We turn back to the actual labour of the fields, and the songs and

refrains that went with it. A refrain[702] has come down to us from the

harvesters of ancient Hellas,—“Sing the sheaf-song, the sheaf-song, the

song of the sheaf,” which is not unlike the type just considered in

George Peele’s “Lo, here we come a-reaping”; while that waif of Germanic

myth,[703] the story of Scéaf, where the “sheaf” is made the name of an

agricultural god, or culture-hero, as one will, reminds us of Phrygian

countryfolk who at their reaping sang “in mournful wise” the song of

Lityerses, itself said to be the outcome of an old refrain, lapsing into

a _vocero_ for the hero’s death. Burlesque laid unholy hands upon the

custom and the myth; the story growing out of the song passed into a

tradition which coldly furnished forth the satire and comedy of a later

day; since any song of the harvest-field or the threshing-floor came to

be called a Lityerses,[704] the name was seized upon for certain comic

features, and grew to be a symbol of an insatiable eater. Yet dramatic

allusions and uses of more serious nature, like the song recorded by

Peele, were doubtless common in Greece and throughout the Orient. It has

been said already, in speaking of the _vocero_, that the song of Maneros

was sung by Egyptian reapers, just as they sang on the threshing-floor

the song of the oxen treading out the corn; while at the harvest-home

Greek husbandmen, if Mannhardt’s surmise[705] is right, sang a variant

of the Maneros; and Homer is witness for the singing of the Linos at the

time of vintage.[706] If, now, one seeks for similar songs in the fields

of modern Europe, one finds, to be sure, hints in plenty, descriptions

by this and that traveller, and fragments of actual verse; but

conditions of religious ceremonial have broken up the old refrains and

barred any handing down of a Germanic Linos or Lityerses. Customs, too,

have changed; and few are the places where folk at harvest-home do as

their forbears did, when “the whole family sat down at the same table,

and conversed, danced, and sang together during the entire night without

difference or distinction of any kind” as between master and man,

mistress and maid.[707] Add to the case that great transfer of vital

interests upon which economists lay such stress, from open-air life to

home-life, from the throng with its indiscriminate dance and merriment,

often, too, its indiscriminate morals, its communal habit of thought and

expression, to the individual responsibility, the sober pleasures and

the stricter morals of the fireside, from the delight in movement,

noise, cadence of many voices, to lamplight and the printed page and

meditation: add this to the account, and one sees how ill it must have

fared with the communal refrain of work, feast, and ceremonial rite.

Reactions come, of course, and no one denies a constant market for cakes

and ale; but what is a church fair, even a camp-meeting, to the old

vigil? The wife of Bath is still with us, but she has to make shift with

an afternoon tea. Disintegration, due to the lapse of communal feeling,

has either broken up the traditional refrains, leaving only _Hooky,

hooky_,[708] and unmeaning things of the kind, or else has favoured the

making of doggerel which may or may not mean something, and which in any

case threatens the student with perils of a too curious interpretation

of chops and tomato-sauce. Even where there is neither corruption nor

distortion, there is unblushing if often innocent substitution of modern

mawkishness. Precisely as one boggles, when reading Herd’s _Scottish

Songs_, to find under the title “I wish my Love were in a Myre” the

familiar translation of Sappho’s “Blest as the Immortal Gods,”—so, in

coming to the “Cornish Midsummer Bonfire Song,” in Bell’s collection, a

title to make any student of communal poetry get out a fresh pen, and in

reading, too, that here “fishermen and others dance about the fire and

sing appropriate songs,” one pulls up with a rude shock at—

Hail! lovely nymphs, be not too coy,

But freely yield your charms,[709]

which, while appropriate in sentiment, has not the note of simplicity

that one expects from Cornish fishermen dancing round the bonfire of

heathen tradition. True, this is a very bad counterfeit; but many a

verse quite as alien at heart, if not on the face, has been foisted upon

communal and traditional song.

The best survivals come from the harvest field, and mingle refrain with

improvisation. Very common in old times and in new is the note of

ridicule, particularly for the wayfaring man, converted temporarily into

a fool, who passes by the labourers; such a man even now gets rude

handling as well as rude rimes, and this was the case in Hellas.[710] In

an often-quoted Idyll of Ausonius there is reference to the exchange of

abusive lyric compliments between workers in the field and the boatmen

on the Moselle; while any one can note how this instinct for a flyting

between labourers in a band and the _spectator ab extra_, alone or in

company, holds always and everywhere, while, on the other hand, the

solitary labourer and the solitary wanderer are wont to pass the time of

day with full courtesy and often with an inexplicably kindly feeling.

German peasants breaking flax in the fields still sing to the rhythm of

their strokes; as in the old days, a stranger who passes by them is sure

to be hailed in improvised verses not of a complimentary kind.

Particularly if the stranger be a young gentleman, a possible suitor for

one of the daughters at the great house, sarcastic song greets him from

twenty or thirty throats, mainly a refrain, and that partly of an

imitative character, with derisive lines like:—

Too fat is he quite,

And he isn’t polite,

with the refrain for conclusion,—

Hurrah, let him go![711]

All this, of course, to the exact time of the work in hand. When no

stranger offers, mutual flytings will serve. Near Soest all the young

people shout and sing throughout the entire process of preparing

flax,—“unsung flax,” they say, “is good for nothing,”—and songs are

improvised in satire of one another, with a refrain _rummel dumm dum_ or

_rem sen jo jo_. Travelling in Wales, by the bye, had once these chances

of satire, and Aubrey tells about them, thinking doubtless of his

favourite time “before the civil warres.” For in Wales there were not

only “rymers ... that upon any subject given would versify extempore

halfe an hour together,” but “the vulgar sort of people ... have a

humour of singing extempore upon occasion: _e.g._ a certain gentleman

coming to ——, the woemen that were washing at ye river fell all a

singing in Welsh, wʰ was a description of ye men and their horses.”[712]

How facile the black fellows of Australia, Africans, and savages

everywhere, can be with this improvised ridicule, mainly practised on

the march, or at some sort of labour, all travellers testify. Samoans

sing instead of talking “as they walk along the road, or paddle the

canoe, or do any other piece of work. These songs often contain

sarcastic remarks, and in passing the house or village of parties with

whom they are displeased, they strike up a chant embodying some

offensive ideas.”[713]

We must keep to the harvest fields. Wordsworth’s solitary reaper called

forth an exquisite lyric; but there is material more attractive for the

student of refrains, however it lack poetic merit, in Boswell’s and

Johnson’s stories of a Highland harvest, and one would be glad indeed if

the doctor, who had all of Wordsworth’s curiosity on this point, could

have made the reapers tell him what they sang.[714] He was coming close

to Rasay in a boat, while, as Boswell says, the boatmen “sang with great

spirit,” and Johnson remarked that “naval music was very ancient”;[715]

then the men were silent, and from the near fields was heard the song of

reapers, “_who seemed to shout as much as to sing_, while they worked

with a _bounding activity_.” Johnson’s own account[716] of reaping on

Rasay may refer to this or to another occasion. “I saw,” he says, “the

harvest of a small field. The women reaped the corn, and the men bound

up the sheaves. The strokes of the sickle were timed by the modulations

of the harvest-song in which all their voices were united. They

accompany in the Highlands every action which can be done in equal time

with an appropriate strain, which has, they say, not much meaning;[717]

but its effects are regularity and cheerfulness.” These hints from the

Highlands are of peculiar importance because of the undoubted

homogeneous conditions of life in the clans, keeping songs of this sort

in an almost primitive state. Significant is the rhythm of shouts,

significant the preponderance of the refrain. Lady Rasay showed Johnson

“the operation of _wawking_ cloth. Here it is performed by women who

kneel upon the ground and rub it with both their hands, singing an Erse

song all the time.” Boswell speaks of their “loud and wild howl”; and

Dr. Hill[718] quotes Lockhart that women at this work screamed “all the

while in a sort of chorus. At a distance the sound was wild and sweet

enough, but rather discordant” at close quarters.

The Lowlands of Scotland, too, had their _kirn_,[719] and the English

harvest-home, practically the same thing, had merry songs and refrains

down to living memory. What must these songs have been, when, if

Professor Skeat[720] is right in his estimate and inference, on one

estate of two hundred acres in Suffolk no less than five hundred and

fifty-three persons were assembled for harvest? At almost any period of

English country life one finds the rural philosopher looking back, like

the Rev. Dr. Jessopp now,[721] to kindlier and more communal times,

greater harvests, keener jollity, a wider and deeper social sense; so

Overbury’s franklin felt that he held a brief for the _tempus actum_.

“He allows of honest pastime, and thinkes not the bones of the dead

anything bruised, or the worse for it, though the country lasses dance

in the churchyard after even-song. Rocke Monday, and the wake in summer,

shrovings, the wakefull ketches on Christmas eve, the hoky or seed-cake,

these he yearly keepes.” Of this festal round harvest-home was

culmination, since it knitted the bond between labour and rest, and was

the pledge of plenty, the high tide of the agricultural year. Three

elements may be noted in this harvest-home so far as the refrain is

concerned; first, the shouting, the choral cries and songs of the

labourers in the field as the last sheaf is cut and bound; secondly, the

march homeward with the hock-cart to the cadence of loud refrains and

songs, with the thrice-repeated procession about barn and yard; and

thirdly, the more elaborate ceremonial of those gatherings which marked

the safe accomplishment of harvest. Moreover, in any of these cases a

progress may be noted from the rude but cadenced shouts, the refrains

and chorals, through definite songs of harvest, up to all manner of

offshoots and distortions,—fixed rites, speeches, sermons, pantomime,

beggings, what not; but even in the last and worse estate of the

communal harvest-song there is everywhere echo of the refrain,

everywhere echo of the dance. The breaking up of communal labour has

left mainly the songs and cries of working folk on any given farm or

estate; but the songs of a common festival for harvested crops still

linger in customs of the village,—now a traditional march of the elder

folk, now some half-understood dance and walk of the maidens, such as

Hardy describes in his _Tess_, and now a mere song of village children

coming in a band from the search for berries, as in the Black Forest:—

Holla, holla, reera,

Mer kumme us d’Beere.[722]

Lithuanians coming back from the field, or in any communal gathering,

when they have sung through their traditional stock of songs, call for a

new ditty; amid jest and jollity some one strikes up a _daina_ of his

own, composing as he sings; the rest repeat in chorus, correct the

words, add to them,—and so a new song is made, and, if it finds favour,

is handed down, and even passed to the neighbour villages. This custom,

however, is fast going out of date.[723]

In some places the day when harvest begins is still a time of communal

and ritual importance; Würtemberg reapers, men and women, gather in the

early dawn and sing a choral for blessing on their work.[724] As they go

to the field, the throng still sing choruses, improvised verses, and

traditional ballads; and when they march home at dusk to their village,

they sing songs, often modern enough, but, as Pfannenschmid points out,

substitutes for older and doubtless far more communal singing, which

indeed lingers in the unintelligible refrain. In many places, however,

chorus, refrain and song, whether communal or alien, to be sung at

harvest and threshing, are dying out or dead; in Normandy, says

Beaurepaire,[725] at the _fête de la gerbe_, when the last of the wheat

is threshed, no song of any sort is heard, though elsewhere the festival

is loud with chorus. A scrap of the refrain sung in another part of

France—

Ho! batteux, battons la gerbe,

Battons-la joyeusement, ...

Beaurepaire heard, to be sure, here and there in Normandy; but it was no

longer a refrain of labour, and was attached to a love-song.[726]

The main ceremony, of course, is at the end of harvest. In many places a

custom still prevails, that when the last sheaf is to be cut, a portion

of grain is left standing, and the reapers now dance about it with

repeated cries, sometimes of vague mythological tradition like “Wold,

Wold, Wold,” and with songs; now bare their heads, and pour food and

drink upon the spot; now let the “bonniest lass” cut this remnant, dress

it, and bring it home as the “corn-baby”; now throw their sickles at it

to see who can cut it down;[727] and so on, in variety of form, but all

to the same purpose. In Flanders they sing, when the last load is taken

from the field,

Keriole, keriole, al in!

’t loaste voer goat in.

Keriole, Keriole, al in![728]

There is every reason to think that some rite of this sort, accompanied

with communal refrain and song, was once universal in agricultural

life.[729] The corn-baby just described as decked in silk and ribbons

and brought home with singing, is also known as the kirn-baby, the

ivy-girl, and the maiden; so that harvest-home is here and there called

the maiden-feast.[730] The songs belong primarily on the field and with

the homeward faring cart; but customs change. In Suffolk at harvest

suppers some one is crowned with a pillow and the folk all sing _I am

the Duke of Norfolk_,[731] though elsewhere in the country the old note

remains. Still farther from the field, Hertfordshire countrymen sing

_The Barley Mow_ in alehouses after their day’s labour; but in another

part of Suffolk this is a festal song chanted at the harvest-supper

“when the stack, rick, or mow of barley is finished.” It is a song of

repetitions, and holds an old refrain.[732] For this song at the

harvest-home supper, its variations, corruptions, survivals, its

refrains, and its choruses, one would need a book; a description or two

of recent doings must suffice. “At the harvest suppers up to some twenty

years ago,” say Broadwood and Maitland, “while the other guests were

still seated at the table, a labourer carrying a jug or can of beer or

cider filled a horn for every two men, one on each side of the table; as

they drank, this old harvest-song was sung and the chorus repeated,

until the man with the beer had reached the end of the long table,

involving sometimes thirty repetitions of the first verse. After this,

the second verse was sung in the same manner.” The chorus—from

Wiltshire—ran thus:—

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

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

What is left here of communal song is the fact of the chorus and the

infinite repetition; the song has a poor mixture of the bucolic with the

buckish. The older collection of Dixon gives a better song:—

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

Our hay is mowed and our hovels heaped,

Harvest Home! Harvest Home!

We’ll merrily roar out Harvest Home!

Harvest Home! Harvest Home!

We’ll ...

with another repetition of the line.[733] The men who sang this chorus

were still in thrall to an old custom at the barley harvest. On putting

up the last sheaf, which is called the craw, or crow sheaf, the man who

has it cries out,—

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

Another asks,—

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

And the answer comes,—

A craw, a craw, a craw!

Then wild cheering, and off they go to the supper, where they sing a

well-known cumulative song about the brown bowl, the quarter-pint, the

half-pint, and so on.

These repeated cries, however, take us back to the field. In Devon, as

Brand relates, they still cried “the neck”; a little bundle was made

from the best ears of the sheaves, and when the last field was reaped,

all gathered about the person who had this neck, who first stooped and

held it near the ground. All the men doffed their hats and held them

likewise and then cried, in a very prolonged and harmonious tone, _The

Neck_, at the same time raising themselves upright, and elevating arms

and hats above their heads, the holder of the neck doing likewise. This

was done thrice; after which they changed their cry to _wee yen_,[734]

_way yen_, prolonged as before, and also sounded thrice; then boisterous

laughter, amidst which they break up and hurry to the farmhouse,—a

maimed rite, indeed, but of interest when compared with kindred doings.

For the words are surely wreckage of an old refrain, full of

repetitions, like that song Montanus rescued from the rites of

midsummer-eve along the Rhine. Under the “crown,” boys, girls, and their

elders dance in a ring and sing as they dance a sort of refrain which is

made of incremental repetitions into a description of the game they are

playing; meantime one person stands in the midst of the ring until he

has played his part to the choral suggestion, a common element in other

games of children. In these and kindred ceremonies it is clear that a

concerted shouting was the main feature, but the shouts were rhythmical

and went with the communal dance, not with a disintegrated, howling mob.

At Hitchin farmers drove furiously home with the last load of harvest,

while the people rushed madly after, shouting and dashing bowls of water

on the corn; but this is chaotic, for old Tusser[735] knew a better

way:—

Come home lord singing,

Come home corn bringing.

In Germany the last load of grain is brought home with throwing of water

and singing of traditional songs and shouts for the master. So too in

English “youling,” when cider is thrown on the apple trees, at each cup

“the company sets up a shout.”[736] Doubtless the elaborate chorus of

the Arval brothers had once its wild but cadenced shout of the whole

festal throng, as they “beat the ground” in communal consent of voice

and step; and this primitive shout recurs in all folksong, not only in

the _schnaderhüpfl_, in the _jodel_ which ends a stanza, but in those

cries at the dance which have crept into the ballad itself. But the

cadenced shout, the refrain, the infinite repetition of a traditional

song, pass with the dance that timed them, and decorous reapers may now

depute one of their number to act as spokesman; hence, as in

Mecklenburg, the recited poem, or the little speech, or even, as in

Hanover, a figure made of the stalks is furnished with a letter to be

read aloud for the behoof of neighbours; and there are other infamies of

the sort. So passes the old Harvest-home.

Of vast importance for agricultural life, and resonant with refrain and

song, were those processions about the field, about parish boundaries,

to sacred wells,[737] to woods and groves to bring in the May, and for a

hundred other purposes to a hundred other resorts. The solemn procession

of a community, along with the festal dance, forms the oldest known

source of poetry; and Kögel points out that in German even now the

proper word for celebrating a festal occasion is _begehen_, while the

corresponding noun is used in a mediæval gloss for _ritus_ and _cultus_.

The song of the Arval brothers had its origin in such a procession about

the fields; and Vergil’s advice[738] to the farmer shows that this rite

was no monopoly of priests, or even of the man skilled in incantations,

but a communal affair,—marching round the young crops, and dance and

song at harvest:—

... thrice for luck

Around the young corn let the victim go,

And all the choir, a joyful company,

Attend it, and with shouts bid Ceres come

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

Put sickle to the ripened ears until,

With woven oak his temples chapleted,

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

There can be no question of borrowing in these songs and dances, even in

the simpler forms of ritual, which are found wherever rudest agriculture

has begun. Doubtless only a change of religion deprives us of those

songs, or some echo of them, which were sung in the famous procession of

Nerthus,[740] the _terra mater_, goddess of fertility and peace among

the Germanic tribes who lived by the northern oceans two thousand years

ago. These people, so Tacitus[741] records the rite, “believe that she

enters into human activity, and travels among them.” Drawn by cows, she

is accompanied in her mysterious wagon by a priest; “those are joyful

times and places which the goddess honours with her presence, and her

visit makes holiday.”[742]

Tacitus was interested in the mysteries of the rite; would that he had

heard and transmitted the songs that rang out in honour of this German

Demeter, and had described the dances of the folk about their

fields![743] For, as Kögel points out, the later procession to bless

crops and to ban all things hostile to their thriving, a custom still

common in certain parts of Europe, is only a repetition of this old

progress. Half-way between the time of Nerthus and the present occurs

that Anglo-Saxon charm for making barren or bewitched land bear fruit;

amid its excrescences of ritual, and under the alien matter, still

lingers a hint of the old communal procession, the old communal song and

dance; and perhaps Nerthus is dimly remembered in the cries of,—

Erce, Erce, Erce, earth’s mother,

which has a repetition familiar from many survivals,[744] and in the

lines:—

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

Be thou growing in God’s protection,

Filled with food for feeding of men!

Again, one has the extremes of shouts, communal cadenced cries, and

songs which are often quite irrelevant; thus in Brandenburg on Easter

Monday girls march by long rows, hand in hand, over the young corn of

each field, singing Easter songs, while the young men ring the church

bells;[745] but one learns that Wends of the fifteenth century greeted

the early corn as they ran round it in wild procession, and hailed it

“with loud shouting.”[746]

About the year 1133, and along the lower Rhine, a procession was in

vogue which may have been a survival of the worship of that goddess

recorded by Tacitus and called Isis because her symbol was a ship; for

in the mediæval rite such a ship was placed on wheels and carried about

the country, followed by shouting bands and hailed at every halt with

song and dance.[747] The songs, _turpia cantica et religioni Christianae

indigna concinentium_, were condemned by clericals,[748] and the dances

of scantily clad women, not unlike the festal dances of savage women in

many places at this season of the year, were doubtless not only

intrinsically objectionable, but pointed back to the heathen doings from

which our Germanic folk were so slowly converted. A glimpse at this

older worship is given by Gregory in his often-quoted story of the

Langobards who offered a goat’s head to their “devil,” running about in

a circle and singing impious songs.[749] A survival of some such heathen

rite, with ridiculous perversion of Christian legend, is the feast of

the ass, the festival of fools, on Christmas or on St. Stephen’s day,

when during mass the priest brays thrice and the congregation respond in

kind; here and there, as in France, a hymn is sung, with refrain from

the throng:[750]—

Hez, Sir Ane, hez!—

and ending in what Hampson oddly calls “an imitation of the noisy

Bacchanalian cry of _Evohe!_”—

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

Bialz, Sire Asnes, carallez

Belle bouche car chantez,—

a very far cry, indeed. After service, crowds marched through the

streets, sang Fescennine songs, danced, and ended by “dashing pails of

water over the precentor’s head.” It is needless to follow this

degenerate choral over Europe, as it blends thus with rites of the

church, passes into the song of the waits, and lingers in degraded form

with the beggars or children who parade the countryside at Martinmas or

in Christmas week, singing refrains that echo older and better song and

doggerel that echoes nothing.

A soule-cake, a soule-cake,

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

A soul! A soul! A soul-cake!

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

printed here with full apologies to all outraged friends of the

immensities and the eternities, who sought nobler stuff in a book on the

beginnings of poetry. On Palm Sunday, near Bielefeld in Germany, the

children go about with branches of willow and sing “all day long”—

Palm’n, Palm’n, Påsken,

Låt’t den Kukkuk kråsken,

Låt’t dei Viögel singen,

Låt’t den Kukkuk springen![752]

Most stubborn, of course, is this converted or Christian survival, and

almost as stubborn the custom of the village and of remote agricultural

communities; such a procession as Coussemaker[753] describes, popular

throughout Flanders and Brabant, with a fixed refrain, held its place

even in the cities. Occasionally Church and State were opposed;[754] a

proclamation of Henry VIII forbade processions “with songes and dances

from house to house,” and even carols were forbidden by act of

Parliament in Scotland. Wakes[755] were either abolished, or else passed

into that curious communal revival, the love-feast and the watch-meeting

of Methodists. But the communal song and procession are fast dying out,

and the new century will hear little of them; although early in the old

century the Christmas days[756] heard many a shouting throng, now with

cries of _an guy_, now _gut heil_, now _hogmenay trololay, give us your

white bread and none of your gray_! and whatever other etymological

puzzles the scanty records can show. These fragments of festal song are

too far gone in corruption for profitable use. Aubrey[757] felt the

lapse, and made such _memoranda_ as these: “get the Christmas caroll and

the wasselling song;” “get the song which is sung in the ox-house when

they wassell the oxen,” that is, with echo of an old refrain, where they

drink “to the ox with the crumpled horne that treads out the corne”; and

he has noted a few of these songs. The civil wars, he thinks, made an

end of these old customs; “warres doe not only extinguish Religion and

Lawes, but Superstition; and no suffimen is a greater fugator of

Phantosmes than gunpowder.” But peace has its victories of this sort.

Not long ago the procession about village and parish boundaries was

common enough; the whole community took part in this festal affair, and

all sense as of an individual purpose or individual ownership was laid

aside. Shout, dance, song, banquet, even directly ceremonial acts, were

the concern of a homogeneous throng, “our village” in strictest communal

sense. On the march—for example, the boundary march at Hamelin, in the

late autumn,—rose traditional songs, varied by noise of every sort; and

at the feast which followed, gentle and simple joined hands in the

dance, until, with recent innovations, the gentry withdrew, became mere

onlookers, and at last left the old rite to fall, like most communal

traditions, into a shabby, vulgar, discredited uproar of the lower

classes, a thing common and unclean. A quite similar case of

degeneration is quoted by Brand from the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ for

June, 1790, as going on at Helstone in Cornwall.[758] But where the

prosperity of crop and barn is in question, the rites are more stubborn

and hold their ground. This Helstone song welcomes summer; but before

that was sung, processions of all kinds were wont to go about the

fields, and in 1868 what the _Times_ newspaper called a “ritualistic

revival” came off in Lancashire, priest and choir making a progress

through the fields with cross and banners, and singing as they went.

Rogation week is still known as gang-week.[759] In older times the

community itself was priest and choir; the cases are plentiful and may

be read in Brand’s account of “parochial perambulations.” Then there is

the song of bringing home the May,[760] the dance and song about the

Maypole, with material and survival beyond one’s compass; enough to let

them echo in the verses put by Nash into his chaotic but pretty play,

where the clowns and maids sing as they dance:—

Trip and goe, heave and hoe,

Up and down, to and fro;

From the town to the grove

Two and two let us rove.

A-maying, a-playing:

Love hath no gainsaying;

So merrily trip and go.[761]

The voices of the real maying folk are here, and the steps, lightly

touched by art in the transfer to the play; in that Furry-Day Song at

Helstone, with its opening about Robin Hood and Little John, there is a

rougher but less effective refrain:—

With ha-lau-tow, rumble O!

For we were up as soon as any day O!

And for to fetch the summer home,[762]

The summer and the May O!

For summer is a-come O!

And winter is a-gone O!

What the poet can do with a fragment of communal song, with a heart full

of communal sympathy, and with that final touch of art and individual

reflection, may be felt by any one who will read in the echo of this

rough old chorus those exquisite verses of Herrick to Corinna.

Songs that may pass as communal drama hold something of this old refrain

of labour; so, for example, in the flytings of winter with summer or

with spring,[763] which seem to go back in England to times before the

conquest. A refrain, with change of “summer” to “winter” in alternate

stanzas, runs through a ballad printed by Uhland:[764]—

Alle ir herren mein,

Der Sommer ist fein!

Another refrain is sung “by all the youth,” when a mock fight between

the two is ended, and winter lies at jocund summer’s feet:—

Stab aus, stab aus,

Stecht dem Winter die Augen aus!

In the strife by deputy,[765] owl appearing for Hiems, and cuckoo for

Ver, there is the call of the bird for refrain; or else it is holly for

summer and ivy for winter, a chorus,[766] said to have been written down

in Henry VI’s time, running—

Nay, Ivy, nay,

Hyt shal not be, iwys;

Let Holy hafe the maystry

As the maner ys.[767]

These flytings came to be extraordinarily popular, and it is hard to

draw a line between the _volkspoesie_ and the _volksthümliche_; learned

allegory, which was early on the ground, has the mark of Cain upon it,

and cannot be missed. Probably Böckel[768] is right in looking on the

winter and summer songs as originally communal, with those dialogues

between soul and body, which one finds in nearly every literature of

Europe, as a learned and allegorical imitation; a combination of the two

kinds is not unusual.[769] So one passes to all manner of

debates,[770]—riches and poverty, wine and water, peasant and noble,

priest and knight, down to Burns’s _Twa Dogs_; but it is the old

communal sap that keeps holly and ivy green, and an old communal rite,

the driving out of winter or of death, lingers in the verses which

German children still sing to the dance:[771]—

Weir alle, weir alle, weir kumma raus,

Weir brenge enk’n Tod hinaus;

Der Summa is wieder kumme,

Willkummen, lieber Summe![772]

Refrain and chorus of labour among savages have been noted here and

there in the foregoing pages; to collect them to any extent would be

useless. They are found everywhere, and show that stage of development

at which the repetition of a single sentence, often of a single word,

affords unmeasured delight or ease. Individual singing is almost unknown

in many savage tribes,[773] and the refrain in its function as deputy of

the older chorus, is less common than the chorus itself.[774] Where the

savage is still mainly a hunter, mainly a warrior, the refrain is

insistent whenever a connected bit of description breaks away from the

choral song, as if artistic poetry could not yet walk by itself; and

where he has begun to till the soil, or even merely to gather plants and

fruits, there is the chorus and there is the refrain of a rude

harvest-home. For the hunter and warrior we may quote Heckewelder’s

account.[775] “Their songs are by no means inharmonious. They sing in

chorus; first the men and then the women. At times the women join in the

general song, or repeat the strain which the men have just finished. It

seems like two parties singing in questions and answers, and is upon the

whole very agreeable and enlivening.... The singing always begins by one

person only, but others soon fall in successively, until the general

chorus begins, the drum beating all the while to mark the time.” Their

war-dance is described in the familiar terms; but Heckewelder adds a

more interesting account of the feast which under agricultural

conditions would be a harvest-home. “After returning from a successful

expedition,” he says, “a dance of thanksgiving is always performed....

It is accompanied with singing and choruses, in which the women join....

At the end of every song, the scalp-yell is shouted as many times as

there have been scalps taken from the enemy.” As to the rhythm,

Heckewelder makes a statement much clearer than the accounts given in

Schoolcraft’s question and answer, for he does not undertake to express

Indian metres in terms of civilized poetry, but simply says that “their

songs ... are sung in short sentences, not without some kind of measure

harmonious to an Indian ear.”

These Indians, however, were not in the absolutely primitive stage, and

the artist had elaborated dance, speech, song; in short, like European

peasants of isolated communities a century ago, the redskin was at that

point of poetical development where improvisation is a general gift, and

every one is expected to compose his bit of song, leaning, of course, on

the chorus, on refrain and repetition, and on those traditional phrases

which even more than modern speech realized Schiller’s lines about the

poet:—

Weil dir ein Vers gelingt in einer gebildeten Sprache

Die für dich dichtet und denkt, glaubst du schon

Dichter zu sein?

“The Indians also meet,” says Heckewelder, “for the purpose of

recounting their warlike exploits, which is done in a kind of

half-singing or recitative ... the drum beating all the while.... After

each has made a short recital in his turn, they begin again in the same

order, and so continue going the rounds, in a kind of alternate

chaunting, until every one has concluded.” It is easy to see that while

the chorus of war is an eminently communal performance, asking an

exactness of consent which makes strongly for rhythm at its best, the

conditions of nomadic and belligerent life must breed excellent

differences, set apart the great warrior, the great orator, and work in

certain ways toward communal disintegration and the triumph of the

artist. Agricultural communities, on the other hand, foster the choral

and social side of poetry, and discourage individual feats. So even with

the Indians; witness that “cereal chorus,” as Schoolcraft calls it,[776]

at the corn-husking, sung whenever a crooked ear is found by one of the

maidens:—

Crooked ear, crooked ear, walker at night,—

with additions and variations. This crooked ear, _wa-ge-min_, is the

symbol of a “thief in the cornfield,” and may have some relationship

with Mannhardt’s corn-demon.[777]

Older views of the American savage show him in the warlike guise, to be

sure, but with poetry overwhelmingly choral. Lafitau,[778] who says that

commerce with the white man has materially changed the savage’s customs,

is determined to paint him in his unspoiled state. During an eclipse,

for example, all the tribe dance in a peculiar manner, filling the air

with lugubrious cries; that rhythm is in them, though it is no song in

Lafitau’s ear, is proved by the dance, which, of course, compels a

rhythm, and by that picture of the girl who shakes pebbles in a

calabash, “trying meanwhile to make her rough voice accord with this

importunate jingle.”[779] Singing and dancing are the chief features of

Indian social life, and constitute the main charm of the life to come;

improvised songs, even speeches, occur, but general singing and dancing

make the background of their poetry and fill their festivals.[780]

Everybody improvises, and has his special song,—a trait noted among the

Eskimo; the dancers always sing, and apparently the singers always

dance; the verse is measured, but has no rime, and individual songs are

always supported by an accompanying _he! he!_ in cadence from the

throng, a sort of burden. Dramatic songs of war are common; and Lafitau

gives a case marvellously like that Faroe ballad of the luckless

fisherman, with satirist and victim in full view, although here the

latter is passive, and is often forced by the laughter and scorn of the

tribe to break away and hide his head in shame.[781] Song-duels, too, as

among the Eskimo, are frequent, with throwing of ashes, which makes

Lafitau call on Athenæus for a parallel among the ancient Greeks. But,

after all, what sticks in Lafitau’s mind about Indian dances is the fury

of them and that wild _he! he!_ which gave them cadence, but which often

“made the whole village tremble and shake.” The war-dance is described

in terms familiar to the reader of later accounts.

Lery gives an older story, but in the same spirit as that found in

Lafitau. Of great interest is the Huguenot’s account[782] of a festivity

which he and one Jacques Rousseau saw and heard performed by five or six

hundred savages in a certain village. The men retired into one house,

the women to another; Lery and his friend were shut in with the women,

about two hundred in all. From the house of the men came a low murmur,

like that of folk at prayers; and the women, pricking their ears,

huddled together in great excitement. Then the noise grew in volume, and

the men could be heard singing in concert, and often repeating their

interjection, _he, he, he, he_; the women now began to reply in kind,

crying, _he, he, he, he_, for more than a quarter-hour, leaping,

meanwhile, and foaming at the mouth, till it was quite plain to Lery

that the devil was entering into them. But this was not all. From

another house a mob of children now tuned the hallowed quire; and the

Huguenot, despite his year and a half in those parts, is free to say he

felt a desire to be “en nostre Fort,” doubting the sequel of all this

coil. Suddenly the women and children were quiet; and Lery could now

hear the men singing and shouting “_d’un accord merveilleux_,” so that

these “sweet and more gracious sounds” heartened him to go near the

house of the men. He made a hole in the soft wall and looked in; then,

with two friends, he went inside, saw the dance, and heard the songs,

which ran on without stop. All the men stood in a close circle, but

without clasping hands or stirring from the place, bent forward, moving

only the leg and the right foot, each having his right hand on his

buttocks, the arm and left hand hanging, and so danced and sang. It

seems to have been a communal dance, like that of the Botocudos, save

that certain priests—_caraïbes_—richly arrayed, holding in their hands

“little rattles or bells made of a fruit bigger than an ostrich egg,”

had evidently extraordinary powers. There is a remarkable picture by way

of illustration,[783] showing the naked dancer, bent over, as described,

with a priest behind him, a parrot on a perch just above the dancer’s

shoulder, and a monkey at his feet,—these doubtless an exuberance of the

artist.

The social foundation, the communal dance, the incessant refrain, the

festal excitement, are here plain outcome of primitive conditions in

survival; the priest, and the ritual functions which are left to one’s

guessing, show that mingling of ceremonial tradition and art which is

bound to spring up with even savage culture. Despite this mingling,

however, the overwhelming characteristic of the whole affair is

communal, and the songs are in close tether to the refrain. An excellent

summary of American savage songs and American savage poetry in general

has been already quoted in part from a paper by Dr. Brinton,[784] and

may be used here as a conclusion of the whole matter. Repetition is the

groundwork of this poetry; it is always sung; it has no rhythm,—no

metre, that is,—no alliteration, but depends on two kinds of repetition.

Either one verse is repeated indefinitely, or a refrain is used. “The

refrain is usually interjectional and wholly meaningless; and the verses

are often repeated without alteration four or five times ever.” This is

the case with Eskimo poetry. Now and then, each line “is followed by an

interjectional burden.” A little ballad may be quoted from Dr. Brinton’s

paper[785] to show how events passed into poetry, without forming what

could be called in any sense narrative or epic verse. About the year

1820, the Pawnees captured a girl and put her to the torture; but a

Pawnee brave, of generous vein, made a daring rescue and flight. After

three days he came back; and as the thing was so mad, it was counted

inspiration, and no one harmed him. Whereupon this song was sung:—

Well he foretold this,

Well he foretold this,

Yes, he foretold this,

I, Pitale-Sharu,[786]

Am arrived here.

Well he foretold this,

Yes, he foretold this;

I, Pitale-Sharu,[786]

Am arrived here,—

and in this song, leaning so hard on the event, so bare of statement, so

woven in with the life of the actual day that lapse even of a year or so

must have brought need to its hearers to be edified by the margent,[787]

so dependent on the refrain, so suggestive of an accompanying dance and

of gestures to make the little drama real, it is not unfair to say that

one has at least some of those factors which went to make the beginnings

of poetry.

The refrain has been considered as the main communal element in songs of

labour; here are its functions in communal play, primarily a combination

of consenting cries and movements in the festal dance. The song that

always went with a dance got its name thence, and was called a ballad;

and in the ballad, whether strictly taken as a narrative song, or as the

purely lyrical outburst for which there is no better term than folksong,

this consenting and cadenced series of words found its main refuge and

record. The subject is complicated enough, and asks a volume to put it

into any semblance of order; all that can be done here is to group the

main facts in their relation to primitive poetry. Unless one holds fast

to the idea that refrains represent the original choral song of the

mass, one begins to explain them by their modern features, and thus,

while accurate as to a certain stage of poetry, falls into error on the

historic and genetic side. Ferdinand Wolf[788] gives an admirable

account of the refrain, an admirable definition, but with a wrong

inference of origins, when he assigns it to the participation of the

people or of the congregation in songs which were sung to them by one or

more persons on festal occasions, where the throng repeated in chorus

single words, verses, whole strophes, or else in pauses of the main song

answered the singer with a repeated shout to express their agreement,

applause, horror, joy, or grief,—a shout which often lost its real

meaning and became a mere conventional choral cry. Hence, says Wolf, it

is clear that the refrain is as old as songs of the people.[789] It has

been said that this statement is misleading in any genetic sense; it

fails to note the growth of the exarch or foresinger into the poet, and

to follow the backward curve of evolution to a point where the voice of

the foresinger is lost in the voices of the choral throng itself, that

raw material from which all poetry has been made. On the other hand,

this definition undoubtedly states the facts of the refrain in its

mediæval stage of survival from the chorus. In ballads, for example, it

is the part taken by the throng in distinction from the part of the

minstrel; but there is great difficulty in deciding how the throng

actually sang the refrain. Names are no guide; and the terms, chorus,

refrain, and burden are used in no exclusive fashion.[790] Probably one

will not stray far from facts if one assumes that whenever a ballad came

to be sung artistically, as a part-song in the rough, the

refrain—_hey-no-nonny, the wind and the rain_, or what not—was really a

burden, “the base, foot, or under-song”;[791] as is proved by the scene

in _Much Ado_,[792] where no man is in the group to sing this base or

foot, and Margaret, wishing a song to which they can dance, cries,—“Clap

us into _Light o’ Love_; that goes without a burden: do you sing it, and

I’ll dance it.” A passage quoted by many writers from the old play, _The

Longer thou Livest the more Foole thou art_, tells how Moros enters,

“synging the foote of many songes”; and bits of them follow, an

interesting list; a little later, three of the characters are to “beare

the foote,” and there is much testing of the key. On the other hand, in

Jonson’s _Bartholomew Fair_,[793] there is the same play of getting key

and tune, and Cokes “sings the burden” with Nightingale; but this is

simply a couplet recurring at the end of each stanza. So Guest[794]

defines the burden as “the return of the same words at the close of each

stave.” Is this right? For what one most wishes to know, so far as the

singing of ballads is concerned, is whether the refrain, constant or

intermittent, was sung as the “foot,” that is, contemporaneously with

the regular lines, or after them, either as couplet or in

alternation,—as in—[795]

It was a knight in Scotland borne,

_Follow, my love, come over the strand_,

Was taken prisoner and left forlorne

_Even by the good Earle of Northumberland_.

Here the fitness of things indicates intermittent singing of the refrain

which thus makes a four-line stanza out of a two-line stanza; this is

Rosenberg’s theory of the evolution of a ballad strophe.[796] Certainly

the refrain came to be used in artistic and late communal poetry to mark

off the stanza as the rime marked off the verse. What we now call a

chorus, a recurrent stanza, sung after each new stanza, is often a clear

case in ballads; for example, in _The Twa Magicians_,[797] that

provocative and tuneful cadence of—

O bide, lady, bide,

And aye he bade her bide;

The rusty smith your leman shall be

For a’ your muckle pride.

But there is doubt in regard to the refrain when it is said to be sung

as burden, or what Grundtvig calls burden-stem; although there is no

doubt that refrains were taken from folksong and chorus and were used as

burdens in the ballad.[798] Even the song of labour is used for the

refrain:[799]—

Hey with a gay and a grinding, O!

distorted into—

Hey with the gay and the grandeur, O!

The question, as Professor Child acknowledged, is extraordinarily

difficult even when narrowed down to ballads. It is discussed at length

in an unpublished dissertation by the late Dr. J. H. Boynton, who

decides for the simultaneous singing of the ballad strophe and the

refrain,[800] and incidentally for the growth of a four-line strophe out

of the early strophe of two lines. Icelandic and Faroe ballads show the

most archaic elements in the Germanic group, and “a large proportion of

their refrains deal directly with the dance.” The “stem” is sung first

by the leader of the dance, and is a “lyric in itself,” fit to go “with

any ballad.” Now it is clear that whether the ballad and the burden were

sung simultaneously, as Boynton believes to have been the case, or

alternately, as certain English ballads seem to require, and as Guest

assumed in his definition, this question of musical technique cannot

affect the inference that the burden, a “lyric in itself” which serves

as refrain, is older than the ballad or narrative song, and has most

intimate relations with the steps of the dance. In other words, here is

the refrain in its passage from a dominant place as choral repetition of

the throng, timed to their steps and deriving its existence from these

steps and from the expression of festal delight that prompted them, to

an ancillary and subordinate place as choral support to the artistic

progress of a narrative in song. This agrees with the records of

communal song not only under savage conditions but among the homogeneous

and unlettered communities of Europe. Neocorus,[801] a priest who writes

about the beginning of the seventeenth century, defending that

unschooled song which he still heard at the dances and festivities of

his countryfolk of the Cimbrian peninsula, and which still flowed so

easily, although much of it was lost that ought to have been recorded

and sung, describes their communal dance; it is in a fairly advanced

stage, of course, and is led by an expert. First, this leader comes

forward singing alone, or with a colleague, and begins a ballad. “And

when he has sung a verse, he sings no further, but the whole throng, who

either know the ballad or else have paid close attention to him, repeat

and echo the same verse. And when they have brought it to the point

where the leader stopped, he begins again and sings another verse.” This

is again repeated. Presently, with the singing thus under way, a leader

of the dance comes forward, hat in hand, dances about the room, and

invites the whole assembly to join. Facts which have been given already,

and facts still to be considered, show clearly that these leaders of

song and of dance are deputies of the throng which once danced as a mass

to its own choral singing. On the other hand, as Boynton noted,

repetition and refrain may take the form of a genuine burden. In

Icelandic ballads, the “burden-stem” was often in a different metre from

the ballad stanza; it was sung “to support the voice by harmonious notes

under the melody,” and “was heard separately only when the voices

singing the air stopped.”[802] But in the Faroe isles “the whole stem is

sung first, and then repeated as a burden at the end of every verse.”

This is certainly more natural than the process, known in Iceland, where

a leader sings the incremental stanzas and the throng keeps singing the

burden or accompaniment; although a very familiar ballad might so be

sung, and the fact would of course indicate either a shifting of

interest toward purely musical ends, as in Elizabethan England, or else

a devotion on the part of the crowd to the dance proper and the refrain,

while the narrative is left to the leader of the song.[803]

Apart from the manner of singing it under later conditions, the refrain

in itself, so far as ballads are concerned, is clearly the recurrent

verse or verses sung by the festal crowd; and the nearer one comes to

the source of a ballad, that is, to the dancing throng, the more

insistent and pervasive and dominant this refrain becomes. That is the

fact which nobody has ever denied. Jeanroy,[804] in a careful discussion

of origins, concludes that refrains are really fragments of song for the

dance, now and then, as he hints, of songs of labour; he regards them

solely in their function as lines sung at the end of a stanza, and like

other scholars thinks they were “originally repeated by the chorus in

answer to the soloist.”[805] Elsewhere, however, he grants that this

need not have been the universal fashion, and that now and then all the

dancers may have sung all the song,[806] a theory fortified by his

conjecture that the refrain was once made up of imitative sounds.

However, the modern refrain of the dance, best preserved among French

and Italians, is a lively lilting couplet, or the like, to which the

other riming verses are prefixed in the growth of the actual song, as in

the stanzas quoted from Bujeaud:—

Là haut, dessus ces rochettes,

J’entend le haut-bois jouer,

Et vous autr’, jeunes fillettes,

Qui allez au bal danser,

_Allez, allez, tenez vous dreites,

Prenez gard’ de n’ pas tomber_.

The transition is very evident. In another case[807] the leader calls on

the dancers to make some cry imitative of animals, which now serves as

refrain; but, wherever found, the test of a really popular refrain, as

Jeanroy insists, is that it was made for the dance. Read “in the dance,”

and communal conditions are even better satisfied.

For the ballad is a song made in the dance, and so by the dance; a mass

of those older dance-songs which have come down to us as popular, are

later development, are of either aristocratic or learned origin, and

simply point back to the communal dance which is the real source of the

song. Originally a chorus of all the dancers, it gave vent to the

feelings of joy,—in the old _vocero_ dance, of grief,—to the common

emotion of the throng. An impulse which makes for this song of the dance

is simple delight that the season of dancing is begun:—

A l’entrada del tems clar, _eya_;[808]

and so one may trace these invocations of nature to their later form at

the beginning of a narrative song like _Robin Hood and the Monk_. This

dancing of the round as an expression of feeling on the part of a

throng—dancing in pairs, we know, did not reach Neocorus’s country, for

example, until the middle of the sixteenth century—meets one everywhere

in mediæval records, and it has died a reluctant death; unless

observation be at fault, even children are ceasing to play the old round

games common not many years ago, a city of refuge that seemed at one

time so secure. But in those mediæval days one danced in throngs on

almost any occasion; and impossible as the story may be if taken

literally, there is truth enough for our purpose in that account[809] of

Leicester’s army in 1173 pausing on a heath, where they “fell to daunce

and singe—

“Hoppe, Wylikin, hoppe Wyllikin,

Ingland is thine and mine.”

Many of the folksongs go little beyond this stage of an exhortation to

dance, along with a brief comment on the posture of affairs or on the

scene. Such an exhortation as refrain for the dance occurs in the old

play of the _Four Elements_, with an interesting context. Says

Ignorance—

I can you thank; that is done well;

It is pity ye had not a minstrel

For to augment your solace.

and Sensual Desire replies:—

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

Ye shall see me dance a course

Without a minstrel.

Then he singeth this song and danceth withal, and evermore maketh

countenance according to the matter; and all the others answer

likewise:—

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

Ignorance says it “is the best dance without a pipe he has seen this

seven year.” But Humanity inclines to think “a kit or taboret” would

improve the dance; and the dancers retire to a tavern where they are

sure “of one or twain of minstrels that can well play.” Humanity now

proposes “to sing some lusty ballad”; but Ignorance is against all such

“peevish prick-ear’d song,” and when he is told that prick-song in

church pleases God, makes the often-quoted reply that there is no good

reason why it is “not as good to say plainly _Give me a spade_, as _Give

me a spa, ve, va, ve, va, vade_.” No; if a song is wanted, one of the

good old sort will do; and there follows a list not unlike that of Moros

in the play or that of Laneham in the letter, with the trifling

exception that this runs into a helpless sort of burlesque. “Robin Hood

in Barnsdale stood” is probably a genuine first line, and so are some of

the other titles. The main thing is that ballad singing is opposed to

prick-song and the new fashions generally, and that a refrain from all

lusty throats is better for the dance than pipe or minstrel. The refrain

in this case is just the old exhortation to dance. This exhortation is

common enough in folksong, alone or as a refrain:[811]—

Springe wir den reigen ...

Saute, blonde, ma joli’ blonde ...

but a pure and simple description of the matter in hand, as communal,

spontaneous, and immediate an expression in song as may be, and tied to

steps of the dance by the shortest of tethers, is doubtless to be found

in the game where a circle of children dance round one of their

companions in the ring to this refrain:[812]—

Here we go the jingo-ring,

The jingo-ring, the jingo-ring,

Here we go the jingo-ring

About the merry-ma-tanzie.

Let this be a survival of a wedding ceremony, or whatever the learned

will, the refrain, sung with each stanza, and suited of course to the

action, is typical of the earliest choral stage.[813] Now so soon as

narrative takes the place of this description of contemporary and common

action, this exhortation of all to all to do something which they are

all doing, then memory, deliberation, arrangement, are needed, and an

artist comes to the fore. When a ballad records some doing of the folk,

when the epic element takes upper hand, it is clear that a process of

separation is inevitable. A ballad of this sort may long remain as

favourite song for the communal dance. Thus a lively little thing, found

in Flanders and in Germany,[814] is of particular interest, first for

the narrative which is the old satire on monk and nun, so popular in

mediæval times; secondly for the refrain, which is nothing less than a

dance about the maypole, keeping the song itself in some places for this

festivity; and thirdly for the wandering of the ballad as a whole, from

the fifteenth century down to its modern refuge in a children’s game:—

A monk went walking along the strand,—

Hey! ’twas in the May!

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

Hey! ’twas in the May!

So gay!

Hey! ’twas in the May!

Here the dance has held its own with the story; but in most cases, as

the foresinger or exarch takes command, the new verses, beginning as

incremental repetition in the dance, grow bolder and learn to walk

alone; singing is still a condition, but the dance is only an occasion,

not a cause; and finally the crowd passes over the bridge of chorus and

refrain into a quite passive state of audience, with intermittent echo

and applause, utterly disappearing at last behind the sheets of a

broadside.

This, of course, is a conclusion at very long range; and there is an

extensive period, a large field, where elements of art mingled freely

with the old communal motive. For a single example, take the _Bouquet de

Marjolaine_.[816] This is a case of incremental repetition, with the

same rimes throughout, and an unvaried refrain or chorus which is

knitted to each stanza by this pervading rime. The third line of each

stanza forms the opening line of the next stanza, so that the story

proceeds slowly but surely to the end. The whole can be gathered from

one stanza and its refrain, with addition of the following incremental

lines:—

Me promenant dans la plaine,

(Tir’ ton joli bas de laine)

J’ai trouvé un Capitaine.

(Tir’ ton, tir’ ton, tir’ ton bas,

Tir’ ton joli bas de laine,

Car on le verra.)

Then, “il m’a appelé’ vilaine”; “je ne suis point si vilaine;” “le plus

jeun’ fils du roi m’aime;” “il m’a donné pour étrenne”—“une bourse

d’écus pleine,” “un bouquet de marjolaine;” “je l’ai planté dans la

plaine;”—and, for good last, and with that touch of pathos common in

these things, despite the gay tone, “s’il fleurit, je serai reine”; and

so, with the refrain, an end. Full of communal elements, this song is

nevertheless of an artistic type and of an aristocratic origin, an

offshot of the _pastourelle_ and its kin; popular enough, of a certain

simplicity and beauty, it is not directly communal in its tone; it has

gone among the people, and yet, though it was imitated from purely

communal refrains, like other and older songs treated so successfully by

Jeanroy, it has not come directly from the people. In fact, the communal

refrain of the dance is seldom in such independent case as this

infectious lilt; when it is not a survival, as in children’s games, its

best chance for life is as parasite to a narrative ballad or even to a

“lyric of sentiment and reflection,” as anthologies call them. Thus Ten

Brink is undoubtedly right when he takes the refrain as old,

traditional, communal, and the stanzas as new and artistic, in that

pretty English lyric, _Ichot a burde in boure bryht_, which has the

refrain at the beginning, as in many Provençal ballads:—

Blow, northern wind,

Send thou me my sweeting!

Blow, northern wind, blow, blow, blow!

Compare this with the artistic refrain of _Alisoun_, from which it

differs so widely, and with the refrain of the Cuckoo Song, in its

recorded form part of an elaborate composition, but doubtless taken from

the “nature” refrain of a dance. The ballads and folksongs of Europe are

of course in the transitional stage. They ought to be sung, but many of

them may have been recited; they echo the cadence of a dancing throng,

and have often timed the dance, though they are separable from such

company. It must be borne in mind, however, that many ballads in which

one would not now suspect such uses, were employed to regulate the slow

steps of a dance. Narrative ballads were in great favour for the

purpose; Faroe islanders danced to the stories of Sigurd, and the

Russians, whose folksongs are always choral and without instrumental

music, dance the _khorovod_ to a narrative song,—in fact, the word means

a blended song and dance; while even the Robin Hood ballads, if we may

believe the _Complaynt of Scotland_, as well as some ballad of Johnny

Armstrong, were sung at the dance of the shepherds. Savages sing

narrative poems to the dance, and so do Melanesians.[817] One can

therefore understand the statement made by Steenstrup,[818] that every

genuine ballad has a refrain, though this may not be recorded; for the

refrain is the tie which binds a ballad to its parent dance. As one

retraces the path of the ballad, the refrain grows in importance, slowly

pushing the leader or soloist nearer and nearer to the throng, until he

is lost in it; and a repetition of cadenced choral cries becomes the

main factor of poetry. As every one knows, those cadenced cries were

regulated by the dance; and to this important factor in early poetry,

already considered under the head of rhythm, we must now turn.

Dancing, most momentary of all the arts, as A. W. Schlegel called it, in

Wagner’s words “the most real,” seeing that the whole man is concerned

in it, “from head to foot,” with motions and gestures that give it tone,

and rhythm that gives it speech,[819] was also the primitive and

universal art, the sign of social consent; consenting steps, with

mimicry of whatever sort, timed a series of rude cries which expressed

the emotion of the moment, and so grew into articulate language. But the

song detached itself from dancing long before dancing could shake off

the choral cries and the refrain. Among Tasmanians and Australians songs

already existed apart from the dance; but there was no dance without a

song, and the dances were prevailingly of the whole horde or clan.

Survivals of this primitive stage, and the early history of dancing in

all quarters of the world, afford good warrant for the conclusion of

Böhme;[820] “no dance without singing, and no song without a dance,” is

his axiom for earliest times. Moreover, this proof of the connection of

song and dance in the primitive horde, a bond which one or two writers

have lately tried to sever, but without success, disposes of Mr. Herbert

Spencer’s attempt[821] to explain the dance as a modification of the old

movement of obeisance.

Dancing is universal among savages; and if a few cases occur which make

against this doctrine, one may safely assume, as Ribot does, and even

Wallaschek,[822] that they are due to insufficient observation,[823] or

else, at the worst, that they belong to tribes with hardly any claims of

humanity, degenerates, retrogrades, who have no social order and

consequently no dance. Again, the primitive form of the dance is to be

found in the choral throng; but it must be borne in mind that even

rudest tribes can develop an art of complicated, traditional, and ritual

character,[824] which in its turn breeds the solo and the professional

artist in dancing. However, the choral dies hard even under civilized

conditions; among savages it is prominent everywhere and in full vigour.

Waitz,[825] speaking of tribes in the South Seas, says that song there

is mainly choral, and dancing, affair of the community as a whole, is as

universal as song, often passing into mimicry and a rude drama.

Everywhere, too, song is accompanied by dancing, and when women thus

dance and sing they clap hands or slap the hip in time with their steps

and words, after the manner of their sisters in mediæval Europe. Musical

instruments are few. Chamisso noted now and then what he took to be

degeneration of song into mere howling; but we know there is a more

excellent way to explain these festal and cadenced cries. Dancing is in

order at each important moment for the community,—when strangers arrive,

when war is imminent, at feasts of every sort. As with these natives of

the South Sea, so with other and more savage tribes. It is useless to

insist in detail upon the African love of dancing, which goes on every

evening and in every village for hours at a time. “The natives of Obbo

began their dance by all singing together a wild but pleasant-sounding

melody in chorus,[826]” is only one of many descriptions of this

favourite communal diversion; but the legends and the complicated

artistic dances which exist side by side with the choral song and the

communal dance warn one that while primitive ways survive on the Dark

Continent, there is a lower stage of song and dance to be found

elsewhere. Like the Botocudos in South America, the Australians are on a

quite elementary level with regard to dance and song; they attach more

importance to the gesture than to the articulate word, so far as the

telling of stories or the describing of events is concerned, and they

know scarcely any individual performance.[827] Dance and song are of the

horde, the clan, as a whole. Choral shouts, refrains which repeat a word

or a short phrase indefinitely, and so time the steps of the throng,

make the original social art; with the aid of gesture, mimicry of

labour, of feats of hunting, this passes into kangaroo-dances, erotic

pantomimes, sham fights, and all the rest. Perhaps, as Hirn[828]

suggests, the dance of the Weddas, or Veddahs, in Ceylon is as primitive

as anything of the kind; although Ehrenreich’s account of the

Botocudos[829] shows little if any advance. A spear is stuck into the

ground to serve as centre for the ring of dancers, who move with swaying

of legs and arms to the cadence of their own singing,—call it rather

shouting,—while they keep exact time by slapping the naked stomach.[830]

From this communal dance and song, emerges after a while, as in the case

of the Botocudos, an individual performer; and it is clear that

elaborate dances, such as those given for the benefit of Captain Cook

and other foreign visitors, are an outgrowth of this primitive huddling

in mass with concert of cries and movements. It is significant that

instinct of the clan calls for some concerted dance and song as

necessary preface for war or any similar doing of the community as a

whole; in long range of development this is the war-dance of our own

Indians, often described, where a general chorus serves as background

and stimulus alike to the volunteers who step forward singly and

promise, in chanted and improvised song that times their steps, deeds of

individual valour in the impending fight. So, perhaps, the _gab_ of

romance, the _gilp_ or _gilpewide_[831] of Germanic warriors, was

originally made not only, as we know it, in the mead hall, but to the

chorus of the tribes and with the steps of a dance. At close range,

however, and with the foe in sight, it was a communal and general gab, a

choral performance; witness the interesting account of Captain

Cook.[832] In the first voyage, some four hundred islanders, about to

attack the captain and his friends, but hesitating, at length “sung the

song of defiance and began to dance.” Such was a particular case; and in

his general statement, Cook says that New Zealanders, before they begin

the onset, “join in a war-song, to which they all keep the exactest

time”; and while he does not mention the dance here, it is evidently

implied, for his scattered accounts of skirmish and fight are full of

it. A curious case is what would seem to be a war-dance in a boat which

was attacking Cook’s ship; as it approached, the savages in the boat

varied menaces with peaceful talk, “till, imagining the sailors were

afraid of them, they began the war-song and dance, and threw stones on

board the ship.” Then Cook goes on: “In the war-dance their motions are

numerous, their limbs are distorted ... they shake their darts, brandish

their spears ... they accompany this dance with a song, which is sung in

concert; every strain ending with a loud and deep sigh. There is an

activity and vigour in their dancing which is truly admirable; and their

idea of keeping time is such that sixty or eighty paddles will strike at

once against the sides of their boats, and make only one report.”

Concerted singing, this communal initiative, goes not only before war,

but before embassies, messages of peace, greetings, and the like; and

the dance is clearly an original prop of this song, now and then

retained, but often omitted. In Cook’s last voyage,[833] “a double

canoe, in which were twelve men, came towards us. As they drew near the

ship, they recited some words in concert, by way of chorus, one of the

number first standing up and giving the word before each repetition,”—a

“solemn chant,” Cook calls it. Readers of these and other voyages in the

South Seas, know how singing rather than speaking takes the foreground

of private as well as of tribal life; a chief coming on board the ship

hails it with a song to explain his visit, and there is the case of the

islander who told in song his story of life aboard an English ship, and,

asking the native who had met him what news there was from home, put his

excited questions in rhythm and got the equally excited answers in rapid

chant. Behind this individual song is the chorus; with the chorus is

nearly always the dance; wherever the dance, there is song. Musical

instruments the islanders knew, of course,—drums, perhaps, best; but as

Cook says[834] of a great dance which was given for him, it did not seem

“that the dancers were much assisted by these sounds, _but by a chorus

of vocal music, in which all the performers joined at the same time_.”

Indians of the Western continent have the same tale to tell, and it has

been told in part already by Lery, Lafitau, and the older travellers. A

century and more ago, Carver[835] noted that the savages of North

America “usually dance either before or after every meal”;[836] and

“they never meet on any public occasion, but this makes a part of the

entertainment.... The youth of both sexes amuse themselves in this

manner every evening.” At the feasts and other dances, “every man rises

in his turn, and moves about with great freedom and boldness, singing,

as he does so, the exploits of his ancestors. During this the company,

who are seated on the ground in a circle, join with him in making the

cadence, by an odd tone, which they utter all together, and which sounds

‘_Heh, heh, heh_.’” This they repeat “with the same violence during the

whole of the entertainment.” “The women dance without taking any steps

... but with their feet conjoined, moving by turns their toes and

heels.... Let those who join in the dance be ever so numerous, they keep

time so exactly with each other that no interruption ensues.”

In recent times the intricate dances, ritual and ceremony which, of

course, reach back in far tradition, have been studied and recorded; but

this is not a primitive phase of the art,[837] and even among the Moqui

and Navajo tribes of New Mexico, where instrumental music is common, now

and then the dancers furnish their own music, each one rolling out “an

_aw, aw, aw, aw_, in a deep bass tone.”[838] So in ancient Mexico, where

civilization of a sort had long held sway, the dances “were almost

always accompanied by singing”; this, however, was “adjusted by the

beating of instruments.”[839] But this public dance is no longer

communal in the old way; ritual of the clan becomes a state religion,

while dance and song are not only lifted but expanded. There is a sense

of ritual, to be sure, about the dance of a small community, as when

among the Bechuanas, to ask a man “what he dances,” is the same as

asking to what clan or tribe he belongs, a phrase curiously akin to

Gosson’s remark[840] that “to daunce the same round” means to be of the

same flock. But all this belongs only to the primitive horde or the late

homogeneous community; the dance of such a little clan about their

growing crops yielded to traditional and solemn rites, and the

spontaneous singing and dancing which Vergil recommends to his

farmers[841] is really a more primitive stage of the art than the

seemingly older ceremony of the Arval brothers, which had already

hardened into ritual and belonged to a close corporation under control

of the state. Tribal dances become expiatory and religious acts at a

very early stage of culture; it is easy to see that the records would

preserve such a dance only when it had lost some of its spontaneous

character, and taken on a ritual form. Germanic, Slavic, and Romance

peoples have the communal dance surviving as a religious act; and it was

one of the hardest tasks for councils and bishops to stop this dancing

of the congregation within the church itself. Often they allowed it in a

modified form. As a part of ritual, choristers still dance before the

altar of the cathedral at Seville; sixteen boys in blue and white form

“in two eights,” facing each other, and the priests kneel in a

semi-circle round them. Then “an unseen orchestra” begins to play, the

boys put on their hats and sing the _coplas_ in honour of the Virgin:—

O mi, O mi amada

Immaculada!—

“to a dance measure.” After this they begin to dance, “still singing,” a

“kind of solemn minuet.”[842] This is done at the feast of the

Immaculate Conception. In the sixteenth century boys and girls danced

about an image of Christ set upon the altar of German churches, singing

Christmas songs, while their parents stood by, also singing and clapping

their hands in time with the dance.[843] From these good folk to the

German barbarians “running in a circle” round the goat’s head and

“singing diabolical songs,” as seen and heard by Gregory,[844] is no

long step backward in development if it is in chronology. When the

children were at last driven from the churches, and when the old

ring-dance was at last forgotten by their elders, even in the fields and

about the fires of St. John’s Eve, the little ones made a brave rescue

and kept up the ritual in their games. Now even these are vanishing.

Outside of Europe, sacred and even national dances of the throng go this

same path of development and decline. The Hebrew communal dance passed

into traditional forms;[845] and there are other dances, outside of

religious cult, which acquire a fixed form and are passed down as of

tribal and even national significance. One thinks of the Pyrrhic

dance;[846] indeed, a study of the sword-dance in all its varieties, and

from this double point of view, communal and national, would be of great

interest. Savages, as Donovan remarked, imitate in their dancing now the

movement of animals, now the clash of arms in war, and again, though not

to the extent asserted by Scherer, erotic gestures.[847] For the second

sort, a gymnastic motive, the sense of preparation and drill for future

fighting, and a festal or reminiscential motive, combine to produce such

an exercise as the sword-dance, a convenient name for this group,

although the sword itself is not always in evidence. Chronology is here

of no account; for earliest records may show a well-defined and almost

national exercise such as Tacitus noted among the Germans, and very late

examples can be found of the purely communal sword-dance, with flyting,

songs, refrain, and rustic acting, as in the Revesby Sword Play;[848]

while Xenophon tells of a little drama, enacted by soldiers of the ten

thousand, combining the weapon dance, the imitated fight, and other

elements, in terms which could be matched by many an account given by

traveller or missionary of a similar affair among quite savage

tribes.[849] It is easy to see how one of the many paths from this dance

of mimicry, exercise, and rhythmic shouting, would lead to the narrative

song or ballad, and how such a ballad would long cleave to a particular

traditional dance. The Phæacians have a narrative song sung to them as

they are dancing, and when two dance alone, tossing the ball,[850] “the

other youths ... beat time”; but an older and more communal habit is

found in the dances of the Faroe islanders, where the gestures and

expression of face show how keenly the folk feel what they sing;[851] in

the Icelandic _rimur_, narrative songs which went with the dance; on the

Cimbrian peninsula, where ballads about the battle of Hemmingstede were

used for the same purpose; in scattered rural communities[852] of

Europe; and among savage tribes the world over. It has been made clear

to probation how the narrative ballad grew out of a tribal or communal

dance; and it is equally clear that there was an even shorter path from

dance to drama.[853]

From this point of view, it is easy to understand why the dance plays

such a part in the beginning of nearly every national literature, not

only in the Dionysian origins of Greek drama, but in less obvious ways.

The same ecstasy, indeed, appears again and again in a kind of panic

dance; in the summer of 1374 along the Rhine and in the Netherlands, and

again in 1418 at Strassburg, communal excitement went quite mad in the

St. John’s or the St. Vitus’s dance, vast crowds of men and women

leaping and shouting, garlanded, singing, as they reeled, a refrain

which might belong to the usual dances of St. John’s Eve:—

Here Sent Johan, so, so,

Vrisch ind vro,

Here Sent Johan!

until they fell exhausted, but still raving.[854] These panic dances

reproduce in some features the mad dance of mænads and all that “wild

religious excitement,” that “Bacchic ecstasy,” which lay behind the

Hellenic drama, and anticipate as mad a dance of as wild an ecstasy,

though not religious, when the mob of Paris dances the _carmagnole_ to

its own singing; but all this belongs to the pathological side of the

case, and one turns to the harvest-field, and to the village oak, where

merry dances often set a rhythm heard in later and nobler verse. Not

long ago, poetry of every kind was thought to start in some religious

rite, and a god or goddess lay hid under the most harmless rime of the

yokel; of late, however, a wholesome tendency has prevailed to stop the

search of sky and storm-cloud and other far-away haunts for an

explanation of the rustic dance and of the rustic refrain. On one hand,

the chase, war, whatever concerned the routine of nomadic life, and on

the other hand, among agricultural folk, the round of seedtime and

harvest, days of plenty or of want, and in both cases, the common joys

and sorrows of mankind, are now thought to be a better reason for

communal dance and song. Primitive man did not go about with his eyes

fixed upon the heavens; and it is not the goddess of spring and sunshine

transferred to those harvested crops as signs of her presence which

explains a Nerthus or a Ceres, but rather a slow inference from local

delight in harvest up to a great feast of gathered and related tribes,

involving wider ideas of divinity and arriving by easy stages at the

abstraction of one beneficent deity sending out her largess of sun and

quickening showers. The dance, then, with nomadic tribes was a triumph,

an outburst of communal elation, dealing in its mimicry with scenes of

the war or hunt, and cadenced by shout and song that echoed a clash of

arms; with the agricultural community it was a harvest-home, with

recapitulation of the rural year, imitated acts of sowing, planting,

watching, reaping, storing, which survive in some sort to this day. In

both kinds of life, nomadic and agricultural, the dance was an essential

part of such rites as the wedding and the funeral, and is still

considered in this way by peasants in remoter Europe. Thus in Dalmatia

and Montenegro,[855] the _kollo_, that is, circle, “the figure of all

their dances, though the steps differ,” is danced at weddings. “Twelve

or thirteen women ... danced in a circle, singing a slow and rather

plaintive song ... while waiting for the bride.... In the meantime, the

men ... walked in procession to the court before the church door, and

danced in a circle.” Evidence of this sort is everywhere; it has been

studied under the refrain; but the festal idea may be repeated here in

comment on the meaning of our old English word and suffix _lâc_, and the

related Gothic _laiks_,[856] German _leich_, originally the combination

of word, song, and dance—or march—in one communal act,[857] with an easy

transition into the idea of battle, the “play of spears,” where, indeed,

this communal act always served as prelude, as well as into the idea of

feast, ceremony, merriment. A festal song and dance after the fight,

easily turned into ritual and thanksgiving to the gods, but once mere

fighting the battle over again, was called in Norse the

_sigrleikr_.[858] Further philology would not be in place; enough that

the earliest songs and poetry of Europe appear everywhere hand in hand

with the dance,[859] and that this dance is partly the triumph of

victorious war, partly a triumph of peace and plenty, always, however, a

festal and communal affair.

In considering this communal dance of Europe, one finds that it is

practically inseparable from song, and the song is mainly sung by those

who dance. In modern Greece, even, Fauriel[860] found that “every new

dance was the result of a new song, of which it formed the mimicry; it

was never danced without this song, and fell with it into oblivion.” A

study of the refrain showed how close this bond between song and dance

must have been; and one sees how slowly and reluctantly the separation

takes place, most reluctantly, of course, in the games of children. It

must also be borne in mind that dancing by pairs is of comparatively

recent date; Neocorus, one will remember, says it was unknown among his

peasant neighbours between the German ocean and the Baltic until the

middle of the sixteenth century, while Bladé makes this way of dancing a

stranger to the Gascon countryfolk as late as seventy years ago. What

they knew and practised was the old round, danced once to the songs of

the dancers, but now dominated more and more by instruments;[861] the

song, when used, is led by a soloist who improvises a line or so which

is repeated by the dancers in chorus, with a refrain for all stanzas.

This round, of course, is the _carole_[862] of Romance literature, known

later as the _branle_, a dance or march of many, hand in hand, with

chorus or refrain to time the steps;[863] it was the main amusement of

aristocratic folk, but derived directly from popular usage. Such an

aristocratic dance is described in the _Romaunt of the Rose_.[864] Dante

refers[865] to the practise of singing with the dance; and if we had his

chapter on the _ballata_, we should have riches. On the dance-song of

these Romance nations, and its absolutely communal origin, enough has

been quoted already from such authors as Wolf and Jeanroy; and it would

be waste of time to heap up evidence of the English ballad[866] as it

was danced in Elizabethan fields, and when the youth went out to “mix

their songs and dances in the wood.” Dances of this sort we have already

noted not only among shepherds, but in the Elizabethan theatre; besides

the refrains of labour and merriment to which the actors danced, ballads

were in demand. A good instance is in the old play of _Like Wil to

Like_,[867] where Nichol Newfangle, the Devil, and Tom Collier are on

the stage. Says Nichol,—

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

Then, godfather, name what the daunce shall be.

“Tom Coliar of Croydon hath solde his cole.”

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

[Nichol Newfangle must have a gittorn or some other instrument (if it

may bee), but if hee haue not, they must daunce about the place all

three, and sing this song that followeth, which must bee doon also

althoug they haue an instrumenth.]

And the song follows. Jigs were songs, largely improvised, and sung by

actors as they danced; they came after the play.[868] It was the fiddle,

says Mr. Baring-Gould,[869] “which banished the ballad as a

song-accompaniment to a dance. Nevertheless, as a very aged fiddler told

me ... in his early days the lads and maids always sang whilst dancing

to his music.” On the stage this substitution was more immediate and

thorough; so that in the days of George II, when Nancy Dawson “produced

the novelty of singing as she danced,” she took the town by storm;

though one may conjecture that it was the survival, not the

“novelty,”[870] in the case which thus aided her charm as a woman and

her grace as a dancer. For rural England, like rural Europe, showed

reluctance enough in giving up the good old way; a Scottish parson,

moreover, writing in 1793, tells of a large stone, set up in one of the

islands, about which he saw “fifty of the inhabitants” gathered on the

first day of the year, and “dancing in the moonlight” with no other

music than their own singing.[871] About such stones, but by preference

about the village linden,[872] folk danced to their own singing in

Germany down to modern times; and as the dance was an even movement in a

ring, the dancers hand in hand, it was quite possible for them to sing

the ballads which seem to us grotesquely unfit for the lively springing

of single performers as well as for the rapidly gliding couples.

Leaping, and livelier motions generally, followed the dance in a ring;

but it was to the latter that ballads were sung and in the first

instance composed.[873] The dances which go mainly to a refrain

represent of course an older stage than those which are danced to a

ballad, to a narrative song; the early dance knows only present action,

and exhorts or describes, as in the Flemish dances[874] now mainly

relegated to children.

As Mr. Thomas Hardy is so fond of reminding his readers, this is a

merry, dancing world no more; even youth can hardly make shift “to revel

in the general situation” as all men used to do. _Weltschmerz_ is to

blame, no doubt, and there is Mr. Baring-Gould’s fiddle, which has done

a deal of mischief. Rivals to the human voice, successful rivals, were

early at the dance,—harp, lyre, pipe, what not. South Sea islanders were

fain, not of these, but of the drum. With the dominant note of alien

music came a desire to break up the ring, to dance in pairs, or even to

listen and look on. Meddlesome bishops and officials of every sort were

bound to destroy this communal dance as a place of scandal; and we have

seen how the chimney and the clean, warm fireside and the lamp drew

sober folk from the village dances and left these to the baser element.

One can take quite seriously that petition[875] of the would-be peasant

to restore legal sanction to the village dance; and one is interested to

hear the petitioner complain that it is the violin now where once was

the bagpipe,—and once, too, he might have added, the echoing refrain.

No, the dance as well as the dancing song, the ballad proper, is going

out of date;[876] and not only the dance in this communal and social

meaning, but the very fact of rhythm, which is the soul of the dance.

Children play these games less and less, although the kindergarten makes

some stand in the matter; and even in music, as Bücher[877] points out

in those pages to which we have so often referred, teachers and artists

are fain to give rhythm an ancillary place and put melody, harmony, in

the foreground. One feels little displeasure, says Bücher, at the sight

of unrhythmic movements; and what would be said of an orator who, like

his Athenian brother, should address a political assembly as his “fellow

dancers”? But the decline set in early; even in Sir Thomas Elyot’s

day,[878] dancing is “that exercise whiche of the more parte of sadde

men”—serious folk, that is—“is so litle estimed.” So, too, in imperial

Rome. When the Romans hired mimes to dance for them, some lover of the

old ways might have said of the communal dance, expression of social

union and social equality and the strong, compact state, what the stern

old orator said of his profession when he first heard hired applause in

the courts of law: _centumviri, hoc artificium periit_,—“judges, oratory

is doomed!” In both cases one is dealing with the decline of communal

force and the growth of individual power.

Our business, however, is with the past. It is clear that movements of

labour, particularly in a reminiscent festal act, and movements of the

communal dance, furnished the raw material of poetry. In all cases the

primitive dance, or what seems to come nearest to that state of the art,

is a dance of masses of men for one purpose and to one exact

rhythm.[879] Equal sets of movements gave the verse, and sets of these

sets gave in time the strophe. Communal interest, resulting in the

communal expression, added contents to form; and shout, movement,

cadence, are all born of this absolutely social and communal impulse. To

use the good old word, here is the poetry of nature; facing this

communal material, what are we to say of the changes wrought upon it by

individual art?[880]