

But as maiden nevermore.

The third stanza simply puts “binding” for “handing.” Here is the

incremental repetition along with the fixed refrain,—not a very

difficult communal feat, by the way, and, as in all these cases, getting

its rhythm from the work or the dance, its meaning from the event or

deed in hand. So, too, when the bride goes away, she is again besung,

and the events are occasion of the quite contemporary words; thus, as

she is lifted upon the husband’s horse,-

She is seated, she has sobbed!

She has ridden away, she laughed![456]

The better known collections are full of these simple cumulative songs,

which it would be superfluous to record. In Algeria women sing an

endless song of the sort with fixed refrain and incremental stanza. A

combination of the counting-out rime and the song of labour is found in

many places, for example, a Gascon ballad[457] sung by women as they

wash clothes and beat the linen in cadence; the feature of dropping a

number with each new stanza reminds one of those _Ten Little Indians_ of

one’s youth:—

Nine are washing the lye,

Nine.

Nine are washing it,

Nine are rubbing it,

Pretty Marion in the shade,

Pretty Marion,—

Let us to the fountain go.

Then “eight are washing,” then seven, and so on, one woman dropping out

at each break. Again, soldiers on the march sing the interminable song

of increments with a refrain:[458]—

Ma poule a fait un poulet,

_Filons la route, gai, gai,

Filons la route gaiment_.

Ma poule a fait deux poulets ...

Bücher[459] traces all these marching songs back to a primitive form

such as one still hears in Africa, where “for hours at a time” the

natives on the march keep singing a half-dozen words or phrases in

monotonous repetition, and with no increments. The development hence

through incremental stanzas up to the Tyrtæan lyric of battle, verses of

the _Chanson de Roland_, and so on, is evident enough. Repetition of the

incremental and cumulative sorts, moreover, is easily connected with

religious rites. “It seems a fair inference,” says Mr. E. B. Tylor,[460]

“to think folklore nearest its source where it has its highest place and

meaning.” At the end of the book of Passover services used by modern

Jews, as Mr. Tylor and others have noted, there is a poem which

curiously resembles the nursery tale of the old woman and her pig; the

angel of death is dignified enough, and is slain by the Holy One, but

cat eating kid, dog biting cat, and so on, are something ludicrous. Mr.

Tylor thinks all this the original of the nursery tale itself. Again, in

the same book there is a solemn counting poem; one is God, two are the

tables of the covenant, and so on up to thirteen, when all is reversed

in order back to one. Watchmen’s songs counting the hours will occur to

every reader. Germanic heathendom, doubtless, had this counting song in

its ceremonial rites;[461] while incremental repetition in the charms,

that oldest form of recorded poetry, is often found, witness the highly

interesting charm against a stitch in the side, or rheumatism, from an

English manuscript of the tenth century;[462] here are not only the

recurring line of incantation, and the epic opening usual in charms, but

a trace of something like the repetition with increments: “There sat a

smith and made a knife,” and again, “six smiths were sitting, warspears

working;” why not _caetera desunt_?

Repetition is not an invention and grace of artistic poetry, as the

books are fond of saying; it is the most characteristic legacy, barring

rhythm, which communal conditions have made to art. Its artistic

expression, in which, to borrow Emerson’s phrase, it comes back to the

passive throng “with a certain alienated majesty,” no longer the simple

iteration of a refrain or an incremental ballad, takes noblest form in

tragedy and monody, shading down into artifice, however effective, in

Maeterlinck’s _Princesse Maleine_ and _Pelleas et Mélisande_[463] where

it almost makes rhythm of the prose, and into clever but legitimate

tricks in Molière’s famous _galère_ passage and in his other passage,

almost as famous, of the _sans dot_. It is used to give simple effects;

probably it constitutes the charm of Hiawatha, as well as of that

imitated ballad by Hamilton, the _Braes of Yarrow_, which Pinkerton

ill-naturedly called “an eternal jingle.” We may therefore divide poetic

iteration into two great classes,—one natural or primitive, which is as

much as to say communal, the other artistic, with a No Man’s Land or

Siberia whither one banishes the artificial. This artificial iteration

of poetic style is perhaps nowhere so insistent as in those interesting

but exasperating oddities known as _Greenes Funeralls_,[464] published

“contrarie to the author’s expectation.” Of course, the step from art to

artifice is not too obvious. Every one knows the smoothness, the

fluidity, as Arnold calls it, which Spenser gave to his verse, often by

this delicately managed iteration—say in _Astrophel_;[465] Donne softens

his roughness with it in many a poem; but it becomes a tiresome trick at

R. B.’s hands:—

Ah, could my Muse old Maltaes Poet passe

(If any Muse could passe old Maltaes Poet),

Then should his name be set in shining brasse,

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

and it grows worse than tiresome in Gabriel Harvey’s variation of the

_ubi sunt_ theme:—

Ah, that Sir Humphrey Gilbert should be dead,

Ah, that Sir Philip Sidney should be dead,

Ah, that Sir William Sakevil should be dead,

which is not even humorous. Now it is clear that classical models play a

part here. The pastorals of Vergil, the iteration of elegy imitated by

Milton at the opening of _Lycidas_, are to be reckoned with; but not

only was the throng behind all this, as shall be seen in a study of the

_vocero_, not only are the charming iterations and incremental touches

in Catullus,[467]—

multi illum pueri, multae optauere puellae ...

nulli illum pueri, nullae optauere puellae ...

along with store of ordinary repetition and a refrain, to be placed

where they belong, in an alternating chorus of youths and maidens, with

distinctly communal background; but there were cases in early English

where the classical influence is slight, and the song of a swaying mass

is clearly to be heard:[468]—

Adam lay ibowndyn, bowndyn in a bond,

Fowre thousand wynter thowt he not to long;

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

As clerkes fyndyn wreten in here book.

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

Ne hadde neuer our lady aben heauene qwen.

In fact, early literature is full of repetition which suggests a recent

transfer from the dancing and singing throng. So even the mediæval

clerk[469] had not only Latin jingling in his head, but also songs of

the country folk buzzing in his ears; and it is no classical tone,

despite the tongue, that sounds in his—

veni, veni, venias,

ne me mori facias,

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

Come, my darling, come to me!

I am waiting long for thee:

I am waiting long for thee,

Come, my darling, come to me!

Lips so sweet of red-rose grain,

Come and make me well again:

Come and make me well again,

Lips so sweet of red-rose grain!

Incremental repetition, then, as it is found in traditional ballads,

lies midway between two extremes, one communal and one artistic. Behind

it is the indefinite iteration, unchanged, of primitive song; before it

is the repetition of artistic parallelism which is crossed by variation,

mainspring of the poetic dialect. Iteration is the spontaneous

expression of emotion, and begins in the throng; it lies at the root of

all rhythm, cadence, and consent; variation is the assertion of art, of

progress, of the individual. These are the two great elements of poetry.

Variation could take place in two ways. The communal singer had his

stock of communal refrains and the like, derived from tradition of the

singing and dancing throng; for communal purposes he could have added

his own stanzas, just as Burns did in modern days. There was the

chorus:—

Bonnie lassie, will ye go,

Will ye go, will ye go,

Bonnie lassie, will ye go

To the birks of Aberfeldy?

To this, and many a chorus like it, Burns added his own words.[471] But

the early artists who worked out the scheme of national poetry went

about their task by a different method. Their material was the unchanged

repetition, probably in couplets corresponding to the forward-and-back

of a dance, either in line, like some children’s games now, or in a half

circle, like that dance of the Botocudos. Out of this repetition they

made the artistic parallelism found alike in Germanic epic and in Hebrew

psalms, as well as the variation which Heinzel has so neatly compared

for this same epic and for the Sanskrit hymn. As regards Germanic verse,

Dr. R. M. Meyer[472] notes that repetition of words yielded to the

necessity, imposed by rigid metrical law, to take a synonym which would

rime with the principal word, thus ending in a mass of kennings or

verbal variations. It is clear that the strophic ballad is based upon

older conditions, as is proved by preceding examples, and by the lack of

variation in typical verses such as this, the opening of a pretty

dance-song:[473]—

La rauschen, lieb, la rauschen!

The rigid structure of an alliterative verse calls for variation, not

repetition, within its limits; variation in the ballads is incremental

and close to actual repetition, being forced within a stanza only by the

exigencies of rime:—

O where hae ye been, _Lord Randal, my son_,

O where hae ye been, _my handsome young man_?

The refrain, however, could hold to repetition pure and simple, leaving

room for an increment of considerable effect at the climax; thus in the

same ballad of _Lord Randal_, the refrain

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

turns at the end to—

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

Doubtless, too, variation began in the singing before it was evident in

the record; that change of accent which editors claim for the well-known

verses:—

Sigh nó more, ládies, sigh no móre...

Weep nó more, wóeful shépherds, wéep no móre

may have had its counterpart in far older and far ruder verse of the

throng. If the earliest form of poetry was the iterated single verse, a

statement of a fact, or, in the first instance, a fact stated not

formally but by the repetition of words in a rhythmic period which was

itself exactly repeated, it is clear that the progress of poesy may have

begun by making a proposition of the single verse and then proceeding to

add some new elements in the repetition of it. Artistic skill next fell

upon the single verse,[475] fixed its cadence, curbed its repetition by

syntactic relations, and, as in Germanic poetry, rang the changes on

this law of variation. Now it is evident beyond all doubt how great a

part incremental repetition must have played, and it is also evident

that this can be studied best in a collocation of communal survivals,

like the ballads, and primitive survivals, such as are found in savage

songs. Let us look first at certain songs which belong between these two

classes, then at a form of verse which is found in both, and finally at

the ethnological or primitive material.

Radloff[476] collected an admirable series of songs and ballads in

southern Siberia. Here are the homogeneous community, the oral and

traditional verse, and the slow but sure ruin[477] of both due to

importation of Mahometan learning, books and poets; here too are those

fashions of making and keeping a song, half communal, half artistic,

which yield to the conditions of written poetry. The gregarious song

still lingers in chorus and in improvisations; while individual singers

are working free from the throng, and are diverting the old broad

current of repetition into channels and courses of art. But this

individual artist[478] has a very short tether, and he is close to the

community not only in fact but in the character of his work.

Improvisation is the rule; composition of the deliberate modern sort is

almost unknown. Festal throngs, not a poet’s solitude, are the

birthplace of poetry; and the folk, if they must listen and may not sing

in chorus, choose a pair of singers to compete. “Some one present steps

forward and challenges to a flyting. If no one appears in answer, the

challenger sings improvised stanzas making fun of the people before him;

but if a match is made up, then the two wage their duel in song until

one fails to respond, loses the game, and gives a present to his

conqueror.” As with the Faroe islanders, so here on the Tartar steppes,

and on the slopes of the Altai, if these rival songs show conspicuous

merit, they are remembered, repeated, and sung as traditional

ballads.[479] Radloff has several instances. A girl who enters such a

flyting with a young man named Kosha, now flouts, now praises, and

finally—another world-old trick of traditional song—falls into a series

of riddles. What was first created,—who was so-and-so’s

father,[480]—when do the waters freeze? Kosha answers them all; the girl

gives up, and presents him with a coat. Another pretty flyting[481] is

also between youth and maid; the girl holds her own until the boy says

he has wounded her brother, whereupon she sits down and weeps. In all

these, and in the solitary improvisations, there is constant repetition.

Two verses of a challenge—all go by quatrains—are repeated in the

answer; while in the continuous ballad, song oscillates, as Ten Brink

says of this stage in the development of poetry, between memory and

improvisation, production and reproduction. The singer has a mass of

verses in his head, and puts his own thought only into the third and

fourth lines of a quatrain,[482] the first and second coming from the

common stock. That is the recurrent passage, the “ballad slang”; but

actual repetition, in its incremental phase, is stronger here than in

any poetry on record except that of the Finns. A fine example of this

repetition and variation is in the _Kangsa Pi_, one of the historic

songs;[483] mostly the stanzas are interlaced in pairs. Often the

changes are mere emphasis, not progress; for example:—

If I had a white hawk,

He would scream behind me;

If I had relatives on my father’s side,

They would follow behind me.

If I had a blue hawk.

He would scream behind me;

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

They would follow behind me.

These changes of colour, variation on hard-and-fast lines, are very

frequent and often inappropriate, as with a white horse and a blue

horse;[484] one form of the change is not far remote from a Germanic

kenning:—

O Myrat mine, Myrat mine,

A _sea_ is coming,—

How will you cross it?

On its _border_ dwells a tribe,—

How will you come through it?

O Myrat mine, Myrat mine,

A _stretch of water_ is coming,—

How will you cross it?

On its _banks_ dwells a tribe,—

How will you come through it?

Thus a mother to her son; his answer is of the same kind; and so back

and forth for nineteen stanzas, when the poem closes with two stanzas

sung by the son happily returned from war. With this parallelism of form

goes a parallelism of thought not unlike the implied simile in poetry of

the schools; witness the hawk and the relatives, quoted just above, or

these improvised verses:—

What has scattered the golden-seeming leaves?

Is it the white birch? It is indeed!

She whose hair streams down her back,

Is it my wife? It is indeed!

What has scattered the silver-seeming leaves?

Is it the blue birch? It is indeed!

She whose hair streams down her neck,

Is it my betrothed? It is indeed!

This is growing a bit too artistic for comfort; and presently in another

song direct simile breaks out:—

As the meadow fire in spring,

Warms this heart of mine;

As the bird that comes in spring,

Implores this eye of mine.

As the fire that burns in autumn,

Burns this heart of mine;

As the bird that comes in autumn,

Mourns this eye of mine.

Improvised or not, these songs are not only of the individual lover, but

of the artist, the bard, still close to his throng, to be sure, but with

a clear notion of his dignity and a good care for his singing-robes. As

one of these bards, though in another tribe,[485] prettily puts it:—

When the wind blows from the right hand,

Bends and bows the poplar;

When I sit and sing,

May there follow thirty songs!

When the wind blows from the left hand,

May the poplar move and quiver!

When I thus sit and sing,

May my own breast move and quiver!

Presently pen and paper will be found for the singer, and at last

printer’s ink to spread his songs; the days of communal chorus and

communal repetition are numbered. One other effect of the old communal

impulse, however, may be noted along with this trick of style. The

rhapsode, singer, leader, where he is first seen detaching himself from

the throng, has neither the individuality nor the artistic importance of

what one now calls a poet. Every one knows the solicitude of Germanic

singers to base their song upon tradition, to put their own invention

into the background and appeal to the common stock: “we have heard tell

of the Spear-Danes,”—“I heard tell of Hildebrand and Hathubrand.” This

meant that the tale to be told had the communal stamp, and was worth

hearing.[486] Egger[487] notes that the oldest Greek rhapsodes, like

their songs, differed not one from the other in glory; the best song was

simply the last which had been heard,[488] and there was no trace of

rivalry among the bards, no trace of partiality among the hearers. With

the next age, the time of Hesiod, came the stress and struggle for a

poet’s crown; and since the crown was to be awarded to the best singer,

judges were in demand, and so a rough criticism. It is easy to see that

this stage would be reached in any growth of poetry when the bard began

to talk of his thirty songs and of his quivering bosom; behind that

stage lies the stage of the poets as deputies and mouthpieces of the

throng; behind that, the throng itself.

We have now to look at a second class of material where primitive

repetition, born of strong communal emotion, gets artistic control and

so passes into new phases of development; this, confined to no one epoch

of culture, must be sought in some universal human impulse. Birth,

marriage, death, ought to give rise to such songs. Obviously, however,

the first of these will be of the least value, and in point of fact

songs of the sort were rarely recorded in early times, and perhaps

rarely if ever made. Marriage and death, from the terms of the case,

promise far better; and of the two,—for to treat them both would demand

excessive space,—we shall take the songs of death, the _voceri_.[489] A

brief glance at the marriage-songs, however, which are mainly sung in

communal dance and procession, shows repetition everywhere, increasing

with the older stages of culture. In German villages the whole community

still has a share in the bridal;[490] while in Tyrol, if a girl goes

outside the village for a husband, the youths mob her, tie her to a

dung-cart, and lead her through the place, all singing derisive songs,

until her father rescues her.[491] Of course, the mobbing of unchaste

women who marry is common enough; while in other cases of local

indignation, crowds and derisive songs are always in order,[492] being

represented under conditions of print by the “ballad,” which can be used

as a threat, like the modern reporter’s interview or “exposure.”

Gretchen, in her terror, seems to hear these mocking songs. Poor Pamela

hoped she would “not be the subject of their ballads and elegies,” if

she put an end to herself. But this is the other side of a joyous page.

The later epithalamy was sung on private family occasions outside the

bridal chamber and Puttenham gives a lively description of such

festivities; but public and communal features are the older fact. In

Greece[493] the bridal song comes from the festal crowd and accompanies

the communal dance; the bride throws bits of food into the village

fountain, about which the dances begin,—dances “which are regarded as

the last act of the wedding ceremony.” The songs for these dances,

moreover, along with verses composed and danced at other stages of the

affair, “form a considerable part of the national poetry.”[494] In

Albania[495] the bridal bread is baked on Thursday, and the kneading of

it is begun with choral songs made for the occasion; on Sunday the

marriage takes place, and from the procession of the groom and his

friends down to the departure of the pair all is song and dance. The

formal dance is opened by bride and groom, when a song is sung: “Raven

stole a partridge.—Partridge? What will he do with the partridge?—Play

with her, toy with her, and spend his life with her.” English marriage

customs, with communal dance and song, were of the same sort;[496] and

“the poore Bryde” had to “kepe foote with al dauncers and refuse none,

how scabbed, foule, droncken, rude and shamles soever he be,”—an early

puritan view of the case. Song and dance, communal rites throughout,

were certainly characteristic of the Germanic wedding in its old estate,

as is proved by divers names cited by Müllenhoff in his essay on our old

choral verse,[497] and by the fact that a wedding was often called

outright “the bridal song.”[498] Neocorus,[499] too, tells of the

customs in his time among the folk of the Cimbrian peninsula. In the

East, again, down to this day, a wedding, like a funeral, is celebrated

by the entire village for a full week; it was on communal epithalamies

of the sort that one based the artistic bridal poem such as Budde[500]

sees in Solomon’s Song. The modern custom is said to keep many primitive

traits. After a wedding,[501] which is usually in March, the pair are

treated for seven days “as king and queen,” and songs, now of communal

victory and the like, now erotic, are sung by the folk; a great dance,

moreover, is danced to the _wasf_, a song which praises the charms of

bridegroom and bride. The chorus is naturally insistent and incessant,

and a main characteristic of the songs is repetition.[502] But all

folksong of the wedding tells this tale of dance and song, with

repetition as the chief feature of the poetical style; and repetition is

studied to even better advantage in that communal song of lamentation

for the dead, which, for convenience, may pass by its Corsican name of

_vocero_.

Mourners for the dead, now, save in the case of public characters,

restricted to kin and friends, but once the whole community, are only

mutes or audience to the act of burial; it is clear, however, that the

priest and the service, or, as in France, the oration at the grave,

along with the reticent group, are deputy for older and indeed still

surviving songs of lament improvised and uttered by a near relative, and

these again are but a development from the rhythmic wailings of a whole

community or clan. Antiquity is no test whatever. A husband who advances

to the coffin where his dead wife is lying and gives her a passionate

farewell, after the manner of the French, while the funeral guests stand

now in sympathetic silence, now with audible manifestations of grief, is

doing precisely what Lucian describes as common in his day, barring the

extravagance of the previous scene and the violent demonstrations made

by Grecian women. Lucian thinks both demonstrations and oration

ridiculous,[503] and he gives a kind of parody of the speech which a

father makes over the body of his son. So too with the poetical lament,

the elegy, mere antiquity goes for nothing; and the question is one of

stages of evolution, regardless of chronology, from the communal and

choral wail up to the highly individualized and intellectualized monody

of grief. The elegy of Simonides over the dead at Marathon was doubtless

in its way as artistic as Tennyson’s _Ode on Wellington_; and the same

perspective must be kept in dealing with private outbursts of sorrow.

Tennyson’s own lines on the death of his brother are not a whit more

modern in tone than the _Ave atque Vale_ of Catullus which inspired

them. The more primitive obligation was not to hear in respectful

sympathy, not to read with intellectual approval, the oration or the

poem, but to weep with them that weep and so to sing with them that

sing. Uhland[504] cleverly notes the mythological projection of this

older custom in that lament for Balder shared by all animate and

inanimate creation. We are not, however, to think of the _vocero_ as

sprung from the ceremonies of a primitive funeral. Historians of

literature are fond of such a process, and fix upon this or that

religious rite as the source of some poem or song; Kögel,[505] for

example, traces epic to a ceremonial rite as to its ultimate origin,

and, for this particular case, insists that the _vocero_ of a Germanic

wife over her husband was a song of magic, a kind of incantation,

asserting, wildly enough, that choral lament for the dead was unknown to

the Germans of Tacitus, while magic songs had long been in vogue. This

is distortion of facts and reversal of natural evolution. By the very

terms of social organization, social consent must precede social

institutions, and a ceremonial must usually be regarded not as the

beginning but as the end of a social process. The prime factor in social

expression was consent of rhythm; rhythmic cries at wedding[506] and at

funeral do not spring from the religious rites, although this or that

wedding-song, this or that threnody, may have had such an origin; the

rites are rather themselves an outcome, under priestly control and the

hardening of custom into law, of this festal excitement, this communal

grief. The priest, even the shaman, is deputy of that throng which was

once active and is now passive; and when one considers the literature of

death, one finds the earliest stages of funeral lament in that half

chaotic chorus of repetition and tumultuous cries which cannot be

derived from any ceremony, strictly so called, but is rather on the way

to ceremony. At this literature we are now to look.

Homer has preserved in an artistic form echoes of primitive wailing, of

primitive repetition and choral cries, when he describes the funeral of

Hector.[507] “And the others ... laid him on a fretted bed, and set

beside him minstrels, leaders of the dirge, who wailed a mournful lay,

while the women made moan with them.” Andromache then leads the

lamentation, “while in her hands she held the head of Hector, slayer of

men. ‘Husband, thou art gone young from life.’ ... Thus spake she

wailing, and the women joined their moan.” Then Hecuba; and again the

line like a refrain, “Thus spake she wailing, and stirred unending

moan.” Lastly Helen; and again, “Thus spake she wailing, and therewith

the great multitude of the people groaned.” Wailings of the throng are

echoed also in choruses of Greek tragedy;[508] but it is these epic

passages and their details which carry one back into the communal realm,

quite away from the satire of Lucian,[509] however some of the features

which he describes may seem to be repeated here. The song of lament,

whether a domestic duty or a professional act, was mainly a matter for

the women, and was originally improvised; at the funeral of

Achilles,[510] it is his mother and “the deathless maidens of the

waters” who wail about his pyre, and it is the muses themselves who

raise the clear chant. So Hildeburh at the funeral pile, in that episode

of the _Béowulf_:[511]—

Sad at his shoulder sorrowed the woman,

Moaned him in songs.

That a wailing chorus answered her wailing there can be no doubt, though

nothing is said of it; that the song is not quoted, that the record of

these rites is brief, can be explained easily enough, when one remembers

the monk who set down this fine old epic with pagan delight in his heart

but a crucifix before his eyes, and constant thunder of ecclesiastical

denunciation in his ears. Those _neniae inhonestae_, the singing of

diabolical songs and the dancing of diabolical dances[512] about a

corpse, all the “payens corsed olde rites,” were denounced by bishops

and councils of the church with a fervid iteration which at once

accounts for the silence of the poets and testifies to the stubborn

vogue of the ceremony. The dance is of course a survival of very

primitive rites, as will be seen in the study of the actual _vocero_,

and as can be learned from ethnology; for the epics it has been

developed into funeral games, although in the _Béowulf_ one finds an

older stage of these ceremonies than in Homer. Besides Hrothgar’s lament

over Aeschere, a lament intensified by the absence of the dead

body,[513] and the moanings of old Hrethel for his son,[514] there is

the hero’s own funeral, where, when all the clan, presumably, have

mourned their lord, presumably in song, and when the wife has sung, like

Hildeburh, her _giomorgyd_, her song of lamentation, at last the ashes

are placed in the barrow, and twelve noble youths ride round it chanting

the praises of the dead king. A close parallel to this ceremony is found

far to the eastward. In what is now known to have been a Gothic rather

than a Hunnish rite, warriors rode, “as in the games of the circus,”

round the body of Attila where he lay in state, and as they rode sang

also a funeral song of praise; Jordanis[515] gives a Latin version of

it, but as it stands in this guise, it has a very artistic and even

artificial ring. The clan-grief and the clan-praise at Beowulf’s funeral

are nearer to the facts. As regards the riding, it is clear that this

takes the place of an older dance or march, just as the song takes the

place of older wailings and cries. The processions of a whole community,

at times of planting and of harvest, round the field, the barn, the

village, to which we shall presently refer when considering the refrain,

are matched by similar rites of marching with dance and song round

hearth, grave, altar, in the ceremonies of wedding and burial. On the

Isle of Man a wedding party goes three times round the church before it

enters; and in many places the corpse is carried in the same way for a

funeral. In the latter case, the solemn march is only a repetition of

the dance round the corpse itself, the mourners going hand in hand, now

slowly, now tumultuously, to the sound of their own wailing.

Ethnological evidence, again, puts the songs and dances for the dead, as

found among savage tribes throughout the world, in line with these

survivals among the peasantry of Europe; no chain of evidence could be

more complete. To this ethnological material we shall presently return;

meanwhile it is in order to note the evidence in literature.