We have seen obvious cases of the _vocero_ in oldest English, and it

could be followed in other Germanic records. Probably many of the

English and Scottish ballads began as a kind of _vocero_, something like

the coronach of Highland clans: one thinks of _Bonny George Campbell_,

with its repetition and refrain, and of _The Bonny Earl of Murray_, with

its triad of incremental repetitions, ballads which follow close upon

the death of their hero; of ballads less immediate but still memorial,

like _The Baron of Brackley_, and perhaps _The Lowlands of Holland_;

even of the widely spread ballads of a condemned criminal, the _Good

Nights_, and such admirable precipitates of this kind as _Mary

Hamilton_. For more direct evidence, the refrain line _Ohon for my son

Leesome Brand!_[516] is promising; but it is only a line. One _vocero_,

however, has come down to us, although considerably changed from the

normal and original pattern. In Aubrey’s _Remains of Gentilisme and

Judaisme_,[517] mention is made of “Irish howlings at Funeralls, _also

in Yorkshire within these 70 yeares_ (1688)”; and again, quoting the

song, _This can night_, Aubrey says it is from Mr. Mawtese, “in whose

father’s youth, sc. about sixty years since (now 1686), at country

vulgar Funeralls was sung this song,” by a woman like a _praefica_.

Scott has a like account; it was sung a century ago[518] “by the lower

ranks of Roman Catholics in some parts of the north of England. The tune

is doleful and monotonous.” The refrain, or, as Scott calls it, the

chorus, is very insistent and belongs to genuine communal tradition; he

quotes an account of Cleveland, Yorkshire, in the reign of Queen

Elizabeth, which was found by Ritson in a manuscript of the Cotton

library: “When any dieth, certaine women sing a song to the dead bodie,

recyting the journey that the partye deceased must goe.” The following

stanzas will serve as specimens of this highly developed but interesting

_vocero_:—

This ae nighte, this ae nighte,

_Every night and alle_;

Fire and sleete and candle-light,

_And Christe receive thye saule_.

When thou from hence away art paste,

_Every night and alle_,

To Whinny-muir thou comest at laste,

_And Christe receive thye saule_.

In Germany, the _vocero_ lingered long, but is dying or dead; it was an

improvised farewell in “free” rhythm.[519] A very interesting communal

survival akin to the _vocero_ was known in Flanders down to the year

1840,—The Maids’ Dance[520] at the funeral of a companion; it was sung

and danced by the young girls of the parish. When the coffin had been

lowered into the grave, all these girls, holding by one hand the cloth

which had covered the corpse, went back to the church singing this

“dance” with a force and a rhythmic accent which roused the hearer’s

surprise.[521] The two stanzas and the refrain are, of course, partly

modern; but they show traces of the old dance and _vocero_ noted below

as surviving among the Corsicans:—

Up in heaven is a dance;

_Alleluia_.

There the maidens are dancing all.

_Benedicamus Domino.

Alleluia, Alleluia._

It is for Amelia;

_Alleluia_,

We’re dancing as the maidens dance.

_Benedicamus Domino.

Alleluia, Alleluia._

But there is better material in the literature of other races. Nowhere,

for example, is the wailing and chanting of women over the dead better

attested than among the Hebrews of the Old Testament; Syrians of to-day

hold to the same rites and sing a song of mourning strangely like that

which Jeremiah heard twenty-five centuries ago.[522] The lament of David

over Saul and Jonathan, known to be an actual _kîna_, with its personal

touch of “my brother,” and its communal refrain, _how_ _are the mighty

fallen_, differs from the professional lamentation of the women, which

was in a fixed rhythm,[523] while David’s outburst is spontaneous and

“free.” In cases of this kind, to be sure, one must always reckon with

the literary and artistic element; but David’s _vocero_ is close to the

popular custom, and of more value to the student than the lament of

tragedy old and new. Indeed, a kind of declamation over the dead

relative is often found in tragedy, with some resemblance to the actual

_vocero_ both in matter and in style, but with an alien touch of

rhetoric; so Hieronimo, showing the corpse of his son, has the

repetition and play of words already noted among the early Elizabethans,

and at far remove from that “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom!”

of the immediate lament:—

Here lay my hope, and here my hope hath end;

Here lay my heart, and here my heart was slain;

Here lay my treasure, here my treasure lost,

and the rest. Hamlet and Laertes at the grave of Ophelia suggest further

distortion, turning the lament into a kind of flyting. It is the actual

_vocero_, and the communal conditions of it, from which one learns the

course of poetry; and this actual _vocero_, even in its Homeric form,

has two elements, the song of the relative and the answering wail of the

throng. With later conditions the single song comes to be professional,

as with Hebrews, Romans, and nearly all nations; or else the women move

with sympathetic gestures now round the chief mourner, now round the

corpse, singing and wailing as they go. Like modern Syria, modern Greece

keeps the old custom; the myriologue has many features of the Homeric

rite, particularly the primitive trait of improvisation. The song, says

Fauriel,[524] is never composed in advance, but is always improvised in

the very moment that it is delivered, and is always fitted to the person

addressed. “It is always in verse; the verses are always in the metre of

other popular songs; and they are always sung.” Each village—and the

communal trait is significant—has an air of its own for these

lamentations, and sings them to no other air. Hahn’s account[525] is

worth quoting. When a man has died, the women of his family make a

fearful cry,[526] which brings all the neighbouring women to the house,

shrieking, howling, and gesticulating with the mourners. The actual

relatives tear their hair, dash their heads against the wall, _call upon

the dead by name_, and scream so loudly[527] and continuously that for a

time they often lose their voices.[528] So the women; the men are more

calm. The corpse is now washed and clad, whereupon the women seat

themselves about it, and the real lament begins. “This is always

rhythmic and generally consists of two verses sung by one voice and

repeated by the whole chorus of women.” Now it is traditional, now

improvised. As fast as one woman is exhausted, another lifts her hand in

signal and begins a new verse. On the way to burial they sing in the

same fashion.

This song over the dead, which is found throughout the world, in

Greenland, in Peru, in the Hebrides, among the Hottentots,[529] shows a

course of development in which the detached or literary lament is the

latest stage. Here it may be a great poem, pulsing with the grief of

nations and close to the common heart, or a mere exercise made by rule;

the gay science of Provence, like the school poetry of Germany and

England, had minute directions for the making of a good _planch_.[530]

“One may compose a song of lament in any melody,” runs the Catalan rule,

“save in the melody of a dance,”—strange exception, when one comes to

the dances which so often went with the real _vocero_; and Master

Vinesauf,[531] in his _Poetria_, called out Chaucer’s well-known

gibe[532] by the recipe for a poem of grief. “When you wish to express

grief,” he advises, “say something like this;” and an appropriate

sentiment follows. That is the literary stage, the detached lament; but

behind the little artifice, as behind the great art, lies the real

_vocero_ with elements that need to be set in right perspective. We see

the corpse, the wailing relatives, the singing relatives, the

professional singing women, the whole clan in tumultuous grief, loud

discordant cries, a choral wail which is rhythmic and articulate,

chanted verses. Of all these the professional singing woman such as

Jeremiah invoked, the _praefica_ of Rome, the keener at an Irish

funeral, is the nearest to literary lament, and connects the communal

with the artistic. Behind her, and taking her place as one follows back

the course of evolution, stands the “free” or natural mourner, now and

then a man,[533] but usually wife or mother or sister of the dead.

Behind these, again, stands the throng itself, the original mourners,

clan or horde of a time when the bonds of mere community were stronger

than any ties of kin, and when individual grief was hardly if at all

lifted from the communal level; and with this stage one has come from

elaborate verse, through choral lament, to mere iteration of clamorous

grief, rhythmical by the consent of a throng and by the compulsion of

dance, gesture, and spasmodic utterance. In this communal refrain, then,

we reach the origin of all laments; here is surely one, at least, of the

“beginnings of poetry”; and in the _vocero_ of Corsica break forth even

yet those cadenced interjections which were heard throughout the Orient,

spread over Greece in the wailings for Adonis, and echo in the repeated

denunciation of Jeremiah: “They shall not lament for him, saying, _Ah my

brother!_ or _Ah sister!_—They shall not lament for him, saying, _Ah

Lord!_ or _Ah his glory!_ He shall be buried with the burial of an ass,

drawn and cast forth beyond the gates of Jerusalem.”[534] But these

earliest cadenced cries are best approached by means of the second

stage; and the song of grief can still be heard in Corsica from wife or

mother of the dead, with all the force and naturalness of the _vocero_

as it is described by Homer and in the _Béowulf_. Elsewhere, of course,

and in Italy itself, one can find material of the sort. D’Annunzio

describes, in terms said to be rigorously correct, a peasant mother’s

improvised _vocero_ at sight of her drowned boy.[535] After a few

moments of silence, broken only by wild outcries, she begins her

spontaneous song in a short, panting rhythm, rising and falling with the

palpitations of her heart; a characteristic noted also by writers on the

Corsican _vocero_.

We turn, then, first to this Corsican lament.[536] _Voceri_ they call

the songs, as one might say “vociferations,” a name doubtless due to the

_gridatu_ or inarticulate wailings of the throng, which precede the

_vocero_ proper; _lamenti_ and _ballati_ are terms sometimes used

instead, the second, of course, referring to those dances which were

once an inseparable part of the rite, but are now seldom seen. “Make

wide the circle,” runs one lament, “and dance the _caracolu_; for this

sorrow is very sore.”[537] As for the song itself, it is briefly but

adequately defined[538] as an “improvised funeral song,” sung by a near

female relative of the dead man, in a strophe of six verses with four

measures to the verse, that verse beloved everywhere of communal poetry;

and since the same occasion begets them all, all _voceri_ have

considerable likeness one to another, with recurrence of word and

phrase. The speech of Corsica is itself rudely poetic; and these

improvisations, though full of traditional passages,—“sweeter than

honey”; “better than bread,”—are direct in their diction, even to a

point that seems at first sight to deny such a fundamental communal

trait as repetition. Iteration, however, is there, insistently there,

when one takes into account not only the refrain, always breaking down

into sobs and repeated moans, but the evident suppression of repetition

in the text. As to the refrain, the leader now bids all present join her

in this wailing cry, and now bids them cease in order that she may be

heard:—

Di gratia, fate silenziu ...

Finitele ste gride ...

and now, again, she takes the refrain bodily into her own song,

beginning thus a new stanza. “_Di, di, dih!_ Woe is me! Make one great

cry of sorrow, brothers and sisters all,” sings a wife over her husband;

and this inarticulate bit of chorus, always sung, as Marcaggi says,[539]

at the end of each stanza, by the women who surround the corpse, may be

the imitation—echo would better hit the truth—of the old sobbing of the

throng. As for the text, repetition is hardly to be expected in print,

and the editors have doubtless done as Lyngbye did with Faroe ballads,

though here and there occurs a line[540] like,—

Chéta, chéta, chéta, o Sàgra,

Chét’ é nun piegna piu tantu.

They are keen to record the power of improvisation shown by their

countrywomen; what use to print pages of iteration? A fine hint,

however, can be found in Marcaggi’s forewords, not only of the silly

sooth but of the old time; he saw, he says, “one day a poor woman run

shrieking from her house, her hair disordered, and coming to the public

square, where the corpse of her sister-in-law lay, sing in a mournful

and monotonous note, with grotesque leaps and bounds:—

O commari Mari!

O commari Mari!

People said,” adds Marcaggi, “_that she was following the custom of a

former age_, and that she lacked proper reserve.”[541] This is, indeed,

the more primitive note; and the iterated cry, mere appeal to the dead,

like those _cris d’enterrement_ which Bladé heard at Gascon burials, was

once sung by the swaying and dancing throng of mourners. Psychologically

and physiologically this is quite in order; a kind of communal

hysterics, intensely rhythmical, as with a badly frightened child, as

with insanity, delirium, abnormal emotion of any kind, has the cadent

and recurrent note at its utmost; and this woman, with her “lack of

decorum,” like that peasant on the beach by the drowned boy, is the

modern survivor and deputy of panic emotion, a belated case in the

pathology of epidemic grief. Between this mere iterated cry, as was said

above, and the later professional song of lament,[542] lie the bulk of

Corsican _voceri_, sung by sister or mother of the dead, and most

characteristic when it is a violent death which they deplore and when

they will stir to vengeance a group of male relatives standing sullenly

by the corpse. For while a _vocero_ in the case of some peace-parted

soul, such as the village priest, is often a decorous and comforting

office,[543] the passion of the thing is felt only over the bier of a

man murdered in feud. St. Victor, whom all the others quote on this

point, describes the scene. At first, in the chamber of death, rises a

great wail of lament, through which oaths of vengeance flash like

lightning; men draw their daggers, and dash their guns upon the stone

floor; women dip their handkerchiefs in the blood still oozing from the

wounds;[544] sometimes they are moved to a frenzy that vents itself in

dancing round the corpse amid loud cries, until silence is demanded and

the dead man’s mother, wife, sister, moves to the bier and begins her

_vocero_. There is no art in it; “the excuse for its violence is in its

explosive force, ... it sings through the mouth of a wound.” It begins,

however, in a plaintive way, calls tenderly upon the dead, then tells

the story of his taking off; now the gently cadenced movements of the

singer grow more violent, and presently she breaks into a storm of

imprecations and into wild appeals for the vendetta.[545] One after

another of these singers improvises such a lament, and for every stanza

a chorus of sobs and cries and moans, often, one gathers, of articulate

words, rises from the throng. The passion, too, is real; readers who

come of northern blood must banish certain associations of the cardboard

castle, the cloak and sword, loud baritone confidences, and stage

moonlight. These _voceri_ of vengeance are not rated as rant by the law,

which often and vainly tries to put them down. Thus among the Basques, a

race, as George Borrow declared, not of poets but of singers, laws were

passed against the old fashion of the funeral;[546] it was forbidden “to

make lamentations, to tear one’s hair, to bruise the flesh, to wound

one’s head, to chant death-songs.” A Basque chorus of lament is

described by Michel. “All the women join in it with deep sighs and cries

of grief, addressed now to the dead and now to themselves; they begin

with high tones, then fall into a deep note, and pronounce from time to

time _ayené_, a Basque word which means _Alas!_” It is quite clear that

in these repeated words of the chorus one finds the origin of the

_vocero_, the “cry” of communal grief; and a study of such cries at the

actual burial, as they are still heard in Gascon funerals,[547] shows to

what beginnings one must refer the more elaborate _voceri_ of the

Corsicans. As early as 1340 a law was passed at Tarbes against “cries

and lamentations at the return from a burial.” According to Bladé, the

Gascon burial cries are a kind of recitative, lacking rime and even what

modern ears demand in the way of rhythm, for they are now divorced from

the dance, and at best are timed to the steps of the procession. They

begin when a funeral procession starts from the church to the cemetery,

and are a series of “distinct exclamations combined into irregular

stanzas”; mostly they begin “in a high note, falling slowly, to rise

again at the end.” The iteration of these cries is insistent; Bladé

quotes a long _cri_ of the sort:[548]—

Ah!

Ah! Ah! Ah!

Ah! Pauvre!

Ah! Pauvre!

Ah! Pauvre!

Mon Dieu!

Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu!

Ah!

Pauvre Père!

Pauvre Père! Pauvre Père!

Vous êtes mort, pauvre Père!

Pauvre Père, vous êtes mort!

Vous êtes mort!

Vous ne reviendrez jamais!

Jamais! Jamais!

Then the first stanza is repeated. The choral possibilities of this cry

are clear enough, and sung to the dance about a corpse, as was

undoubtedly the primitive case, its rhythm would have been exact and no

“recitative.” A further step is taken when individual and artistic

touches make themselves felt in a pretty little _cri_ which is sung by a

mother[549] over her child:—

Pauvret!

Ah!

Tu seras bien seulet

Au cimitière

Cette nuit,

Et moi

Je te pleurerai

A la maison.

Mon Dieu!

Ah!

Repetition is the original rhythm, the original poem; then comes

improvisation by the individual, begetting the increment and founding a

“text,” while variation plays upon the repeated words. Such is the

course of poetry, and in particular of the _vocero_; repetition lies at

the heart of it. Wetzstein,[550] describing the Syrian song of lament

sung by the women, lays stress upon the constant iteration in it, and

upon the chorus which consists mainly of a single word,—“woe!”

“alas!”—counterpart of the chorus in Corsican and Basque _voceri_.

Indeed, the _vocero_ is not only inscribed with woe, but was once

nothing else; and fragments of this or that “cry” of burial and of death

found their way into the mythology and the recorded poetry of

Phœnicians, of Egyptians, and of Greeks. Brugsch,[551] in his study of

the songs about Adonis and Linos, makes it clear that Linos was simply a

personification of these Phœnician cries of lament, _ai lenu_, the

choral “alas!” or “woe to us!” The refrain or repeated cry of grief sung

by mourners about their dead finds thus both mythical and ritual

projection and the immortality insured by great artistic song. This

_ai_, _ai_, seems to be one of the oldest choral funeral cries, common,

as Brugsch puts it, “to the whole Orient as well as Egypt”; and he

follows it down to the exquisite elegy of Bion. Linos, in the vintage

songs, was made a personification of this cry,[552] became a Greek, was

said to be buried in Argos, and was worshipped on Helicon amid

lamentations of matron and maid gathered at the yearly festival. One

remembers Ezekiel’s wrath over the women who, in the gate of the Lord’s

house, were weeping for Tammuz. In the Egyptian lament of Isis for

Osiris, the opening words, “Come back,” are repeated, as in the choral

cry from which it sprang, and are in accord not only with the _vocero_

of Europe, but with the refrain of a dirge in India:[553]—

We never scolded you; never wronged you;

_Come to us back_!...

_Come home, come home, come to us again!_

The Egyptian _vocero_, the _ai en Ise_, is worth quoting in full:[554]

“Come back, come back, God Panu, come back! For they which were against

thee are no more. Ah, fair helper, come back to see me, thy sister, that

love thee; and drawest thou not nigh to me? Ah, fair youth, come back,

come back! I see thee not, my heart is sore for thee, my eyes seek thee.

I wander about for thee, to see thee in the form of Nai, to see thee, to

see thee, fair lord, in the form of Nai, to see thee, the fair one,—to

see thee, to see thee, God Panu, the fair one! Come to thy darling,

blessed Ounophris, come to thy sister, come to thy wife, come to thy

wife, God Urtuhet, come to thy spouse! I am thy sister, I am thy mother,

and thou comest not to me; the face of gods and of men is turned to

thee, while they weep thee, seeing me that weep for thy sake, that weep

and cry to heaven that thou hear my prayer,—for I am thy sister that

loved thee on earth. Never lovedst thou another than me, thy sister!

Never lovedst thou another than me, thy sister!” Like the companion

lament of Nephthys, this is distinctly a _vocero_ of the sister over the

brother; and the repeated _mââ-ne-hra_, “come home,” the refrain of the

piece, gave rise to the name Maneros, fabled to be a prince of Egypt, a

fact which reminded Herodotus of the similar song of Linos in Greece. In

his chapter on the Lityerses song, Mannhardt[555] notes that this name,

too, with that of Bormos, both supposed to be sons of a king, like

Maneros, Linos, Mannerius, was developed out of an old refrain. The

Greeks, singing a lay which corresponded to the Maneros, went with

choral cries and music to seek the vanished Bormos. So, too, with Hylas;

a Bithynian festival is on record, where sacrifice is made at the scene

of his capture by the nymphs; and the festal throng thereupon wander

over the hills and about the Hylas Lake, crying incessantly upon his

name. It is needless to follow all these myths and the ritual connected

with them; nor can we turn aside and study the memorial festivals of the

dead, like that old Germanic feast in November, now surviving in All

Souls’ Day, where masses said for the repose of Christian dead, and

flowers laid upon their tombs, took the place of older sacrifice, dance,

and song.[556] What one sees beyond question is the origin of funeral

songs in the communal chorus, and what one infers with great probability

is that death, and the resulting expression of communal grief in choral

song and dance, had much more to do with earliest forms of poetry than

even the erotic impulse. Sociology now declares that primitive feeling

for children, relatives, clan, was far keener in its emotional

expression than the sense of sexual desire.[557] The importance of the

love-lyric, now overwhelming, and mainly an individual outburst, yields

in primitive life to the importance of the choral _vocero_ over a dead

clansman; so that, using the terms in a modern way, one must reverse

that saying of the preacher: it was death that was stronger than love.

Coming back to modern survivals, one finds this _vocero_ common, both in

its individual and in its choral form, among the Celts. Leaving the

Ossianic lament alone in its gloom, one may take the honest and homely

prose of Pennant,[558] who made a tour through Scotland in the year

1769, and saw a lyke-wake[559]—he calls it a “late-wake”—in the

Highlands. “The evening after the death of any person, the relatives and

friends of the deceased meet at the house, attended by bagpipe and

fiddle; the nearest of kin, be it wife, son, or daughter, opens a

melancholy ball, dancing and greeting, _i.e._ crying violently, at the

same time; and this continues till daylight, but with such gambols and

frolics among the younger part of the company that the loss which

occasioned them is often more than supplied by the consequences of that

night.” This is eighteenth-century humour, and an eighteenth-century

reason to explain the hilarity is quoted from Olaus Magnus.

Unfortunately Pennant did not hear what he calls the “Coranich”; but he

learned that such a song is generally in praise of the dead, a recital

of his deeds or the deeds of his forbears. Questions, too, were

addressed to the corpse, why, for example, he chose to die—a common

trait of the _vocero_, already put to use by Chaucerian humour,[560] and

noted by old Camden; Pennant remarks that the mother of Euryalus makes

the same query.[561] But Pennant had heard such songs in the south of

Ireland; and this feature of an Irish wake is still accessible to the

curious. On its native soil it has been often studied and

described.[562] When the corpse has been laid out, “the women of the

household range themselves at either side, and the keen (_caoine_) at

once commences. They rise with one accord, and moving their bodies with

a slow motion to and fro, their arms apart, they ... keep up a

heart-rending cry. This cry is interrupted for a while to give the _ban

caointhe_, the leading keener, an opportunity of commencing. At the

close of every stanza of the dirge the cry is repeated.” The authors

give the air to which keens are chanted. “The keen usually consists in

an address to the corpse, asking him, ‘Why did he die?’—or a description

of his person, qualifications, riches; it is altogether extemporaneous.”

A note attributes the ease of improvisation to the fact that assonance,

“vocal rime,” is enough to satisfy the needs of Irish verse. The keener

is often a professional and paid; sometimes a volunteer and a member of

the family. “Any one present, however, who has the gift, may put in his

or her verse; and this sometimes occurs.... Besides _caoines_, extempore

compositions over the dead, _thirrios_, or written elegies, deserve

mention. They are composed almost exclusively by men, as the _caoines_

are by women.” One thinks of Marcaggi’s poetical bandits and their

written effusions as compared with the improvised songs of the

_voceratrice_ over her dead. It is odd to see how the zeal of certain

antiquarians would reverse the law of nature, and make this improvised

keen a degenerate form of older and carefully composed elegies of Irish

“bards.” O’Conor thought the old keen to be “debased by extemporaneous

composition”;[563] and a Mr. Blanford[564] describes the degradation in

detail. The keen, he says, was once an antiphonal affair prepared

beforehand, and sung by bards with the aid of a chorus,—elaborate in

every way. On the decline of these bards, “the Caoinan fell into the

hands of women, and became an extemporaneous performance.” Like the

degeneration theory of ballads, this account of the keen goes to pieces

under the test of comparative and historical studies. Spenser, to be

sure, speaks of these bards, and not without respect;[565] but it is

clear that the ancestral line of the keen among Irishmen runs back to

“the lamentations at theyr burialls, with dispayrefull outcryes and

immoderate wailings,”[566] which he mentions in his argument to prove

that the Irish are descended from the Scythians. Would that Spenser had

not cut short his tale “of theyr old maner of marrying, of burying, of

dauncyng, of singing, of feasting, of cursing, _though Christians have

wiped out the most part of them_,”—best reason for telling in detail of

all the Christians had left!

Wailings, cries now articulate and now inarticulate, but wrought by

repetition, by the cadence of rocking bodies, or of measured steps, by

the spasmodic utterance of extreme emotion, into a choral consent which

is not harmony, perhaps, to modern ears, but which has a rhythm of its

own,—these are the raw material of the poetry of grief. Like the “cries”

at a Gascon burial, like the Irish keen, is the _rauda_ of Russian

Lithuania, which Bartsch[567] significantly calls “a preliminary stage

of actual folksong.” This _rauda_ or _daina_ is sung by women; it lacks

what one calls melody and verse; and it is sung mostly on the way to the

burial or at the grave. Prætorius, at the end of the seventeenth

century, describes the Lithuanian _vocero_ as a mingled song and sob,

with the usual questions to the corpse, so familiar in the Irish

keen—why did the man die, had he not enough to eat and drink, had he not

clothes and shoes?[568] Brand, who made his tour in 1673, tells the same

story; relatives and friends, however, are here seated round the corpse,

shrieking and howling, to be sure, but in words of a more lyric tone:

“Why hast thou left us? Whither art thou gone? I shall go to thee, but

thou wilt not come to me.”[569]

Enough has been said to show the origins of the _vocero_ in Europe.

Among the Tartar folk of Siberia, songs of lament, although nearly

always improvised, have more the character of an elegy, and are sung by

the relatives of the dead during a full year after the funeral.[570] If

the husband dies, it is his wife who makes the song; if son or daughter

dies, it is the mother; while a dead mother is sung by her daughter or a

near female relative. Men sing these songs only when a rich or powerful

person dies, and then only at the funeral:[571] one thinks of David over

Jonathan and Saul, and of that old king in the _Béowulf_. Among the

Eskimo,[572] however, occurs a _vocero_ precisely like the type which

has been found common to the primitive customs of Europe,—a song by the

near relative, with chorus of moans, sobs, and cries from the women who

stand about. Coming to the distinctly savage state, one finds material

enough to fill a book, all going to prove that a choral cry and not an

individual composition must be taken as starting-point of the _vocero_.

“Of the Tasmanians, Mr. Davis relates[573] that ‘during the whole of the

first night[574] after the death of one of their tribe they will sit

round the body, using rapidly a low, continuous recitative, to prevent

the evil spirit from taking it away.’” Naturally the artist comes early

upon the scene; dirges, eulogies, elegies of every sort, are built on

this choral foundation; and that communal magic, if it was anything more

than a Tasmanian _vocero_, is soon replaced by the magic of the

individual shaman. To put him in the van of funeral lament, however, to

say that he preceded communal and choral wailings for the dead, is

ignoring the facts of primitive life and the instincts of human nature.

Comparetti makes the magic songs of the Finns precede their heroic and

legendary verse, and this may well be true; but the communal lament is

older than both, for, as was seen in the case of the Botocudos,

primitive folk have no legend, no history, and as for the magic, while

the sayings of a shaman would get the earliest record, they demand a

communal background. For it is the unavoidable condition of all recorded

literature that what is of the moment and of the mass dies with its

occasion; while only individual skill, the hand of a single performer,

is moved to keep the record of his doing on purpose to a life beyond

life. Even the humblest shaman, too, learns his art and his rude ritual

from an older artist in magic,[575] and so his making becomes a

tradition and his verses flit from mouth to mouth. But the history of

religion has taught us to look elsewhere than to the temple and the

priest and the Deus Optimus Maximus of civilized worship, if we would

find the beginnings of cult and the earliest divinity. As we go back to

a horde of homogeneous men, so we go back to a horde of homogeneous

spirits; as one spirit rises above the rest, so the shaman is deputed,

with his superior powers,[576] to cope with the superior god. It was the

“we” of the horde, in the new sense of coherence and social being, which

started that communal thinking and made that communal belief in the

“they” of a surrounding and potent host of spirits; and it is not

unreasonable to suppose that communal appeal, sheer cries and leaps in

some wild consent of rhythm, must have begun those magic rites which are

perhaps to be surmised in no very advanced stage in the songs of Mr.

Davis’s Tasmanians. Actual incantations that come down to us are full of

repetition, and frequently have a chorus or refrain;[577] elements that

point back to a communal source. Among American Indians the necromantic

songs abound in a chorus which is nearly all repetition, like[578]—

Na ha, Yaw ne;

Na ha, Yaw ne.

But it is the _vocero_ which we are now to study among savage tribes. A

case or so from Africa and Asia will do for that side of the

world—evidence is more than abundant—and then America may tell its tale

at a time when borrowing is out of the question. M. Adanson, a

correspondent of the Royal Academy of Sciences, travelled in Senegal

about 1750; his account[579] of _vocero_ and dance is fairly

representative of the case. One night in a village he was awakened by a

“horrid shrieking,” and found that a young woman had just died. What

follows is interesting for comparison with the custom in modern Greece.

“The first shriek was made,” says M. Adanson, “according to custom, by

one of the female relations of the deceased before her door. At this

signal, all the women in the village came out and set up a most terrible

howl, so that one would have thought they were all related to the

deceased;” the traveller forgets that in certain levels of culture the

clan, even the horde, is above kin. The noise lasted till break of day;

relatives then went into the dead woman’s cottage, took her hand, and

asked her questions,—the common trait of the _vocero_ everywhere. When

she was buried, the lamentations ceased; but for three nights the young

people danced a memorial dance. At this the performers sang a song, “the

burden of which was repeated by all the spectators.” Then follows the

description of certain erotic features of the dance, and the usual

testimony to that exactness of time observed in song and movement and

gesture. The _vocero_ itself is mainly a lament; Mungo Park speaks of

“the loud and dismal howlings,” another of “leaping and dancing”; while

in Loango relatives “weep, sing, and dance” about the corpse.[580] In

Korea, after a night of merriment the body is carried to its tomb; “the

bearers sing and keep time as they go, whilst the kindred and friends

... make the air ring with their cries.”[581]

Interesting are the accounts of American Indians in the days of

discovery. Jean de Lery, a Frenchman who went to Brazil with the

Protestant emigrants in the sixteenth century, and wrote an account of

his journey,[582] was struck by the likeness between the funeral laments

made by savages, and the _voceri_ of the women of Béarn singing over

their dead husbands. He quotes one, a good document. “‘La mi amou, La mi

amou: Cara rident, œil de splendou: Cama lengé, bet dansadou: Lo mé

balen, Lo m’esburbat: Matî depes: fort tard au lheit.’ That is to say,

‘my love, my love, laughing face, fine eye, light limb, brave dancer,

valiant mien, lovely mien, early up and late to bed.’” So too the Gascon

women: “‘Yere, yere, o le bet renegadou, o le bet iougadou qu ‘here’:

that is to say, ‘O the brave Protestant, O the brave player that he

was!’ And so do our poor American women, who, besides a refrain for each

stanza,[583] always throw in a ‘He is dead, he is dead, for whom we now

are mourning,’ whereupon the men respond and say: ‘Alas, it is true; we

shall never see him more until we are behind the mountains, where, as

our Caribs tell us, we shall dance with him’—and other things of the

sort, which they add in their response.” Lescarbot,[584] quoting Lery

about the Brazilians, remarks the agreement in songs of lament between

them and the Canadians “fifteen hundred leagues away.” Such a song ran—

Hé hé hé hé hé hé hé hé hé hé,

a monotonous performance on paper, with the notes _fa_ _fa_ _sol_ _fa_

_fa_ _sol_ _sol_ _sol_ _sol_ _sol_, not too elaborate music; but bodily

graces made up for this, since they then “shrieked and cried in fearful

wise the space of a quarter-hour, and the women leaped into the air with

such violence as to foam at the mouth.” Then once more the tuneful mood

began, and they sang, “Heu heüraüre heüra heüraüre heüra heüra onech.”

In this song they are mourning for their dead parents. As with Lery and

Lescarbot, so the spirit of comparison is astir in Lafitau,[585] who,

however, has less to tell of folklore at home, and a great deal to say

of the ancients, as may be gathered from the title of his book; the

laments for the dead he calls _nénies_, and speaks of the “matron” who

plays the part of _praefica_. He tells, however, a plain story of the

savage customs. When a corpse has been dressed and laid in state, tears

and lamentations, restrained up to that time, begin to break forth, but

in order and cadence. The “matron” leads the other women, who “follow in

the same measure, _but use different words, according to the relation

which they bear to the deceased_,”—second stage of the _vocero_, with a

survival of the chorus, however, far more pronounced than in Corsica.

Men, too, mourn their dead, but in a nobler way, singing the death-song

and dancing the hereditary dance;[586] but these _voceri_ of the women

are of great interest. Grosse[587] quotes from Grey the Australian

_vocero_ for a young man, where “the young women sing—‘My young

brother,’—the old women sing—‘My young son,’—and all in chorus

sing—‘Never shall I see thee again, Never shall I see thee again.’”

In Schoolcraft’s[588] time things had undergone no great change; for

“every person aggrieved makes his own complaint, and it is pitiful to

see a married person commence wailing and singing _kitchina takah_, then

wailing again _kitchina_,—‘men’s friend.’ These are all the words,”—a

significant fact. “The same way in other deaths the deceased is

bewailed.” Here is the single _vocero_; but it is a faint affair in

comparison with the volume and sound of the funeral chorus.

Schoolcraft’s evidence all runs this way. “Choruses,” says Mr.

Fletcher,[589] “are about all the Indians sing.” Carver,[590] to be

sure, like the other travellers, tells of a mother who seemed to

improvise a song of lament over her dead child at the time when it was

laid among the branches; but he is emphatic about the chorus, and calls

it “a not unpleasing but savage harmony.” A recent writer,[591] noting

the monotonous choral songs at funerals, thinks “these chants may no

doubt occasionally have been simply wailing or mourning ejaculation.” As

one comes to lower levels of culture, among the Patagonians, for

example, and the interior tribes of Africa, mere choral iteration of

monotonous sounds and beating the ground with the feet—perhaps not so

much “to keep off the evil one”[592] as to find the communal consent—are

the prevailing characteristics of the _vocero_. The funeral dance of the

Latuka, which Baker saw,[593] really comes to this; while the feathers,

the bells, the horns, are easily recognized as lendings of an incipient

culture, and teach the plain lesson that the state of the African savage

is not to be transferred outright to primitive man. Indeed, it is quite

evident that such perfect consent of communal voice and step as was

shown by the Botocudos may be confused and broken in what one must call

higher stages of culture,—for example, that dance of the Latuka. In

Nubia Miss Edwards[594] saw a ceremony, mainly dance, at the grave of a

member of the tribe, which seemed to her artificial in the extreme. “The

lamentation itself is a definite musical phrase executed by women who,

beginning on a high note, proceed down the scale in third-tones to the

lower octave or even the twelfth. It is taught, like the _zaghareet_, or

cry of joy, by mothers to their young daughters in their earliest

years.” It is only when the historian looks at all this evidence of

savage dance and cry, of feminine song and choral response, of refrain

passing into rite and myth, of detached and artistic lament, and when he

applies to it the evolutionary test, the comparative and historical

test, that it lies in true perspective and allows him to draw some

definite conclusion about one at least of the beginnings of poetry. The

_vocero_ began as communal wailing, horde or clan or house mourning the

brother and inmate in rhythmic cries to the cadence of the dance; with

new domestic ties of blood, in which of course the mother and sister are

supreme,[595] these two stand out as singers of the solitary _vocero_ to

which the crowd makes answer in refrain. The inevitable sundering of

individual and chorus now makes headway, the former passing into

literature, the latter, dropping its concomitant dance and surviving as

refrain, dies slowly out in all save a few isolated communities, and in

all recorded verse except here and there a chanted dirge. But in each of

these diverging fortunes, as in the earliest, so in the last estate of

the _vocero_, in elegy, threnody, ode, one common trait abides; and

everywhere it echoes the insistent voice of repetition.[596] As an

example of this repetition, as well as of the _vocero_ in its earlier

stage, we may conclude with an iterated verse sung by a negro woman,

once a slave, who still lived with her master’s family in the

South.[597] She had just buried her husband, but went about her tasks as

usual and waited upon the children of the house. Suddenly, however, in

their presence, and to their great fright, she burst out with these

words,—

O dem ropes dat let him down!

and continued to sing them without ceasing, in a strange crooning way,

the better part of an hour, and at intervals during some days. It were

to consider too curiously, perhaps, if one should compare this crude

case of “vision” with certain forms of poetry that bear a similar

relation to the original song of grief.

So much for the _vocero_. It has led us from the ballads back to that

ethnological evidence making so strongly, in diction as in rhythm, for

the primitive note of iteration, for the fundamental element which marks

the communal origin of poetry, precisely as variation has marked its

individual and artistic course. Repetition of sounds, when joined with

act of labour, with march or dance, with strong emotion of a festal or

communal kind, made possible the perception of consent, or, to speak

with Professor Baldwin Brown, of order. It begets this sense of order in

other arts; repetition of a certain kind of line on a jar made a rhythm

of decoration, just as a series of similar groups of words, of steps,

made poetry and dance. How important repetition must have been in early

poetry, and in any unrecorded verse, is clear when one reflects that the

invention of writing turned poetry from an art wholly of time and

succession to an art half plastic; we see the line, the stanza,

nowadays, and repetition is an impertinence in poetry, because hearing

has become a secondary and imagined process. The æsthetic value of

repetition in primitive verse gets a new aspect when one considers

Wie das Wort so wichtig dort war,

Weil es ein gesprochen Wort war;

although that other protest is right enough for one who has only modern

poetry in view:—

Im Anfang war das Wort?...

Ich kann das Wort so hoch unmöglich schätzen.

For repetition as the main element in savage poetry it is useless to

spread out evidence; no one denies the fact, and ethnology is full of

it. From surviving incremental repetition, as in the _Kalevala_ and in

the ballads, one passes back, with the increment steadily diminishing,

to outright and unrelieved iteration. The Africans have songs, some of

them known as “national,” which consist of a single word, arranged in

rude rhythmic groups, repeated for hours; and they get as much

satisfaction from it as presumably those Ephesians got out of their own

vehement and repeated cry. Lery and Lescarbot heard these songs of an

iterated word. Lafitau[598] says that Father Marquette saw Indians dance

the calumet dance, and was surprised “that the slave in singing said

nothing but the single word _Alleluia_,”—of course an accidental

coincidence of sounds,—“pronouncing the _u_ after the Italian fashion,

and dividing the word into two parts.” The iterated word in primitive

song has its meaning somewhere, but often shades back into an

inarticulate sound, and shades forward into a traditional and

unintelligible cry, mere relief of emotion. Perhaps words of this sort

went with the “detestable air” which Mary Shelley heard at the _festas_

near her house in Italy.[599] The countryfolk, “like wild savages, ...

in different bands, the sexes always separate, pass the whole night in

dancing on the sands close to our door, running into the sea, then back

again, all the time yelling one detestable air at the top of their

voices,—the most detestable air in the world.” The favourite song of the

Botocudos, their lyric mainstay, was just _Kălăuīā ahā́_, repeated

indefinitely. The chorus of Indian war-songs, in North America,

“consists for the most part of traditionary monosyllables which appear

to admit often of transposition, and the utterance of which, at least,

is so managed as to permit the words to be sung in strains to suit the

music and dance.”[600] Dr. Brinton, in a summary of the characteristics

of American aboriginal poetry,[601]—which was always sung,—noting that

repetition is the groundwork, says that this element of iteration has

two forms: a verse is sung repeatedly, which of course makes some

statement, or there is a repeated refrain; but this refrain is wholly

interjectional and meaningless. The Fuegians often sing not so much as a

word, but only a syllable repeated forever. Progress is in the text, and

by the individual; communal reminiscence is in the refrain: it is clear,

then, that the refrain is the original “poem,” and to the refrain one

must look for an idea of beginnings. A. W. Schlegel[602] conjectured

that the earliest forms of lyric poetry were due to an “effort of the

human heart to express a feeling or mood and to give it permanence by

tone and rhythm,” this effort resulting at first “in simple words and

interjections often repeated.” These are kept in the chorus or refrain;

incremental repetition, as was shown above, works its way in the text.

The chorus, to be sure, rises soon to the dignity of a coherent

sentence; but its communal and retrograde force still is strong, and it

insists on naked repetition, while individual singers cherish the

increment. Miss Kingsley[603] heard the Bubis sing in chorus over and

over for hours this verse and nothing more,—

The shark bites the Bubi’s hand.

A more advanced stage is seen in the cautious but distinct incremental

repetition of a singer among the North American Indians; we quote from

Schoolcraft:[604]—

Ningah peendegay aindahyaig:

We he heway ...[605]

That is, “I will walk into somebody’s home.” The following words proceed

very cautiously. “The composer appears to commence with delicacy ...

singing that he would walk into some indefinite home. The next line

implies that he will walk into his or her home. In the third line ... he

will walk into her home during some night. He then informs her that he

will walk into her dwelling during the winter. In the fifth line”—it is

really a stanza, with that eternal chorus—“he becomes decisive and bold,

and says he will walk into her lodge this night.” So, too, the warrior

sings:[606]—

I will kill, I will kill,

The Americans I will kill!

But the repeated air of that “cereal chorus,”[607] when a girl gets a

crooked ear at the husking, has the stricter note:—

Wagemin, wagemin,

Paimosaid:

Wagemin, wagemin,

Paimosaid.

The work of developing poetry from a rhythmic chaos of wild and repeated

cries up to a chorus of this kind was a communal achievement; art is

responsible for increment and variation. Communal consent in rhythm

caused the repetition of more or less articulate sounds, and so

developed that most important element in primitive speech now known as

emphasis. Repetition, which is modern emphasis in sections, marks the

event or sensation which it records as something out of the common,

holds it in the ear and before the mind as something to note and to keep

noting, and so makes for memory, not idly called the mother of the

muses, while it heightens the actual emotional state. Just as certain

early efforts of plastic art expressed great wisdom by several heads,

great strength by a number of hands, great fecundity by many breasts, so

early man by the iteration of a word gave it poetic force; a better art

seeks perfection of the single feature, and fitness of the single word.

It has been shown already how poetry made a gain when repetition of a

certain number of sounds gave ease to the instinct for harmony, and a

yet greater gain when the regular recurrence of a louder sound or a

longer sound satisfied the craving for finer distinctions;[608] it has

been shown how the mere zeal of repetition was crossed by increment and

variation, until the oldest element of poetry was made superfluous in

the plainer form and was almost utterly driven out of diction, with no

refuge but rhythm and certain forms of lyric sacred and profane. In this

plain and outright form of repeated words, however, it lingered long in

ballads, in festal rites, and of course among the savages; it is in the

refrain, therefore, that one can still find some hints of the actual

beginnings of poetry. The refrain has been touched incidentally in the

treatment of repetition; it is now to be considered for itself.[609]

Important as it is in ballads, the refrain has even weightier meanings

when studied in what may be called the occasional poetry of the people.

The refrain, which in its communal function survives as repetition pure

and simple practised by the throng, and in its artistic function has

come to be the means of marking off a strophe or stanza, is really the

discredited and impoverished heir of that choral song which by general

consent stands at the beginning of all poetry. This choral song, under

the influence of art and the reflecting, remembering, individual mind,

was developed into such forms of epic, drama, lyric, as meet us, more or

less divested of communal traits and conditions, on the threshold of

every national literature. Greek tragedy is a well-known case in point.

The refrain, however, is not a development but a survival,[610] so far,

at least, as communal conditions are involved; and even in ballads what

is called the refrain or the burden is a slowly yielding communal

element fighting hopelessly against invading elements of art. In other

words, as the ballad recedes into primitive conditions, the refrain

grows more and more insistent, so that for the earliest form of the

ballad, now nowhere to be found, but easy to reconstruct by the help of

an evident evolutionary curve, one must assume not the refrain as such,

but rather choral song outright. Different altogether from this communal

survival is the artistic use of the refrain. The extreme of art and

often of artifice is reached in those forms of verse which were

developed out of the older minstrelsy of France, and are known as

_ballade_, _rondel_, _triolet_, _chant royal_, with a refrain as their

distinguishing feature; it is conceded, however, that in the first

instance this refrain was everywhere taken from popular song.[611]

Learned poetry of the Middle Ages,[612] to be sure, imitated not the

vernacular refrain, but the refrain of classical verse; this, however,

in its turn had been taken from the poetry of the people, and, whether

one considers the _Hymen, O Hymenaee_ of Catullus,[613] or the later

_Cras amet qui nunqnam amavit_, which trips so featly through the

_Pervigilium Veneris_[614] and keeps such true step with the popular

rhythm of its stanzas, is at no great remove from communal song.

But refrains of artistic poetry are of subordinate interest for our

study of primitive verse; and it is clear that all investigations which

neglect the older and more popular phases, which neglect the primitive

choral song and the primitive communal conditions, can lead to no valid

conclusions about the refrain. It is something, of course, when Bujeaud

explains this or that refrain of a modern song as imitated from sounds

of some musical instrument, or taken from the _argot_ of the

streets;[615] but when Rosières[616] undertakes to tell the whole story

of the refrain, and settle its origins beyond doubt, saying now that it

“springs from the periodic return of full sounds,” now that it is a

_tra-la-la_ to take the place of musical instruments, now that it is “a

little poem stuck in all the fissures of a big poem,” and now, with a

passing recognition of communal conditions, but with sufficient

vagueness, that it voices popular song, then, indeed, one feels the

vanity of dogmatizing to the full.[617] The need of comparative,

historical, and genetic study is also evident in a similar essay on the

refrain in Middle High German. Freericks[618] regards the original

refrain not as repetition of the words of a singer but as an expression

of sentiment which they evoke, coming back in cries of sorrow or of joy.

“When utterances of this sort continually interrupt the song, there is

the refrain in its simplest form.” So too Minor,[619] in his book on

German metres, calls the refrain “the original cry of the throng in

answer to the song of the singer.” Against all this, Dr. R. M. Meyer, in

two essays,[620] makes emphatic and successful protest. With an eye on

conditions and not on theory, Meyer shows the refrain to belong to the

oldest poetry of man,—inarticulate cries at first, in rhythmic sequence,

to express fear, wonder, grief, affection. The refrain, for example, is

the original part of a threnody, as we have seen very plainly in our

study of the _vocero_; in short, so far from being an aftergrowth of

communal song, this refrain is declared by Dr. Meyer to be the very root

of the matter. With more attention to choral song in the horde or clan,

Posnett has come closer to the facts than Meyer, who failed to

appreciate all the communal conditions of such early verse; for while

Meyer referred to inarticulate cries as a beginning of the refrain, it

is evident that these immediately formed the chorus, and that the

refrain is rather survival and deputy of this old chorus than the chorus

outright. The refrain, in other words, allows one to feel one’s way back

to the choral song of the horde,[621] but is not to be transferred to

those primitive times even in its unintelligible and inarticulate forms.

To make this clear, we must study the refrain in its various communal

survivals.

Records of early literature and early religion show the refrain in its

original guise as a part of the choral song, and it echoes audibly the

steps of the dance. Nowhere is this echo more insistent than in that

hymn of the Arval brothers, sung, of course, with a dance that was

confined to the priests, and already come a long way from the shouting

and leaping throng of primitive time; nevertheless, as a hymn used in

processions about the fields, it is to be connected with the survivals

of similar rites and the songs still heard from European peasants at the

harvest-home. In the inscription which preserves it, each verse, except

the last, is given thrice.[622] A free translation[623] follows:—

Help us, O Lares, help us, Lares, help us!

And thou, O Marmar, suffer not

Fell plague and ruin’s rot

Our folk to devastate.

Be satiate, O fierce Mars, be satiate!

Leap o’er the threshold! Halt! now beat the ground!

Be satiate, O fierce Mars, be satiate!

Leap o’er the threshold! Halt! now beat the ground!

Be satiate, O fierce Mars, be satiate!

Leap o’er the threshold! Halt! now beat the ground!

Call to your aid the heroes all, call in alternate strain;

Call, call the heroes all.

Call to your aid the heroes all, call in alternate strain.

Help us, O Marmar, help us, Marmar, help us!

Bound high in solemn measure, bound and bound again,

Bound high and bound again![624]

Refrain and iteration are here in thrall to religious ceremony, and the

priest has laid hands upon the rough material of the throng; but the

throng is present, takes part,—even if, in later time, by deputies,—and

invention is at a minimum, appearing only in its regulative, and not in

its originating force. It is easy to see how question and answer,

strophe and antistrophe, are simply a development and division out of

the crowd with one voice, as in the Greek chorus. So, too, in an

Assyrian hymn:[625]—

Who is sublime in the skies?

Thou alone, thou art sublime.

Who is sublime upon earth?

Thou alone, thou art sublime.

The Hebrew psalms[626] show very clearly a more or less artistic use of

the refrain sung under congregational and therefore to some extent

communal conditions.[627] These communal conditions can be guessed in

their older and simpler form from such an account as is given of David

and his dancing before the ark, when he “and all the house of Israel

brought up the ark of the Lord with shouting and with the sound of the

trumpet”;[628] the personal song detached itself from the rhythmic

shouts of the dancing or marching multitude precisely as the song of the

wife and sister over their dead came out clearer and clearer from the

wailings of the clan. So, if D. H. Müller be right, following in the

path marked by Lowth, the form of Hebrew prophecy was at first choral,

then was divided into strophe and antistrophe, yielding in time to an

impassioned solo of the prophet himself. In any case, this single

prophet, in historical perspective, lapses into the throng, into those

“prophetic hordes” which Budde compares with modern Dervishes, “raving

bands” now forgotten or dimly seen in the background of a stage where

noble individuals like Amos, still in close touch with the people, play

the chief part, and hold the conspicuous place.[629] As Amos and his

brother prophets yield to the later guild whose prophecies were written,

so one goes behind Amos to the “bands,” to communal prophecy, to the

repeated shouts and choral exhortation, and so to the festal horde of

all early religious rites. The backward course would be from a prophecy

written to be read, to the chanted blessing or imprecation of the seer;

thence to a singing and shouting band under the leadership of one man,

with constant refrain; and at last to the shouting and dancing of purely

communal excitement, the real chorus. Moses and the children of Israel

“sang a song unto the Lord, saying, I[630] will sing unto the Lord....

And Miriam the prophetess ... took a timbrel in her hand, and all the

women went out after her with timbrels and with dances. And Miriam

_answered_ them, Sing ye to the Lord.” Here is certainly no premeditated

verse; and it must be borne in mind that refrains, except where they

have a sacred tradition behind them and are kept up by the priests, as

in the Arval “minutes,” easily drop from the record. Oral tradition, on

the other hand, is fain to hold fast to all these vain repetitions; they

are the salt of the thing. Now and then an unmistakable refrain is

preserved. “And it came to pass as they came, when David returned from

the slaughter of the Philistines, that the women came out of all the

cities of Israel, _singing and dancing_, to meet King Saul, with

timbrels, with joy, and with instruments of music. _And the women sang

one to another in their play_, and said:—

“Saul hath slain his thousands,

And David his tens of thousands.”[631]

That women in all nations and at certain stages of culture make songs of

triumph like this, as they dance and sing, is known to the most careless

reader; one or two chorals, strangely similar to these songs of the

Hebrew women, may be noted from mediæval Europe. Now it is the singing

of Gothic songs of welcome by those maidens who come from their village,

as the women of Israel from their cities, to meet and greet Attila,[632]

dancing as they sing. So the daughter of Jephtha greeted her sire with

the singing and dancing maidens; and so in Cashmere a stranger is still

met by the women and girls of a village, who form a half circle at the

first house where he comes, join their arms, and sing eulogies of him,

dancing to the tune of the verse. Malays and even Africans do the

same.[633] Again, it is in the seventh century, and an obscure saint,

Faro by name, has won the gratitude of a community; straightway a song

is made and sung “by the women as they dance and clap their hands.”[634]

It was not often that a saint’s name lent grace to these songs of the

women and saved them from clerical wrath; the decrees of councils, the

letters of bishops, refer perpetually to the wicked verses and

diabolical dances in which maids and even matrons indulged at the very

doors of the church. Sometimes, however, national glory covered the

shame. In the chronicle of Fabyan,[635] who is here telling no lies, it

is said that after Bannockburn songs were made and sung with a refrain

“in daunces, in the carols of the maidens and minstrels of Scotland, to

the reproofe and disdaine of Englishmen”; and Barbour,[636] mentioning a

fight in Eskdale where fifty Scots defeated three hundred English under

Sir Andrew Harcla, says he will not go into details, seeing that any one

who likes may hear—

Young wemen, quhen thai will play,

Syng it emang thame ilke day.

One is even fain to believe that Layamon[637] was thinking of the women

when he said that after a treaty of peace,

Tha weoren in thissen lande blisfulle songes.

That the record of these refrains is so meagre and baffling need cause

no surprise. The histories of national literature are disappointing to

the student of beginnings, for the reason that they almost

invariably[638] study these beginnings as conditioned by the habits of

authorship in modern times; they are always looking for original

composition, for expression of individual feeling, for a story, and

therefore turn aside from these stretched metres of an antique song. But

the story, and the expression of personal emotion, are precisely what

one seldom if ever finds at the beginning of a literature; one finds

there, when one finds anything, the chorus or its deputy the refrain.

The refrain was a constant element in early Greek song, “an essential

mint-mark”;[639] not only the early melic verse, but a study of the

chorus[640] in dramatic survival, proves this beyond doubt, and one is

amazed to find Rosières, in the essay quoted above, saying that the

ancients, particularly the Greeks, had no need of the refrain, and

hardly used it at all. How important, on the contrary, this refrain must

have been, how it works back through the alternate strains of chorus and

solo to the throng of communal singers and dancers, could be shown for

classical poetry, and can be proved by mediæval and modern refrains,

some already noted under the _vocero_, and others presently to be

considered in songs of labour and of the harvest. True, the records are

scanty; and the unwary historian of English poetry in the early stage,

reviewing his material, announces that, with the exception of some

insignificant charms, there is just one poem with a refrain, the

“Consolation” of Deor, the king’s minstrel out of place,—taking, that

is, a lyric of individual and artistic reflection as the only example of

that part of poetry which above all belongs to the communal and

spontaneous expression of the throng. Recorded poetry has here a poor

tale to tell, and even that is usually marred in the telling. Where,

then, is the old refrain of the English folk, and where was the chorus?

Had they no dances, no ballads, no communal singing? If the evidence of

ethnology from tribes and communities of men in every degree of culture

is to be accepted, it is certain that Englishmen of that early day had

dance, ballad, chorus, and refrain. We know that their old heathen hymns

went with the dance; and the dance means a strophic arrangement. What,

then, has become of this refrain? So far as the old English poetry has

found record at the hands of the monk, it is in a fixed alliterative

metre, without strophes,[641] suited to epic and narrative purposes,

suited to recitation and a sort of chant, but not, in its literary

shape, suited to refrain and chorus.[642] One does not dance an epic, or

sing it; it is chanted or recited; and even Anglo-Saxon lyric, barring

that little song of Déor, is elegiac and highly reflective. The refrain,

says Dr. R. M. Meyer,[643] is to be assumed for oldest Germanic poetry,

although it was thrown out by the recited alliterative verse, only to

come again into recorded literature with the introduction of rime; but

no one supposes that Englishmen ceased in that interval to dance and

sing. It is a defect of the record. The chorals and refrains, even the

ballads of which William of Malmesbury speaks as crumbling to pieces

with the lapse of time, were simply deemed useless if not harmful, and

had no claim whatever to the life beyond life. Nor is this chorus, this

refrain, simply assumed for oldest Germanic poetry; it is proved, and

nowhere proved so well as in Müllenhoff’s essay.[644] Many conclusions

of this sturdy and often too intolerant scholar have been rejected by

later investigation; but his assertion in regard to choral poetry as the

foundation of every literature remains an article of faith among those

who deal at first hand with the material involved, and writers since his

day who have undertaken to describe the different kinds of Germanic

choral song have done little more than follow in his steps.[645] There

is no need, then, to rehearse this proof of the existence of refrain and

chorus as main form[646] of poetry among the ancient Germans; it is in

order simply to trace these and other choral songs in the later

fragments and the surviving refrains, whether sung at the solemn

procession round the fields, or sung to the festal dance at

harvest-home, or in whatever survivals they may be found, and to compare

them with kindred refrains and kindred customs elsewhere. From this

point of view, even the blackness of thick darkness which broods over

Anglo-Saxon communal song, that darkness of superstitious fear felt by

monks who knew these customs and these songs to be of the devil himself,

and would not write them down, is lifted a little. We look, then, at

refrains of labour, refrains of actual work, too trivial usually for

record, and at those refrains and chorals of the harvest feasts, of

plantings, sowings, reapings, which had the taint of heathendom upon

them, and so were either left in silence or coaxed into a harmless

formula; we look, too, at refrains and chorus of the dance, the sunnier

side of life, and still more provocative than labour as an occasion of

communal song. For the refrains of war, and even for the choral raised

by a whole army as it marched to battle, an occasion which Müllenhoff

calls the supreme moment of all Germanic life, the fierce and clamorous

words needing no leader,[647] and the wild rhythm asking no aid from

trumpet or drum, there is ample evidence; and indeed these war chorals

might be connected by easy stages with the ridiculous marching songs

already noted above. From the _barditus_ to “ma poule a fait un poulet”

were a pretty journey; but we will keep to the ways of peace, and the

_saure wochen, frohe feste_ of everyday life will yield material enough

in regard to this communal refrain.

Songs of labour are found everywhere; but there is a great chasm between

the actual refrains, the survivals of communal or even solitary song

which come from the real scene of labour and from the real labourers,

and those songs which are made for the labourer. Nowhere is the

difference between _volkspoesie_ and _volksthümliche poesie_ so evident;

and we have here no concern with poetry, however successful, which has

been written for the edification of “honest toil.”[648] It is the song

of actual labour to which we now turn, as it has abounded in all the

activities of life, and which, like the ballad, is fast vanishing from

the scene. Sometimes the labour was solitary, and the song was a

plaintive little lyric when it was made by the lonely maiden grinding at

her hand-mill:

Alone I ground, alone I sang,

Alone I turned the mill....[649]

but often even this grinding of the mill was social, as in Poland, where

it was the manner of the women to repeat a word in chorus.[650] Plutarch

has preserved an old Greek “song of the millstone,”[651] which he heard

a woman sing; from the older Scandinavian literature[652] comes a lay,

sung by two maidens, Menja and Fenja, as they grind out King Frodi’s

fortune, which may hold bits of the actual refrain of labour, and has,

too, its touch of folklore, explaining “how the sea became salt”; but

the real and primitive choral of such labour is sufficiently attested by

those women in Poland, and by a similar case among the Basuto

tribe,[653] where, as Cassilis says, to relieve the fatigue of solitary

grinding, “the women come together and grind in unison, by singing an

air which blends perfectly with the cadenced clinking of the rings upon

their arms.” There is plenty of evidence for this choral of the grinding

women in places and times so widely sundered as to forbid all idea of

borrowing, and to leave the conditions of communal labour and communal

consent as the only explanation. Originally there was a spontaneous

chorus or refrain[654]—in the strictly choral sense, that is, and not in

the technical meaning presently to be considered—suggested by the

movements, cadence, and sounds of the work itself; improvisation added

words at will, until at last art seized upon the material and gave now a

song like that of Fenja and Menja, now even a jolly refrain such as one

finds in an audacious song of Beaumont and Fletcher’s _Maid of the

Mill_.[655] Everywhere labour had its refrain and song, and even the

scanty remains of Hellenic communal poetry tell of songs for reaper,

thresher, miller, for the vintage, spinning, weaving, for the drawers of

water, oarsmen, rope-makers, watchmen, shepherds, and for the common

labourers marching out to their work. Rome itself, in the old silent

period, has something of this song for the attentive ear;[656] and

allusions scattered throughout the Bible show that the Hebrews sang at

their work in house and in field. A few echoes of such singing come from

Egypt; while darker and darkest Africa, along with savage tribes over

the world, shows yet more elementary, and hence more insistent and

necessary[657] connection between work and song. With the breaking up of

communal conditions, with the advance of individual and initiative art,

these songs of labour, like the ballad, like all communal poetry, tend

to disappear or yield to alien verse. Often the individual works in

silence, when his labour demands intelligent thought, but where labour

is automatic or monotonous, wherever it is collective, the labourer

sings, and always will do so; the important fact is that he now ceases

to sing the old refrain or song of the labour itself, born, as

Bücher[658] shows so plainly, of the very movements and sounds which it

called forth. For good reason, _andere zeiten, andere lieder_. Neus[659]

noted that the Esthonians, a century ago, sang their own songs, and sang

always as they worked in the fields or came together for festal

occasions; now,—and “now” is fifty years ago—he says that either the

song is silent, or else it is changed for an imported German ditty. All

the more need, then, to collect and study such survivals of the refrains

of labour as can be found. Speaking of the decline of folksong in

Germany, not only of the making but even of the singing, Professor E. H.

Meyer[660] remarks that collective labour still has some power here and

there to stir the old instinct into a fitful activity. Now it is in the

spinning-room,—where Böckel[661] a few years ago could hear Hessian

folksongs in the making—now at the berry-picking in Nassau, at the

flax-breaking, and elsewhere in cases where companies of peasants still

ply the monotonous tasks of their forefathers. And in all these cases,

as in the beginning, so in the end, women are the mainstay of communal

song.[662]

Of particular trades and callings, perhaps sailors, oarsmen, and

watermen generally, would furnish more refrains than could be found in

any one industry of the land. Sailors’ chanteys are still heard in every

ship;[663] but they are now apt to echo those songs of the street and

the dance-hall which have been picked up at port, and they have seldom a

traditional interest. Here and there, however, the genuine refrain is

clear enough, and attests itself by its power to withstand the

_discrimina rerum_ and the changes of time; it is said that modern Greek

sailors, when reefing sails, have nearly the same melodious calls as

those preserved in a play of Aristophanes.[664] Negro roustabouts on the

Mississippi sing interminable refrains, while a capable leader

improvises stanzas on the work in hand or on current events; a process

which is matched by refrains and songs of manual labour in every part of

the world. A well-known passage in the _Complaynt of Scotland_[665]

gives the cries and songs both of weighing anchor,—where a leader sings

and the rest answer “as it had bene ecco in an hou heuch,” like the echo

in a hollow ravine, mainly in repetitions,—and of hoisting sail, with

iteration of short running phrases such as:—

Grit and smal, grit and smal,

Ane and al, ane and al,—

and not stopping here, undertakes to set down the “chorus” of guns heavy

and light as a spirited sea-fight begins. In the old play _Common

Conditions_ occurs a pirates’ song, the stanzas in quatrains, with a

jolly refrain or chorus:—

Lustely, lustely, lustely let us saile forthe,

The wind trim doth serve us, it blows from the north.

Hoisting, pulling, however, and work of the sort on shipboard, yield in

importance, so far as refrains are concerned, to the regular cadence of

the oar, where voices have kept tune and oars have kept time from

earliest days. Not only in the classical period, where actual song and

music came to take the place of the refrain,[666] but with Egyptians,

Africans, Tonga Islanders, wherever rowing is practised, these refrains

are known; the Maoris, for example, “row in time with a melody which is

sung by a chorus sitting in canoes.” The same thing is told of the

Indians of Alaska.[667] A refrain already noted seems to have served in

England both for hoisting and for rowing; Skelton mentions it:—

Holde up the helme, loke up, and lete god stere,

I wolde be mery, what wynde that ever blowe,

_Heve and how, rombelow, row the bote, Norman, rowe_!

and D’Israeli says that sailors at Newcastle in heaving anchor still

have their _Heave and ho, rumbelow_; while it is recorded that in 1453,

Norman, Lord Mayor of London, chose to row rather than ride to

Westminster, and the watermen made this roundel or song:—

Rowe the bote, Norman,

Rowe to thy Lemman,—[668]

so that two refrains are confused in the laureate’s account, and the

exquisite reason, with a Lord Mayor in the case, is no more probable

than such stories of origins are wont to be. For example, Cnut is

credited[669] with a little song, which he is said to have composed as

he rowed by Ely and heard the chanting of the monks; “ordering the

rowers to pull gently, and calling his retinue about him, he asked them

to join him ... in singing a ballad which he composed in English and

which begins in this way:—

“Merie sungen the muneches binnen Ely,

Tha Cnut ching rew ther by.

“Roweth, cnihtës, noer the land,

And herë we thes muneches sang.”

Several things here are noteworthy; both Grundtvig and Rosenberg have

pointed out[670] that this song is composed in a two-line ballad strophe

of four accents to the verse, the kind afterward so common in

Scandinavia and in England; and whatever Cnut’s share in the making of

it, it is at least of the eleventh century, and is the first recorded

piece of verse to break away from the regular stichic metre of our

oldest poetry. Moreover, it is said that Cnut improvised the song, and

that he called on the others to join him; the lines quoted then, so

Grundtvig infers, are the burden or chorus of the song itself; and it is

interesting to know that in the days of the chronicler, say about the

middle of the twelfth century, this refrain as well as the song was sung

in the choral dances of the English folk. Doubtless it was sung to the

oar itself; and that may have been the first of it, with royalty as an

afterthought.[671]

Coming to land, one would think that the blacksmith, rhythmic as his

work may be, must have little breath to spare for song; and, indeed,

Bücher could find but one specimen which seemed to hold the genuine

rhythm of the anvil. Had he looked to the English, however, he would

have met more; an old “Satire on the Blacksmiths”[672] preserves a

refrain probably sung to the work itself, or, at worst, imitated from

its cadence:—

Thei gnaven and gnacchen, thei gronys togydere....

Stark strokes thei stryken on a stelyd stokke,

_Lus! bus! Las! das!_ rowten be rowe,

Swych dolful a dreme the devyl it todryve!

The mayster longith a lityll, and lascheth a lesse,

Twineth him tweyn and towcheth a treble,

_Tik! tab! hic! hac! tiket! taket! tyk! tak!

Lus! bus! Las! das!_ swych lyf thei ledyn.

St. Clement is the patron of blacksmiths, and while Brand’s account of

the festivities gives no refrain, but only poor doggerel and mimicry, it

is clear that processions, songs, and dances were a feature of the

saint’s day,[673] once regarded as the beginning of winter; so that

communal origins may even lurk in the traditional anvil song, quoted by

Dickens,[674] “that imitated the measure of beating upon iron, and was a

mere lyrical excuse for the introduction of Old Clem’s respected name”:—

Hammer, boys, round—Old Clem,

With a thump and a sound—Old Clem.

Again, there is the tinker with his catches, which moved Overbury[675]

to a theory of origins; “from his art was music first invented, and

therefore is he alwaies furnished with a song,” to which his hammer

keeps time. Of course, the only point of interest in these songs of the

trades is the survival of a refrain which carries the sound and cadence

of the work itself. Thus in the old play of _Tom Tiler and his Wife_, it

is probable that an actual refrain has crept into the lively song of

which Dame Strife sings the first staff, with its

Tom Tiler, Tom Tiler,

More morter for Tom Tiler, ...

clearly an echo from the roof. But there is more of the communal strain

in spinning-songs;[676] for here is the home of balladry, a city of

refuge even to this day,[677] and here the women make as well as sing

the song. Echoes of the wheel itself[678] are not infrequent; perhaps

they are too close to art in that pretty song of sewing, knitting, and

spinning, sung by three women in the first act of _Roister Doister_:—

Pipe mery Annot, _etc._

Trilla, trilla, trillarie,

Worke Tibet, knitte Annot, spinne Margerie:[679]

Let us see who shall winne the victorie....

although, what with incremental repetition in other stanzas, and the

audible whir of the wheel, this is like the songs which still move women

to emulation under like circumstances in the spinning-rooms of Europe.

“In Northamptonshire, when girls are knitting in company, they

say”—surely sing?—

“Needle to needle, and stitch to stitch,

Pull the old woman out of the ditch;

If you ain’t out by the time I’m in,

I’ll rap your knuckles with my knitting-pin.

The ‘old woman,’ ‘out,’ and ‘in’ are the arrangements of the wool over

and under the knitting-pins.”[680] The same authority gives other rimes

of this sort, more or less suggested by the movements of the work; for

instance, a song of Cumberland wool-carders:—

Tāary woo’, tāary woo’, tāary woo’ is ill to spin,

Card it well, card it well, card it well ere you begin.

Slightly different is the song of Peterborough workhouse girls in

procession, where the refrain is quite primitive in form:[681]—

And a-spinning we will go, will go, will go,

And a-spinning we will go.

Bell[682] records what seems to be a real refrain of the spinning-wheel

in the Greenside Wakes Song:—

Tread the wheel, tread the wheel, dan, don, dell O.

The flyting that goes with this refrain is negligible,—a man and a woman

on horseback with spinning-wheels before them, singing alternate stanzas

in the midst of the fair, with its dancing and merriment, a sort of

side-show; but the refrain may well be old.

Songs of the crafts, however, are less likely to hold the festal,

gregarious, communal note than those old refrains which took their

cadence from the movements of workers in the field. An agricultural

community, whether in its rudest stages, a horde that lives in fertile

river bottoms as distinguished from the nomadic, predatory bands of the

plain, or in the civilization of feudal Europe, always tends to

homogeneous conditions and always fosters communal song. Where these

conditions survive, this song in some degree survives with them.

Corsican labourers in the field, says Ortoli,[683] still sing so at

their work; the Styrian threshers, eight together, make their flails

chorus thus:—

Hiwer, hawer, hawerhaggl,

Hiwer, hawer, hawerhaggl,

while Silesians, with two, three, four, five, six, hear as many

different refrains made by the strokes of the flail;[684] and Bladé[685]

prints a song of Gascon peasants which seems to give again all the

stages in the culture of the vine,—a stanza or two may follow for

example of the repetition and the refrain:—

Plante qui plante,

Voici la belle plante;

Plante qui plante,

Voici la belle plante

Plantons, _plantin_,

Plantons le bon vin.

Voici la belle plante en vin,

Voici la belle plante en vin.

De plante en taille,

Voici la belle taille;

De plante en taille,

Voici la belle taille.

Taillons, _taillin_,

Taillons le bon vin.

Taillons la belle taille en vin.

Taillons la belle taille en vin.[686]

Early English drama was evidently fond of songs not unlike this, and in

_Summer’s Last Will and Testament_ Nash brings harvesters on the scene

singing what appears to be a song of harvest-home, if one may judge by

the refrain of _Hooky, Hooky_, said by a Dodsley editor[687] to be heard

still in some parts of the kingdom. “Enter Harvest,” run the directions,

“with a scythe on his neck, and all his reapers with sickles, and a

great black bowl with a posset in it, come before him; they come in

singing:—

Merry, merry, merry, cheary, cheary, cheary,

Trowl the black bowl to me;

Hey, derry, derry, with a poup and a lerry,

I’ll trowl it again to thee.

_Hooky, hooky,[688] we have shorn,

And we have bound,

And we have brought Harvest

Home to town.”_

The tendency to put popular and traditional songs into a play was common

everywhere. Hans Sachs[689] used a May-song for the ring-dance which is

clearly made in its turn out of a lusty old refrain:—

Der Mei, der Mei,

Der bringt uns blümlein vil.

Best of all, however, George Peele, who in his _Old Wives’ Tale_ gives

tryst to countless waifs of folklore and popular stories, makes room

there for a pretty song of harvesters. “Ten to one,” cries Madge, when

they first enter upon the stage, “they sing a song of mowing,” but they

are sowing, it seems; and once again they come in, this time with a song

of harvest. The present writer has ventured[690] to change the first

song so as to make it agree with the second, not an audacious feat when

one considers the case. The songs, with an interval between, would then

run as follows:—

Lo, here we come a-sowing, a-sowing,

And sow sweet fruits of love.

All that lovers be, pray you for me,—

In your sweethearts well may it prove.

Lo, here[691] we come a-reaping, a-reaping,

To reap our harvest fruit;

And thus we pass the year so long,

And never be we mute.

The refrain is easy to detach from the rest; and it is clear, too, that

actual imitation of sowing, reaping, binding, often went with the song,

probably in this case a combination of gesture and word known still in

games of modern children.

These songs, particularly the Gascon vintage chorus, are simply a festal

recapitulation of the rustic year, with more or less echo of actual

refrain sung to the labour in its various stages. From the moment when

communal labour began to sow the seed—in Japan[692] the peasants still

plant their rice in cadence with a chorus, and in Cashmere[693] the

onions are sown with accompaniment of “a long-drawn, melancholy

song,”—through process after process, down to the picking,[694] reaping,

harvesting, and so to the festal imitations just noted, even to the

ritual of priestly thanksgiving, every stage is marked by communal

singing, except that in the function last named the community turns

passive, the guild replaces the throng, and art has begun its course.

Hence it is that most of the survivals of song and refrain come down to

our day with more or less magic in the case. Rites are performed by the

head of a family, and are even transferred from the field to the home;

as when[695] at flax-planting a German wife springs about the hearth and

cries, “Heads as big as my head, leaves as big as my apron, and stalks

as thick as my leg!” In Silesia,[696] again, husband and wife sing

together a song with the refrain,—

Om Floxe, om Floxe, om Floxe!

Even in the field itself, song is mingled with these symbolical and even

religious rites; incantations, such as that Anglo-Saxon charm[697] for

making barren or bewitched land bear again, are strongly tinged with

clerical lore, and in this case involve a visit to the church altar. The

Romans, too, had spells and charms for restoring fields to fertility

when other spells and charms had bewitched them; harmful rites of this

sort were forbidden in the laws of the twelve tables.[698] Corruption is

rife in these things; but in a charm[699] for the old English peasant to

get back his strayed or stolen cattle, amid the hocus-pocus of Herod and

Judas and the holy rood and scraps of Latin, a few lines echo the old

repetition, but have no refrain:—

find the fee[700] and drive the fee,

and have the fee and hold the fee,

and drive home the fee.

A thousand things of the sort survive, but seldom touch the refrain;

perhaps the charm to make butter come from the churn, common in

1655,[701] had a choral element:—

Come, butter, come!

Come, butter, come!

Peter stands at the gate

Waiting for a butter’d cake,—

Come, butter, come!