336.Der Scheidende. Sentiment naturally turns to the cadence of rhythm, while humour feels at home in prose; hence it is easy to see that humour in verse, as with Heine, is ancillary to sentiment, while sentiment in prose, as with Sterne and even Lamb, is ancillary to humour.

337.See below, Chap. VII.

338.See the author’s Old English Ballads, p. xxx, and reference to Wordsworth’s famous preface. See also Gray’s letter to R. West, April, 1742, “The language of the age is never the language of poetry,” and what follows.

339.See the author’s Old English Ballads, Boston, 1894, Introduction (on terminology, origins, criticism), and Appendix I. (The Ballads of Europe). For collections, see, of course, the material in the tenth volume of Child’s great work. On the relations of this communal ballad to the other kind of ballads, see Holtzhausen, Ballade und Romanze, Halle, 1882, and Chevalier, Zur Poetik der Ballade, Programme of the Prague Obergymnasium, in four parts, Prague, 1891-1895.

340.“Volkslied und Kunstlied in Deutschland,” Beilage zur Allgemeinen Zeitung, Munich, Nos. 53, 54, March, 1898,—a paper first read in October, 1897.

341.Only the narrative song is here considered; for popular lyric see below.

342.“Volksdichtung und Kunstdichtung,” in Nord und SÜd, LXVIII. (1894), 76 ff. It may be noted here that the temptation to take this easy attitude toward poetry of the people, as toward a fictitious and fanciful affair, is largely due to a misunderstanding of the evolutionary side of the case. The distinction is not one of coexistent forms of poetry so much as of successive stages of evolution. It is no hard matter to take so-called popular poetry of the day and reduce it to terms of art—the lowest terms, of course; but with poetry of the people treated as a closed or closing account, and with historical evidence about it in former times, a very different problem is presented. An important hint to this effect was given by Dr. Eugen Wolff in his paper “Über den Stil des Nibelungenliedes,” Verhandlungen der vierzigsten Versammlung deutscher Philologen, etc., Leipzig, 1890, pp. 259 ff.

343.Norske Folkeviser, Christiania, 1853, pp. iii f.

344.Chants et Chansons Populaires des Provinces de l’Ouest, Niort, 1895, I. 12. For the authorship, Le Braz, remarks, Soniou-Breiz-Izel, Chansons Pop. d. l. Basse-Bretagne, Introd., p. xxv, “À mesure que les productions populaires deviennent plus mÉdiocres, leurs auteurs se font un devoir de conscience de les contresigner.”

345.Songs of the Russian People, p. 40.

346.Krohn, “La Chanson Populaire en Finlande,” Proceedings Internat. Folk-Lore Congress, 1891, pp. 134 ff., a valuable paper. “La poÉsie s’est refugiÉe dans la pensÉe, mais elle n’a pu se maintenir intacte de trivialitÉ.” See also Comparetti, Kalewala, pp. 16 f.

347.E. H. Meyer, Volkskunde, pp. 327, 331.

348.James Hogg (Famous Scots Series), p. 25.

349.In MÉlusine, IV, (1888-1889), pp. 49 ff., and continued.

350.It is significant that the vogue of singing-clubs in German rural districts, which would seem to make for communal ballads, really drives them out. See Dunger, RundÂs u. ReimsprÜche aus dem Vogtlande, Plauen, 1876, p. xxx.

351.The introduction to Rosa Warrens’s Schwedische Volkslieder, 1857, is by Wolf, and Grundtvig did a similar favour for her DÄnische Volkslieder, 1858; opposed as regards authorship, the two are agreed on the source of a ballad in the homogeneous community. This even Comparetti recognizes: Kalewala, p. 21. See, too, Liliencron, Deutsches Leben im Volkslied um 1530, p. xi., and Baring-Gould, English Minstrelsie, Vol. VII. Introduction (“On English Song-Making”). But it is useless to pile up these references.

352.January 27, 1900.

353.Of course, one community may still sing, while another has forgotten. Beaurepaire, Étude sur la PoÉsie Populaire en Normandie, 1856, pp. 24 f., notes this, as well as the fact that some kinds of songs linger while others die. He found no vocero left in Normandy, but old choral wedding songs still were heard. The dance is going—the old village dance, the ronde: pp. 30 f.

354.BÖckel, Deutsche Volkslieder aus Oberhessen, Marburg, 1885, has an introduction of great value, which shows how utterly German folksong is a closed account. Traditional ballads are still sung, but none are made; what is now made is mainly “Schmutz und Rohheit.” Factories, singing-schools, are putting an end to communal song. The process of decay, he thinks, began as early as 1600. For description of modern communal songs, see p. cxxviii. Folksong, he says (p. clxxxiii), is dead throughout civilized Europe.

355.See John Ashton, Modern Street Ballads, London, 1888. For the French, see C. Nisard, Les Chansons Populaires chez les Anciens et chez les FranÇais, essai historique suivi d’une Étude sur la chanson des rues contemporaine, ... Paris, 1867, 2 vols. Vol. II. treats street songs. This is really a continuation of Nisard’s Histoire des Livres Populaires, 2 vols., 1854, on almanacs, prophecies, divinations, magic, etc. Nisard’s account of origins is ridiculous,—or perhaps it is meant to be playful. See I. 69.

356.In addition to the material quoted in the introduction to Old English Ballads, see Nash, Harvey, and the other pamphleteers on nearly every page. Chettle, Kind-Harts Dreame (Percy Soc., 1841), particularly pp. 9 ff., has a lively account of ballad making, printing, selling, singing, in this lower stratum. What is so lewd, he asks, that it has not been printed “and in every streete abusively chanted”? For the state of things somewhat later, see a curious publication, Whimzies, or a New Cast of Characters, London, 1631; it describes in alphabetical order, “almanach-maker,” “ballad-monger,” and so on, down to “zealous brother”; for ballad-monger, see pp. 8-15.

357.Ancient and Modern Scottish Songs.

358.National Ballad and Song: Merry Songs and Ballads Prior to the Year 1800; 5 vols., privately printed for subscribers only, 1897. The fourth volume of the Percy Folio teaches a like lesson.

359.Werke, ed. Suphan, XXV. 323.

360.See above, p. 121.

361.Poetik (well called Naturlehre der Dichtung, and an excellent piece of work), pp. 99 ff.

362.When folk read and write, they cease to improvise poetry, and the folksong really ceases; that the Æsthetic impulse, however, abides with them, even in low levels, but has other results, is shown by Gustav Meyer in an interesting passage of his “Neugriechische Volkslieder,” Essays, p. 309.

363.Sir George Douglas, Hogg, pp. 38 f.

364.See the context of it in Lachmann u. Haupt, Minnesangs FrÜhling, pp. 221 ff.

365.Jeanroy, Origines de la PoÉsie Lyrique en France, Paris, 1889, Part III., shows conclusively the origin of these songs in the public dance.

366.“Balade” of the twelfth century: Bartsch, Chrestomathie ProvenÇale, p. 107. Alavia = “away from us, begone,” the procul este profani of the dancers. See also G. Paris, Origines de la PoÉsie Lyrique, etc., a review of Jeanroy, Paris, 1892, pp. 12 ff. The rimes in -ar running through this stanza and the rest, and certain touches of art, show the changes in record; but the refrain and the spirit of the piece are quite communal.

367.Quellien, Chansons et Danses des Bretons, Paris, 1889, p. 11, notes that one event is not likely to be treated both in the song and in the tale: “ce qui est tombÉ dans le domaine de la narrative prosaÏque est par cela mÊme exclu desormais de la chanson.” Communal song must seize present things; in the tales it was “once upon a time.”

368.Buckle, Hist. Civ. Engl., I. Chap. vi., calls ballads “the groundwork of all historical knowledge,” and says they are “all strictly true” at the start. The use of writing, he thinks, put an end to their value.

369.This traditional, narrative song is called ballad throughout the present book,—unfortunately an equivocal term. The terminology of the whole subject is notoriously bad, and “ballad” is no exception to the rule. See Old English Ballads, pp. xviii ff.; Blankenburg, Litterarische ZusÄtze u. s. w., I. 387 ff., under “Dichtkunst”; for modern “ballad,” Werner in the Anzeiger fÜr deutsches Alterthum, XIV. 165 ff., 190 f., XV. 259; for German names, Erich Schmidt, Charakteristiken, pp. 199 ff.; on balada, Jeanroy, Origines, etc., p. 403, who shows the passage of the word from its meaning as a dance-song to the technical term for a fixed form of verse. In Corsica a ballata can be a lament (see below under vocero), and derives from the dance round a corpse: J. B. Marcaggi, Les Chants de la Mort, etc., Paris, 1898, p. 121, note on the caracolu, “a sort of pantomime danced about the corpse by the mourning women, with gestures of grief,” but now fallen out of use. Of course, the only point here is to separate the ballad from songs like Greensleeves, from journalism (for the so-called “ballad” under Elizabeth shows that her folk were as anxious to get into print, or to keep out of it, as we are in days of the newspaper), from occasional poetry, scurrilous rimes, hymns, and all the rest. “Sonnet” was a word that then not only meant any short poem, but occasionally made a little competition with “ballad”; several of the ballads in the Rawlinson Collection, Bodleian Library, are called “sonnet” either by title or in the text.

370.Work quoted, p. lxviii. Critics look at this narrative and treat it as the only element in the ballad; but at every turn they should remember that the original ballad was always property of a throng, was always sung, was always danced, and was never without a dominant refrain.

371.Even Kleinpaul, sarcastic enough against Grimm, implies this condition in his nine characteristics of popular poetry: Von der Volkspoesie, published anonymously, 1860, and as supplement to his Poetik, 1870. See p. 29.

372.Introduction to Rosa Warrens’s Schwedische Volkslieder, p. xix.

373.Ancient Danish Ballads, 1860, I. ix.

374.Altgermanische Poesie, p. 118. See also p. 52.

375.Heinzel, “Beschreibung d. islÄnd. Saga,” Sitzungsberichte, Vienna Acad., phil. hist. class, 1897, p. 117.

376.Said of the Castilian and Aragonese ballads in Wolf’s Proben portug. u. catalan. Romanzen, Vienna, 1856, p. 6. Here, too, he opposes the idea, presently to be considered, that ballads are degenerate epic or romance.

377.A broader account of the origin of ballads is given by Comparetti, Kalewala, pp. 282 f. He refers them to the romantic and chivalric sentiment of the late Middle Ages—beginning, say, with the eleventh century—which passed from the “Romanic-Germanic centre of Europe” into various tongues, was delivered to oral tradition as popular verse, spread and flourished down to the sixteenth century, where it was collected as romancero, romanze, kÆmpevise, ballad. But Comparetti neglects the communal conditions.

378.Of course it was the revival of learning, the humanistic spirit, dividing lay society into lettered and unlettered, which really broke up the communal ballad.

379.Characters, “A Franklin.”

380.Brand-Ellis, under Harvest Home. The “mell-supper,” may not derive its name from mesler, as suggested, but the fact is clear enough.

381.Grosse, Formen der Familie, pp. 134 f.

382.Proben, etc., p. 6, as above, and also p. 31.

383.Popular Tales of the West Highlands, new ed., IV. 114 ff.

384.Proceedings, Internat. Folk-Lore Congress, 1891, p. 64.

385.Even in the material itself there is a shading from highly artistic down to communal. Thomas Rymer undoubtedly comes from a romance. The Boy and the Mantle has the flippancy of its origin in the fabliau; Jeanroy, Origines, p. 155, declares such a touch of the cynical to warrant one in taking the ballad out of that class which he calls popular. King Orfeo is a distorted tale from the classics. Plain kin-tragedies, however, like Babylon, Edward, The Twa Brothers, are simple enough for one to leave them to communal origins, and not go source-hunting. Even where the motive seems international, details may be home-made; how much of Hero and Leander is left in that Westphalian ballad, Et wasen twei Kunnigeskinner? This story of the lovers and the lighted taper is found in many folksongs. See Reifferscheid, WestfÄlische Volkslieder, pp. 127 ff. In the classics and modern poetry,—witness MusÆos and Marlowe,—it belongs to art. Comparative mythology laid hold of it, followed it back to India, and from India to the skies,—spring-god, sea, stars, autumn storms, and the rest. But this is needless bewilderment of a plain case; we have only to deal with the way in which Westphalian peasants sing of prince and princess. In three stanzas the story is told; all the rest deals with the situation so given, and here the communal elements (see below, p. 196) come in. The point is that study of subject-matter in ballads is distinct from the study of ballad elements. These are constant in good ballads, whether the subject be borrowed, or be local history, as in Bessy Bell and Mary Gray, and the Border ballads generally. In addition to the studies of ballad migration (e.g. Sir Aldingar) by Grundtvig and by Child, see a close piece of investigation by Professor Bugge, “Harpens Kraft,” in the Arkiv for Nordisk Filologi, VII. (1891), 97 ff.

386.In his introduction to the Canti Populari del Piemonte, p. xviii.

387.On the chasm between ballads of the collections and the recorded beginnings of national literatures, see Old English Ballads, p. lxxi.

388.See below, under Improvisation.

389.See remarks on “Crow and Pie,” Ballads, II. 478.

390.Essays, pp. 309 f.

391.See appendix on minstrels in the author’s Old English Ballads.

392.Social Forces in German Literature, p. 117. Talvj draws similar conclusions: Charakter., etc., pp. 339, 405.

393.Altdeutsches Liederbuch, p. xxii. The personal theory is much more temperately set forth, and with a better idea of throng-conditions, by Jeanroy, Origines, p. 396.

394.This leprous monk has been a godsend to the writers on ballad origins. But one might as well appeal to the ego in a passage from Thomas Cantipratensis, written near Cambrai, in 1263, and often quoted: Quod autem obscoena carmina finguntur a daemonibus et perditorum mentibus immittuntur, quidam daemon nequissimus qui ... puellam nobilem ... prosequebatur, manifeste populis audientibus dixit: “Cantum hunc celebrem de Martino ego cum collega meo composui et per diversas terras Galliae et Theutoniae promulgavi”.... Here are individual authorship—or collaboration: “I and a colleague of mine,” says the demon,—aristocratic origins, and Prior’s lady in the case.

395.VillemarquÉ, Barzaz-Breiz, Paris, 1846, II. 285. Le Temps PassÉ begins p. 273.

396.Or suppose one should pin the ego folk to a belief in the statement found in so many ballads that they are written by the person of whom they sing! This statement is a favourite in Basque songs. See F. Michel, Le Pays Basque, pp. 320 f.

397.Or take the Schloss in Oesterreich:—

398.Compare the dance and singing of the Botocudos, above, p. 95.

399.No one now pretends that “Expliceth, quod Rychard Sheale,” at the end of the Ms. of the old Cheviot ballad, makes Sheale the author of it.

400.Work quoted, p. lvii. The implied protest against Grimm, p. lxxxii, must be read along with the passage just cited.

401.“Una creazione spontanea essenzialmente etnica.”

402.Histoire PoÉtique de Charlemagne, p. 2.

403.Romania, XIII. 617.

404.Ibid., p. 603.

405.Hist. Po. Charl., p. 11.

406.Driver, Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament, p. 389, sums up for a modified acceptance of this theory. It seems clear that some of the Psalms are distinctly individual in every way, and as clear that many others are congregational and communal.

407.“Ueber das Ich der Psalmen,” Zeitschrift fÜr die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft, VIII. (1888), 49-148. Against him in toto is Dr. Robertson, The Poetry and the Religion of the Hebrews, 1898. See pp. 20 ff., 260 ff.

408.Religion of Israel to the Exile, p. 198.

409.Robertson’s objection to this is trivial (work quoted, p. 283), and shows a total lack of insight into the conditions of old communal song. “It is becoming more and more plain,” says Donovan, Lyre to Muse, p. 162, “that individuals could have had little to do with forming the fashions and manner of Hebrew song.” It sprang from the choral dance of the people, which later times called “idolatrous.”

410.Vore Folkeviser fra Middelalderen, Copenhagen, 1891, an admirable book. See particularly, p. 39; also Talvj, Charakteristik, p. 340.

411.Wright and Halliwell, Reliquiae Antiquae, I. 248 f.

412.Sc. fine,—finish, end?

413.Zeitschrift f. VÖlkerpsych., V. 201. He notes a curious close found in many ballads.—

414.The opening or close of Germanic epic is often of this “I” character. So the Hildebrand Lay, the BÉowulf, the Nibelungenlied at its end. Later epic shows a poet in the case, who has his own wares to announce. See R. M. Meyer, Altgermanische Poesie, pp. 357 ff., and his references.

415.Steenstrup, work quoted, pp. 43, 28 f.

416.Often the reciter remarks that it is night; that he is tired, thirsty; let the hearers come again on the morrow and each one bring a coin with him,—and so on. See A. Tobler, Zeitschr. f. VÖlkerpsych., IV. 175, quoting from Huon de Bordeaux.

417.It was noted that the Botocudos had no legends, no song of the past. A narrative song in the legendary sense is unknown to primitive folk; what they sing is the event of the day, an improvised song of sentences almost contemporary with the facts, cadenced by the communal dance. The sense of time past is so slender even among North American Indians (Powell, First Annual Report of Bureau of Ethnology to Smithsonian Inst., 1881, pp. 29 ff.), that while they admit that grass grows, they “stoutly deny that the forest pines and the great sequoias were not created as they are.” Now this primitive trait of poetry is preserved in communal ballads; and from this strictly communal class, long historical ballads, like those in German collections, should be excluded. KÖgel, Geschichte der deutschen Litteratur, I. 111, notes that “the epic song ... is one of the later kinds of poetry.... It cannot even be regarded as belonging to the common Germanic stock.” But the communal narrative song is another matter.

418.“On American Aboriginal Poetry,” Proc. Numismat. and Antiquar. Soc. Philadelphia, 1887, p. 19.

419.See BÖckel, work quoted, cxix.

420.Steenstrup has some good remarks on this point, work quoted, pp. 188 ff., 203 ff.

421.Of far earlier date than ballads, this poetry is in a later stage of evolution. WÎdsiÐ, the oldest recorded English poem, shows more art and more poetic dialect than many a bit of Scottish verse picked up a century ago.

422.See R. Heinzel, Ueber den Stil der altgermanischen Poesie, Strassburg, 1875; W. Bode, Die Kenningar in der angelsÄchsischen Dichtung, Darmstadt u. Leipzig, 1886; R. M. Meyer, Altgermanische Poesie. See too Uhland, Klein. Schrift., I. 390.

423.A kenning, with many branches in Anglo-Saxon poetry, calls survivors of battle “the leavings of weapons.” This may once have been literal; but in its context it looks as deliberate as Lamb’s phrase for a resuscitated victim of the gallows,—“refuse of the rope, the leavings of the cord” (Inconveniences Resulting from Being Hanged).

424.Pop. Tales, IV. 152.

425.The general testimony for all ballads. For example, Fauriel, Chants Populaires de la GrÈce Moderne, I. cxxix; these, he says, are full of commonplaces and recurrent phrases; the diction is “simple, nervous, and direct, that is, it has few figures, almost no inversions, and progresses in short periodic and nearly equal passages.” Remains of oldest Greek folk song show the same traits: Usener, Altgriech. Versbau, p. 45.

426.Wolfram von Eschenbach, ed. Lachmann, p. 4.

427.This may well go back to the summer songs, May-day songs, chorals, and so on, of festal crowds; so Bielschowsky, Geschichte der deutschen Dorfpoesie, Berlin, 1891, p. 13, concludes for the songs of Neidhart. So, too, with songs on the conflict of summer and winter. Latin poets of the Middle Ages led the way in regular description of nature. See Wilmanns, Walther, p. 409. For the general case, Burckhardt, Cultur d. Renaissance, II. 15; Uhland, Klein. Schrift., III. 388, 469.

428.FÆrØiske Qvaeder, p. 74.

429.Child, Ballads, I. 170.

430.Refrain or burden, not printed with the other stanzas, but sung throughout.

431.Maid.

432.Of = by.

433.Deprived, parted.

434.The incremental repetition of this ballad could be matched by many other cases. Typical is the combination of simple and incremental repetition, also in triads, at the end of a French ballad, “Sur le Bord de l’Ile,” Crane, Chansons Populaires, p. 28. Typical, too, is the interesting Westphalian ballad, already noted, of the Hero and Leander story: Reifferscheid, Westf. Volksl., pp. 2 f.; see ibid., Nos. 2, 5. “Mother, my eyes hurt me,—may I walk by the sea?”—“Not alone; take thy youngest brother.” Reasons follow against and for this. Then repetition: my eyes hurt me, may I not walk, etc. “Take thy youngest sister,”—and incremental repetition of the reasons. Then:—

Usually each increment has a stanza, but now and then compression takes place, as in Motherwell’s version of Sir Hugh:—

So with three horses, and what not. This triad is not necessarily sprung from the “Dreitheiligkeit in der Lyrik,” of which Veit Valentin discourses in the Zeitschr. f. vgl. Lit. (New Series) II. 9 ff. “Dreitheiligkeit in der Lyrik,” comes rather from communal iteration in primitive song and dance.

435.See his letter to Mason, Works, ed. Gosse, II. 36.

436.Professor Earle confuses, in a very uncritical way, the garrulity of romances with the garrulity of epics and of ballads: see his Deeds of BÉowulf, p. xlix. A “voluble and rambling loquacity,” he says, is the “natural character of the lay, and still more of the epic, which is a compilation of lays.” And presently he says that the romances are “the nearest extant representative of that unwritten literature which from the very nature of things was undisciplined and loquacious.” Confusion could hardly go beyond this.

437.Ferienschriften, I. 87.

438.“Das russische Volksepos,” Zeitschr. f. VÖlkerpsych., V. 187.

440.See Porthan, Opera Selecta, III. 305-381. I quote from the original dissertations de Poesi Fennica 1778, pp. 57 ff. He begins by lamenting the decay of old national song near the coast and under clerical influence; intimates that song was a universal gift and was improvised, although sundry bards are now eminent. Memorable events slip into song, now convivial, now satiric; and there is great store of proverbs. The description of dual singing begins with § XI.

441.“PrÆcentor, Laulaja ... adjungit sibi alium socium sive adjutorem, Puoltaja sive Saistaja dictum.”

442.“Quod facile jam ex sensu ipso, atque metri lege, reliquum pedem conjectando definire licet.”

443.“Rarissimi stantes canunt; et si contingit aliquando, ut musarum quodam afflatu moti stantes carmen ordiantur, mox tamen, conjunctis dextris sessum eunt, et ritu solito cantandi continuant operam.” They observe the rules of the game. Porthan, to be sure, notes the absence of dancing as a national and pervasive affair; but the statement must not go unchallenged. Long before this, Olaus Magnus (Hist. de gentibus Septentrion., RomÆ, 1555, Cap. VIII. lib. IV. 141) said of the Lappland and other northern folk that they were often moved to dance,—“excitentur ad saltum, quem vehementius citharoedo sonante ducentes, veterumque heroum ac gigantum prÆclara gesta patrio rhytmate et carmine canentes, in gemitus et alta suspiria, hinc luctus et ululatum resoluti, dimisso ordine in terram ruunt,” a parlous state. Scheffer, to be sure, discredits this statement of the archbishop (Lapponia, 1673, p. 292); but Donner, Lieder der Lappen, p. 38, believes it, and says it is confirmed by the report of a recent Russian traveller.

444.CastrÉn, quoted by Comparetti, Kalewala, p. 66, note.

445.Talvj, Charakteristik, p. 87; Steenstrup, pp. 85 f.

446.Ibid., pp. 23 f.

447.Child, Ballads, I. 21.

448.See “Hans Michel,” and the notes to it in Reifferscheid, WestjÄlische Volkslieder, pp. 47, 175. The song “DrÜben auf grÜner Haid,” pp. 51, 176, is used in the spinning-room, old home of communal minstrelsy, to stir the women to their work. Further, see Coussemaker, Chants Pop. des Flamands de France, p. 129, for a pious chanson: One is one, One is God alone, One is God alone, And that we believe. Two is two, Two Testaments, One God Alone ..., etc. Three is three, Three Patriarchs, Two Testaments ... and so on, up to the Twelve Apostles. Ibid., pp. 333, 336 ff., 353, are comic songs of the kind; and these are highly important, for they are songs of the dance, and still in vogue for communal processions. Their main features are repetition—and the refrain.

449.See Halliwell, Nursery Rhymes, p. 197:—

This is cumulative. But an old song of the fifteenth century is incremental, a jolly bit of verse withal: Wright-Halliwell, Reliquiae Antiquae, I. 4 f.—

450.E. H. Meyer, Deutsche Volkskunde, p. 124.

451.Proben, p. 34: “La Mina de PuigcerdÁ.”

452.K. L. SchrÖer, “Ein Ausflug nach Gottschee,” in Sitzungsber., Vienna Acad., phil.-hist., LX. (1868), 165-288. See pp. 231 ff. One is distantly reminded of the cumulative song (Chambers, Popular Rhymes of Scotland, p. 35) of “Katie Beardie,”—for the dance:—

and cock, “grice,” so on,—probably as many animals as were won by her distant cousin in Gottschee. See also the “Croodin Doo,” p. 51; “My Cock, Lily Cock,” p. 31; “The Yule Days,” p. 42; and others.

453.SchrÖer, p. 274.

454.Ibid., p. 277.

455.To the young men invited thus to the wedding.

456.The Armenian bride does the singing herself, combining incremental repetition with a refrain in which the crowd may join (Alishan, Armenian Popular Songs, Venice, 1852: the third edition, 1888, omits the name of the translator):

457.BladÉ, PoÉsies Populaires de la Gascogne, II. 220 ff. In the Chants Heroiques des Basques, p. 48, BladÉ tells how the Basques use these songs of number.

458.Ibid., same page. Herd, Ancient and Modern Scottish Songs, I. 117 (reprint of 1869), among a number of marches more or less artificial, prints a chorus:

to which an indefinite series of incremental stanzas can be added,—as:—

and so the chorus, and again another stanza, and so on. A different kind of song for the march is “Un wenn nu de Pott en Lock hett,” printed by Firmenich, Germaniens VÖlkerstimmen, p. 187.

459.See his references, Arbeit u. Rhythmus, p. 71.

460.Primitive Culture, I. 86.

461.Tacitus, Germania, c. 10. Liliencron u. MÜllenhoff, Zur Runenlehre, Halle, 1852. Simple iteration, of course, is everywhere in charms: ter dices is the stage direction.

462.Grein-WÜlker, Bibliothek, I. 317 ff.

463.D’Annunzio, following Baudelaire, revives repetition with considerable effect to make up for lack of rimes in his Elegie Romane. See p. 69, “Villa Chigi.”

464.By R. B. Gent. (Barnfield?), London, 1594, a rare book. See Barnfield’s own Hellens Rape, ed. by Grosart for the Roxburgh Club, 1876.

465.

No small influence in introducing this kind of repetition is due to the imitations of classic verse, and the struggles of the Areopagus to expel the tyrant Rime. Compare Spenser’s own experiment: Now doe I nightly waste, quoted by Guest, English Rhythms, II. 270.

466.A suspicion that R. B. is japing (see his Amyntas: A-mint-Asse, in the 4th of the fourteen “sonnets”), vanishes with careful reading of these highly interesting “experiments.”

467.Carm. lxii. 39 ff.

468.Recorded as a fifteenth-century carol in the Sloane Ms.

469.See, however, the caution uttered by M. Jeanroy against the idea that songs of the Carmina Burana represent popular poetry (Origines de la PoÉsie Lyrique en France, pp. 304 f.). Ingenious repetition, whether in refrains of the triolet type, or in the Portuguese type represented by these verses, and in certain other poems of artificial construction (Jeanroy, p. 309):—

are probably no popular making. See, however, above, p. 139, the folksong of this type.

470.“Chume, chume, geselle min.” Carmina Burana, ed. Schmeller, pp. 208 f.

471.See also R. H. Cromek, Select Scottish Songs, London, 1810, I. 14,—

472.Altgermanische Poesie, pp. 228 f. See also Kluge, in Paul-Braune, BeitrÄge, IX. 462 f.

473.Uhland, Volkslieder, I. 78.

474.Variations may advance the sentence, or simply hold it; thus (Bareaz-Breiz):

no advance; otherwise in a refrain:—

which suggests the syntactic structure of old English poetry due to alliterative variation.

475.A single sentence to the single verse is indicated in all primitive poetry, and is still the rule in Russian folksong: Bistrom, Zeitschr. fÜr VÖlkerpsy., V. 185. Progress lay both in intension and in extension,—regulation of the verse-parts, and combination of verses in a strophe. For example, an element like rime or assonance was used to bind verses now in couplets, now in a series like the old French tirade.

476.Proben der Volkslitteratur der tÜrkischen StÄmme SÜd-Siberiens, St. Petersburg, 1866 ff.

477.Ibid., III. xix. See above on the closed account. Exotic literature, and the mullas, learned poets, Radloff declares, are slowly driving out folksong of every sort.

478.For a study of the artistic side of this improvised song, see Chap. VIII. Here the communal conditions are to be emphasized, and the basis of unvaried repetition is to be inferred.

479.Radloff, III. 34, note; 41.

480.Compare Hildebrand in the older lay, bidding his son Hathubrand put him to the test of genealogies:—

481.Radloff, III. 48 f.

482.The so-called Oelong, with rime or assonance. Ibid., III. xxii. The quatrain, as Usener points out in his Altgriechischer Versbau, seems to have been the favourite measure for popular verse.

483.Ibid., I. 218 ff.

484.White and blue are the favourite variation. In a series, climax is often displaced by anticlimax, as in the quotation below: wife—betrothed; gold—silver; back—neck. For anticlimax with decreasing numbers, see Radloff, II. 670.

485.Radloff, II. 669.

486.See Vilmar, Deutsche AltertÜmer im HÊliand, Marburg, 1862, pp. 3 f.

487.Essai sur l’Histoire de la Critique chez les Grecs, Paris, 3d ed., 1887, pp. 6 f.

488.Odyssey, I. 352.

489.A study of marriage-songs must begin with choral sex-dances and songs of the great periodic excitement, the mating-time, still observed by Australian tribes, and work up through survivals of every sort to the festal “epithalamies” and their deputies in the poetry of art.

490.E. H. Meyer, Volkskunde, p. 168.

491.Perhaps a survival, but surely an exceptional case, valuable only for the communal feeling. See Pearson, who gives the facts, Chances of Death, II. 141.

492.Old English Ballads, pp. xxxii ff.

493.Fauriel, Chants Populaires de la GrÈce Moderne, Paris, I. 1824, II. 1825. See I. xxxvi. Roman literature gives hints of the same sort. The first epithalamium of Catullus (lxi) is “an imitation of the national custom”: Teuffel, Hist. Roman Lit., trans. Warr, p. 5.

494.The older wedding in Greece was of the same kind. See Iliad, XVIII. 491 ff.; K. O. MÜller, Griech. Lit., p. 34. See too the burlesque at the end of Aristophanes’s Birds, and H. W. Smythe, Greek Melic Poets, p. cxx.

495.Hahn, Albanesische Studien, I. 144 ff.

496.See the whole section in Brand’s Antiquities under “Marriage Customs and Ceremonies.” The quotation is from The Christian State of Matrimony, 1543.

497.De antiquissima Germanorum poesi chorica, Kiel, 1847, pp. 23 f.—“carmina nuptialia, quorum varia erant nomina,” etc. See also KÖgel, Geschichte der deutschen Lit., I. 44 f.

498.KÖgel, pp. 44 f.

499.Chronik, ed. Dahlmann, I. 116 ff., 176. It is here that the good man breaks out in a lament for the “leffliche schone Gesenge” that have been lost. BladÉ, Poesies Pop. d. l. Gascogne, I. xix ff., says the wedding songs are both traditional and improvised, taking the form of choral dialogues, where repetition is of course abundant.

500.“Das Volkslied Israels im Munde der Propheten,” in Preussische JahrbÜcher LXXIII. (1893), 462.

501.Wetzstein, “Die syrische Dreschtafel,” in Zeitschrift fÜr Ethnologie, V. (1873), 288 ff. See p. 297.

502.The various German bridal songs printed by Firmenich, Germaniens VÖlkerstimmen, are mostly artificial things; and one which goes to a lively rhythm and is meant for a dance (I. 165) has fallen into mere barnyard filth.

503.Lucian, On Mourning, 12 f. “A speech senseless and ridiculous,” he says of the oration.

504.Kl. Schrift., III. 445.

505.See his Gesch. d. d. Lit., I. 47, 51.

506.Professor Smythe points out, Greek Melic Poets, p. cxiv, that Homer describes a hymeneal but “nowhere alludes to the religious element in the celebration of the rite.”

507.Iliad, XXIV, 719 ff., trans. Lang, Leaf, and Myers.

508.See H. Koester, de Cantilenis Popularibus Veterum Graecorum, Berol., 1831, p. 15. Roman neniae, of course, are in point (see Sittl, GebÄrden der Griechen und RÖmer; Cap. IV.); but the artificial element is very strong, and primitive survivals are few. Wordsworth, Fragments and Specimens of Early Latin, p. 562, says of the epitaphs on the Scipios, “Whether they were or were not fragments of neniae is quite uncertain.”

509.Crude enough, to be sure, compared with Chaucer’s humour in dealing with the funeral of Arcite:—

For this is the conventional question, in whatever form, in the vocero of all places and ages: “Why did you die? You had enough to eat, you had clothes,” etc. Old Egeus has the modern consolation, and philosophizes in no communal vein.

510.Odyssey, XXIV. 59 ff.

511.1117 f. It has been noted that KÖgel, Gesch. d. d. Lit., I. 54, says, without good reason, that this was a magic song, a spruch. It was surely what it is called, a song of lament, a vocero, and doubtless asked the same old question.

512.St. Augustine tells how such songs were sung at the tomb of St. Cyprian: “per totam noctem cantabantur hic nefaria, et cantantibus saltabatur.” See also the well-known passage from Burchard of Worms: “cantasti ibi diabolica carmina et fecisti ibi saltationes”—i.e. at the “vigiliis cadaverum mortuorum.” MÜllenhoff, work quoted, pp. 26 ff., gives some of these protests of the church. On p. 30 he notes that the songs themselves were improvised: extempore et subito facta. The older the rite, the more choral and communal it grows. The names (ibid., p. 25) are significant: dÂdsisas, leidsang, chlagasang, etc., for older German; lÎcsang, lÎcleÓÐ (epicedium), byrgensang (epitaphium), etc., for older English.

513.BÉow., 1322, 2124 f.

514.Ibid., 2446 f., 2460. There is a sort of vocero echo here. Remarkable, too, in the story of the self-buried chief, is a vocero of that old man over himself, the last of the race burying his treasure as a kind of substitute: ibid., 2233 ff. It is superfluous to point out how English lyric poetry, from the Ruin to the Elegy, and on to our own day, loves to linger by a grave. Traces of the vocero that led to the vendetta might be found in the countless stories of old Germanic feud.

515.De Orig. Act. Getarum, ed. Holder, c. 49. A similar story is told (c. 41) of the funeral of King Theoderid of the Visigoths, killed in 451, and of the wild songs that were sung even on the field of battle as the warriors bore away the body of their king.

516.Child, I. 182.

517.Folk-Lore Soc. Pub., IV. (1881), pp. 21, 31.

518.Scott, Minstrelsy, 1812, II. 361 ff.

519.Still found in remote places,—among Germans in North Hungary, and in Gottschee in Krain, speech-islands both. Meyer, Volkskunde, p. 272.

520.“Dans der Maegdekens,” heard at Bailleul by Coussemaker. See his Chants Populaires des Flamands de France, Gand, 1856, pp. 100 f. Soon after 1840 it was forbidden, and the song is no more, save in the record. It goes back, says C., to the oldest times.

521.Ibid., p. 101.

522.Budde, “Das hebrÄische Klagelied,” Zeitschr. f. alttestamentl. Wissensch., II. 26 f.; and Wetzstein, “Syrische Dreschtafel,” as quoted above. See also same Zeitsch., III. 299 ff. For the professional singing-women, the praeficae of Israel, see Jer. ix. 19.

523.Budde, “Die hebrÄische Leichenklage,” Zeitschr. d. deutsch. PalÄstina-Vereins, VI. 181 f., 184 ff.

524.Work quoted, p. cxxxiii.

525.J. G. Hahn, Albanesische Studien, I. 150 f.

526.Precisely as among the Irish. See Miss Edgeworth’s account, quoted by Brand, Antiquities, “Watching with the Dead.”

527.In a note, I. 198, Hahn notes that Plato forbade this wild cry (Legg. xxi), but allowed the song of lament. For calling on the dead, cf. Latin inclamare.

528.One of the canons which condemned heathen customs at Christian funerals forbids not only song and dance, but also illum ululatum excelsum.

529.The vocero sung by natives of Algiers has been noted as strongly resembling the Corsican. A specimen, quoted from Certeux and Carnoy, L’AlgÉrie Traditionelle, is full of repetition and refrain.

530.Springer, Das altprovenzalische Klagelied, Berlin, 1895, pp. 8 ff. It is this formal poem of grief which is in the mind of Crescimbeni, Comentarj Intorno all’ Istoria della Volgar Poesia, 1731, I. 256, when he traces the Italian funeral song back to Latin and Greek.

531.This English Boileau, who “flourished,” in two senses, about 1200, is good reading. His Poetria begins at p. 862 of Polycarpi Leyseri ... Historia Poetarum et Poematum Medii Ævi, Hal. Magd., MDCCXXI.

532.C. T., 4537 ff. The Latin:

533.Marcaggi, Les Chants de la Mort et de la Vendetta de la Corse, Paris, 1898, p. 193, gives a vocero said to have been made by a monk, who calls on the celestial powers to join the chorus and wail the death of his two friends: “Jesus, Joseph, Mary, Sacred Sacrament, and all of you here in chorus, sing this lamento.” Bandits make a vocero, pp. 307 f.

534.Jer. xxii. 18. See below, on the Linos song.

535.Trionfo della Morte, pp. 419 f. “Era l’antica monodia che da tempo immemorabile in terra d’Abruzzi le donne cantavano su le spoglie dei consanguinei.” See another account of the Italian vocero in Guastella, Canti Popolari del Circondario di Modica, Modica, 1876, p. lxxix. He notes, moreover, that in Sicily the prÈfiche are called ripetitrici.

536.MÉrimÉe’s Columba has made the vocero familiar to readers. See also Marcaggi, work quoted; Ortoli, Les Voceri de l’Ile de Corse, Paris, 1887; Paul de St. Victor, Hommes et Dieux, Paris, 1872, pp. 349-369, a reprinted article cannily decocted and pleasantly served in the English periodical Once a Week, 1867, pp. 437-442. St. Victor refers to the older collections of Tommaseo and of FÉe.

537.Marcaggi, p. 161. See above on the ride round the body of Beowulf and of Attila, and the older dance. The caracolu is “a sort of pantomime, a funeral dance done by the mourners round the corpse as they make gestures of grief.” The caracolu is danced no more. And again, Marcaggi, p. 231, note: “vocerare ou ballatrare veut donc dire improviser un vocero,”—highly suggestive fact.

538.Ibid., p. 4; Ortoli, p. xxxiv. Of these two, Marcaggi prints mainly the older material, with a few new pieces of miscellaneous character, such as cradle-songs and serenades.

539.His philology is unnecessary, p. 85. Ortoli, too, should stick to his “espÈce de sanglot,” rather than follow his colleague’s “racine de titiare” or contraction of Oh Dio!

540.Ortoli, p. 248.

541.Manquait de tenue, M., pp. 24 f.

542.See Marcaggi, pp. 157, 231, for a vocÉratrice cÉlÈbre. “La vocÉratrice marche toujours À la tÊte des pleureuses,”—in going to the funeral.

543.Such is No. X. in Marcaggi, a “vocero sung by a woman in the square of Canonica in the midst of a great crowd of women, priests, doctors, and magistrates come from neighbour villages.”

544.A child who does this, and makes a vocero, declares that he will bind the kerchief about his neck whenever he feels moved to laugh,—a grim bit which throws into the shade that “child on the nourice’s knee” of English ballads, who vows revenge if he shall live to be man.

545.On the vendetta in Italy during the renaissance, see Burckhardt, Cult. d. Ren.,6 II. 179 ff.

546.J. K. BladÉ, Dissertation sur les Chants Historiques des Basques, Paris, 1866, pp. 6 ff.; Borrow, The Bible in Spain, 1843, II. 394; F. Michel, Le Pays Basque, 1857, pp. 277 f.

547.“They have not utterly disappeared from my country,” says BladÉ, PoÉsies Populaires de la Gascogne, introduction to Vol. I. p. xi; and he prints a collection of them, pp. 212-231.

548.This is BladÉ’s French rendering, pp. 212 ff. Beaurepaire, work quoted, pp. 24 f., says these cries are no longer heard in Normandy.

550.“Die syrische Dreschtafel,” Zeitschr. f. Ethnologie, V. (1873), 295 f.

551.Die Adonisklage und das Linoslied, Berlin, 1852, pp. 16 ff.

552.K. O. MÜller, Gesch. d. Griech. Lit., I. 28, makes Linos the personification of the soft spring slain by heats of summer.

553.Quoted by Tylor, Primitive Culture, II. 32.

554.Taken from the German rendering of Brugsch.

555.Mythologische Forschungen, pp. 16, 55. Herodotus, II. 79, distinctly says that the Maneros song was of the people.

556.For the general custom, see Tylor, Primitive Culture, II. 36 ff.; for Germanic relations, Pfannenschmidt, Germanische Erntefeste, pp. 165 ff.

557.Grosse, AnfÄnge der Kunst, p. 234.

558.A Tour in Scotland, 3d. ed., Warrington, 1774, p. 99.

559.Chaucer, who puts several home touches not known to Boccaccio or Statius into his account of the funeral of Arcite in the “Knight’s Tale,” speaks of the lyche-wake as well as of the wake-pleyes,—the latter, of course, funeral games. Pennant, by the way, in his Second Tour in Scotland (Pinkerton, III. 288), speaking of Islay and its antiquities, says “the late-wakes or funerals ... were attended with sports and dramatic entertainments.... The subject of the drama was historical and preserved by memory.” (No italics in the original.)

560.See above, p. 222.

561.Æn., X. 473 ff.

562.Perhaps best in Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall’s Ireland: its Scenery, Character, etc., 3 vols., London, 1841-1843. See I. 222 ff. The authors mention the women who wept over Hector, with the odd explanation that the Greeks were once in Ireland. Other accounts of Irish funerals are quoted in Brand-Ellis, Popular Antiquities, as of “the men, women, and children” who go before the corpse and “set up a most hideous Holoo, loo, loo, which may be heard two or three miles round the country.”

563.Quoted by J. C. Walker, Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards, London, 1786, pp. 20 f. The keening of women who follow the hearse, dressed sometimes in white and sometimes in black, “singing as they slowly proceed ... extempore odes,” is sufficiently like the march of the praeficae at a Roman funeral; and in neither case has one the primitive form of the rite.

564.Transact. Royal Irish Academy, IV., “Antiquities,” pp. 41 ff., read December, 1791.

565.“Present State of Ireland,” Works, ed. Morris, pp. 625 f. Camden, about the same time, Britannia, trans., ed. 1722, p. xix, speaks of the bards as men who “besides ... their poetic functions do apply themselves particularly to the study of genealogies.” See also Evan Evans, Specimens of the Poetry of the Antient Welsh Bards, ... London, 1764, p. 91. This is not primitive song.

566.Spenser, p. 633.

567.“Totenklagen in der litauischen Volksdichtung,” Zst. f. vgl. Litteraturgesch., N. F., II. 81 ff.

568.A similar series of questions, with interesting details of the ceremony, is given in the Itinera Constantinopolitanum et Amasianum ab Angerio Gislenio Busbequij ... AntverpiÆ, 1681, p. 28: “deuertimus in pagum Semianorum Iagodnam: ubi ejus gentis ritus funebres vidimus multum À nostris abhorrentes. Erat cadauer in templo positum detecta facie: iuxtÀ erant apposita edulia, panis et caro et vini cantharus: adstabant coniunx et filia melioribus ornata vestibus, filiae galerius erat ex plumis pavonis. Supremum munus, quo maritum jam conclamatum uxor donauit, pileolum fuit purpureum, cuius modi virgines nubiles illic gestare solent. Inde lessum audiuimus et naeniam lamentabilesque voces; quibus mortuum percunctabantur quid de eo tantum meruissent, quae res, quod obsequium, quod solatium ei defuisset; cur se solas et miseras relinqueret: et hujus generis alia.”

569.Compare the pathetic word of David about his dead child: 2 Sam., xii. 23.

570.Spencer, Sociology, I. § 142, quotes Bancroft, of the Indians of the West, that for a long time after a death, relatives repair daily at sunrise and sunset to the vicinity of the grave, to sing songs of mourning and praise. Hahn tells the same thing of his Albanians, Alb. Stud., I. 151 f.

571.Radloff, III. 22.

572.Often quoted from Kranz, GrÖnlÄndische Reise. See also Boas, “The Central Eskimo,” in Report Bur. Ethn., 1884-1885, Washington, 1888, p. 614.

573.Quoted Spencer, Soc., III. § 126.

574.There was also a lament sung hard upon the death of a warrior in battle. As the Goths bore away their dead king, singing a song of woe in the midst of flying weapons, so with many savages. In a skirmish which followed the murder of Captain Cook, a young islander was killed, and the Englishmen next morning saw “some men carrying him off on their shoulders, and could hear them singing, as they marched, a mournful song.” Cook’s Last Voyage, in Pinkerton, Voyages and Travels, XI. 723.

575.On neniae as incantations, see Grimm, Mythologie,4 p. 1027.

576.The phrase for a capable person in incantation is found for Germanic usage in the Merseburg Charm, here said of Wodan himself,—sÔ hÊ unola conda; in Anglo-Saxon the same phrase is used for a skilled poet: se Þe cuÐe, BÉow., 90; and in Old Saxon for a wise man: Én gifrÔdÐt man the sÔ filo konsta wisaro wordo, HÊliand, 208.

577.For example, in mere invocation, the Erce, Erce, Erce, eorÐan modor of an Anglo-Saxon charm (Grein-WÜlker, I. 314), and the actual spell against stitch in the side (ibid., p. 318):—

with more of the sort, and the solemn,—

and so on, with a refrain in the epic part,—

578.Schoolcraft, Indian Tribes, I. 367 ff.

579.Translated from the French in Pinkerton’s Voyages and Travels, XVI. 598 ff. See pp. 623 f.

580.Ibid., XVI. 877, 685, 596.

581.Ibid., VII. 534.

582.Histoire d’un Voyage fait en la Terre de Bresil autrement dite Amerique ... À la Rochelle, MDLXXVII. pp. 336 f.

583.“Au surplus au refrein de chacune pose.”

584.Histoire de la nouvelle France, Paris, MDCIX. See pp. 691 ff. On the title-page he declares himself “tÉmoin oculaire d’une partie des choses ici recitÉes.”

585.Moeurs des Sauvages Ameriquians, ComparÉes aux Moeurs des PremiÈres Temps, ... 2 vols., 4to, Paris, 1724. See II. 321. Lafitau spent five years in a mission in Canada, and also got information from a brother Jesuit of sixty years’ experience in the new world (I. 2). It was this book which moved Dr. John Brown, a century and a half ago, to write his essay on the history of poetry and music, and to use so effectively the comparative method in literature.

586.Ibid., II. 395.

587.Anf. d. K., p. 229.

588.Indian Tribes, IV. 71, question 254 (see I. 556): “Is it the custom to call on certain persons for these laments? Are the laments themselves of a poetic character?” Answered by Mr. Fletcher for the Winnebago Indians.

589.Ibid., answer to question 253.

590.Three Years’ Travel through the Interior Parts of North America (1766-1768), Philadelphia, 1796. See p. 179.

591.Rep. Bureau Ethnol., I. 194 f.

592.Wallaschek, Prim. Mus., p. 54.

593.Ibid., p. 198.

594.Wallaschek, Prim. Mus., p. 199. It is needless to insist on the custom of dancing at funerals, and, in memorial rites, over the graves of the dead; mediÆval councils were full of warning against this habit. The “dance of death,” of course, became symbolic and artistic.

595.Denied as a literal fact, as an affair of government and authority, the matriarchate, so called, is sufficiently proved as the early form of family life.

596.As the clan or horde had its song of triumph, and this is echoed and prolonged in “national” songs like the Marseillaise, or, better, the Ça ira, so the clan grief can expand into a national lament. Something of this sort is found in that wail over the downfall of their power sung by the Moors in Spain and so potent to stir the heart that it was forbidden by government; its refrain, Woe is me, Alhama, has all the iterated passion of grief that one finds in the primitive vocero. Then there is the song or psalm of the captives in Babylon,—and the list could be extended indefinitely.

597.The story is at first hand.

598.Work quoted, II. 324.

599.Account of Shelley’s last days, quoted in Harper’s Magazine, April, 1892, p. 786.

600.Schoolcraft, III. 326, “Poetic Development of the Indian Mind.”—For a good collection of facts about iterated words as song, see the sixth chapter of Wallaschek’s Primitive Music. For example, p. 173, “The Macusi Indians in Guiana amuse themselves for hours with singing a monotonous song, whose words, hai-a, hai-a, have no further significance.” See also pp. 54, 56 f.

601.Report Proceed. Numism. and Antiquar. Soc., Philadelphia, 1887, pp. 18 f. (Printed 1891.)

602.Lectures, as quoted, II. 117, speaking of poetry before Homer. On the origin of poetry in unintelligible sounds, see Ragusa-Moleti, Poesie dei Popoli Selvaggi, Torino-Palermo, 1891, pp. vi ff., and Jacobowski, AnfÄnge der Poesie, p. 66, who assumes that early man held fast to those tones and gestures which expressed an original sensation or emotion. On the repetition of mere sounds to express emotion, see Alice C. Fletcher, Journal American Folklore, April-June, 1898, p. 87.

603.Travels in West Africa, pp. 66 f.

604.V. 559 ff. “Original Words of Indian Songs literally translated.”

605.“Choral chant, four times repeated.” All Schoolcraft’s examples here are full of repetition.

606.Ibid., III. 328.

607.Ibid., V. 563 f. See below, p. 310.

608.See above on Rhythm. In addition to the references given there, see some sensible remarks in Emerson’s “Poetry and Imagination”; for scientific discussion of repetition as basis of rhythm, see Gurney, Power of Sound, pp. 455 f., and Masing, Über Ursprung u. Verbreitung des Reims, pp. 9 f. J. Grimm pointed out that alliteration is really a form of repetition, Kl. Schr., VI. 161 f. Adam Smith, Essays, pp. 154 f., has some curious remarks on repetition as possible in music, but impossible in poetry.

609.W. von Biedermann, in two articles,—“Zur vergleichenden Geschichte der poetischen Formen,” Zeitschr. f. Vergl. Litteraturgesch., N. F., II. 415 ff.; IV. 224 ff., and “Die Wiederholung als Urform der Dichtung bei Goethe,” ibid., IV. 267 ff.,—traces the development of poetical style from this fundamental fact of repetition. First, simple words were repeated, then only part of the words in a sentence: such is the case in old Chinese, in Zend, in Accadian. Then came parallelism; then the repetition of similar sounds; and finally metre or rhythm (Versmass). Where were the dancing throngs in this interesting stretch of development, with rhythm as an afterclap of rime? As later in his review of BÜcher’s Arbeit und Rhythmus, so here, Biedermann denies that rhythm came into poetry through music and the dance. He fails, however, to make good this assertion by any show of proof (see above, p. 75); but his references are useful for the student of repetition. For another scheme of repetition in poetry, see R. M. Meyer, Altgermanische Poesie, pp. 12 f.

610.Hence the inadequate character of its treatment, say for Old Norse, by Vigfusson and Powell, Corp. Poet. Bor., I. 451 ff. R. M. Meyer, Altgerm. Poesie, p. 341, takes a more excellent way, but he lays too much stress on the ancient refrain, and not enough on the ancient choral and the primitive communal conditions of song. Much more to the point is the admirable though incomplete chapter on “Early Choral Song” in Posnett’s Comparative Literature: see especially pp. 127 ff.

611.Wolf, Lais, pp. 23 f. The refrain was insistent in all poetry of the troubadours and trouvÈres, and so leads back to refrains as the prevalent characteristic of all songs in the vernacular. See Wolf’s references, pp. 22 ff., and notes, pp. 184 ff. For a modern study of this development of artistic forms of the refrain, see the third chapter of the third part of Jeanroy’s excellent Origines de la PoÉsie Lyrique en France au Moyen Age, Paris, 1889.

612.Ebert, Lit. d. Mittelalters, II. 63 f., 64 note.

613.See lxi, lxii. The Hymen cry, taken from the Greek, was there a lending of communal wedding songs: see Smythe, Greek Melic Poets, p. 496. More artistic refrains are the

of Catullus, lxiv. 323 ff., and the recurrent lines in Spenser’s Prothalamion and Epithalamium, which, of course, are on the same artistic plane with that marriage-song of Peleus and Thetis.

614.Walter Pater’s pleasant account of the making of this song (Marius the Epicurean, p. 73) is not improbable, in spirit at least; and it must be borne in mind that this was the metre of marching songs of Roman soldiers and other popular verse. See Du Meril, PoÉsies Populaires Latines, Paris, 1843, pp. 106-117, including the Pervigilium Veneris.

615.Bujeaud, “Refrains des Chansons Populaires,” in Le Courier LittÉraire, 25 Mai, 1877, pp. 256 ff. For reference to this article, the present writer is indebted to Boynton’s dissertation, named and quoted below.

616.“Le Refrain dans la LittÉrature du Moyen Age,” in Revue des Traditions Populaires, III. 1 ff.; 82 ff.

617.J. Darmesteter, Chants Pop. des Afghans, Paris, 1888-1890, p. cxcvi, calls the strophe “abstraction faite du refrain,”—a more excellent way than these theorists take with their “little poem stuck in the cracks of a big poem,” and such clever nonsense.

618.“Der Kehrreim in der mhd. Dichtung,” Jahresber. d. KÖnigl. Gymnas. zu Paderborn, 1890.

619.Neuhochdeutsche Metrik, p. 392. See R. M. Meyer, below.

620.Zeitschr. f. vergleich. Lit., I. 34 ff.; Euphorion, Zeitschr. f. Litteraturgesch., V. (1898), 1 ff. He points out that nobody heeded his view of the case, but that the works of Grosse, Groos, and BÜcher all brought confirmation to it.

621.All early accounts of dances among savages, South Sea islanders, and the like, assert this priority of chorus over refrain. There are no spectators, no audience, or “public”; all sing and all dance. See Wallaschek in his first chapter, and YrjÖ Hirn, FÖrstudier till en Konstfilosofi, Helsingfors, 1896, p. 148.

622.Zell, Ferienschriften, II. 111 f., notes that this sort of repetition is found in old Etruscan prayers as well as in the liturgy of the Roman church.

623.By Wordsworth, work quoted; see, too, F. D. Allen, Remnants of Early Latin, p. 74, with interesting remarks on the fragments of the Carmina Saliaria, the axamenta.

624.KÖgel, Gesch. d. d. Lit., I. 31, 34 f., points out the close resemblance of the conditions and circumstances of this hymn with those of the old German hymns, of which we have no example; he therefore infers for the latter the same repeated cries to the god, and finds confirmation for this inference in the dancing, the repetitions and the cries of a Gothic Christmas play, written in Latin, in Greek characters, but with a Gothic original peeping through. MÜller’s attempt to restore this Latin-Gothic hymn is highly interesting.

625.Westphal, Allgem. Metrik, p. 37.

626.Also dramatic poetry, as in Job; for example, the refrain in the speeches of the messengers who tell Job of his calamity, “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” See Moulton’s arrangement in his edition of Job, pp. 10 f.

627.For these refrains see Driver, Introd. to the Lit. of the Old Test., p. 366 (original ed., p. 344). They are sometimes exactly repeated, sometimes varied. For the poetry due to the Hebrews in general, see Renan, MÉlanges, p. 12.

628.2 Sam. vi, 14 f.

629.Lowth, de sacra Poesi Hebr., ed. RosenmÜller, p. 205, citing “Nehem. xii, 24, 31, 38, 40, et titulum Ps. lxxxviii.” D. H. MÜller, Die Propheten in ihrer ursprÜnglichen Form, Vienna, 1896, I. 246 f.,—a somewhat discredited work with regard to the theory of Hellenic and Hebrew relations, but seemingly sound in these facts. Budde, Religion of Israel to the Exile, pp. 97, 100. The “prophets” who came to England from the Cevennes make another modern instance; and there are many more in the great development of religious enthusiasm in the seventeenth century.

630.Exod. xv. 1. 20 f. Clearly the whole tribe: see above, p. 186.

631.1 Sam., xviii. 1 ff. Lowth says of the one to another: “hoc est, alternis choris carmen amoebaeum canebant; alteris enim praecinentibus ‘Percussit Saulus millia sua,’ alterae subjiciebant ‘et David suas myriadas.’” Perhaps. Amant alterna CamenÆ. But it was rude amoebean, then, a tumultuous chorus, just as in the Fescennine songs of old Italy, and in the songs of Roman soldiers, a roughly divided pair of choruses sang alternately: see Zell, Ferienschriften, II. 149. On the choral nature of old Hebrew poetry see this whole passage in Lowth, pp. 205 f.

632.In the year 446. The story is often quoted from Priscus, 188, 189.

633.BÖckel, work quoted, p. cviii.

634.“Ex qua victoria carmen publicum juxta rusticitatem per omnium ora ita canentium, feminaeque choros inde plaudendo componebant.” Mabillon, Acta Sanctorum ordinis S. Benedicti, Venetis, 1733, II. 590. This clapping of hands as one dances and sings is often found in communal records, and is common among savages, negroes, and the like. Among tribes on the White Nile, where no musical instruments were to be had, girls clapped their hands to the song and dance: Wallaschek, p. 87, and also cf. p. 102, the account of women seen by Captain Cook to snap their fingers in marking time for their song. The practice is common elsewhere; for Polynesia generally, see Waitz-Gerland, Anthropol., VI. 78 f. Sidonius Apollinaris speaks of it, I. 9:—

while a dance to this hand-clapping is represented on an Assyrian monument: see Herrig’s Archiv, XXIV. 168, quoted by BÖckel in the introduction to his Hessian ballads.—That actual songs were made by these women is clear; see the passage from Guillaume de DÔle, quoted by Jeanroy, Origines, p. 309:—

635.London, 1811, p. 420. See also Ritson, Scottish Song, I. xxvi, f.

This refrain, as will be seen, is a kind of water-chorus.

636.Bruce, ed. Skeat, E. E. T. S., p. 399.

637.Brut, ed. Madden, 9538 f.

638.A notable exception is K. O. MÜller, who studied early Greek song in connection with early Greek life, an example—as Posnett notes in some excellent remarks, Compar. Lit., p. 104—which subsequent historians have neglected to their own harm.

639.Smythe, Melic Poets, p. 490.

640.For reference to the older literature of this subject, see Blankenburg, Litterar. ZusÄtze, I. 235 ff.

641.DÉor’s song, of course, is divided into strophes or stanzas by means of this refrain.

642.See above, p. 86, on the dispute between Sievers and MÖller, and their agreement regarding this change from song to recitation.

643.Altgerm. Poesie, pp. 341, 345.

644.De Antiquissima Germanorum Poesi Chorica ... Kiel, 1847. “Antiquissimum enim omnium poesis genus haud dubie illud est, quod choricum dicitur.” See p. 5: “Carmina vero haec sacra ... ex communi populorum usu, non a rhapsodis recitata neque a singulis, sed semper a choro sive pluribus simul et cantata et acta sunt.”

645.The best recent summary is that of KÖgel in the first volume of his Geschichte der deutschen Litteratur.

646.See p. 6 of MÜllenhoff: “Actionum autem choricarum triplex est genus: pompa, saltatio, ludus; quorum et simplicissimum est pompa et quasi primitivum.” He treats only the first of these three; but a valuable paper on the sword-dance (“Ueber den Schwerttanz,” in the Festgabe fÜr G. Homeyer, 1871), the essay De Carmine Wessofontano, and many hints in his introduction to the Sagen, MÄrchen u. Lieder d. Herzogth. Schleswig-Holstein u. Lauenburg, 1845, make up the omission.

647.KÖgel, work quoted, p. 18. See his references, p. 17, for these refrains and songs of war.

648.Well meant but ludicrous compilations, designed to offer songs of solace and cheer to all sorts of labourers, and to drive out the idle rimes which they are wont to sing, are cleverly noted in Hoffmann von Fallersleben’s Unsere VolksthÜmlichen Lieder, Leipzig, 3d ed., 1869; the specimens he gives in his introduction are highly amusing, and are taken from Becker’s Mildheimisches Lieder-Buch, 1799, which provides special songs for the butcher, the chimney-sweep, the scissors-grinder, and all the rest. See Hoffmann, pp. vii ff.

649.A Lithuanian mill-song: see BÜcher, p. 39. See also Porthan, work quoted above, p. 198. He gives a pretty little song of a Finnish woman who calls for her absent husband in no recondite terms, ending:—

that is, “prope, prope, deliciae meae; juxta, juxta, corculum meum.”

650.“Agrestum quendam concentum edere solent ... hocque verbum ad cantilenae similitudinem repetunt.” Pistorius, Polon. Hist. Corp., I. 46, quoted by Bezzenberger, Zeitsch. f. vgl. Lit., N. F., I. 269.

651.Smythe, Greek Melic Poets, pp. 160, 510 f.—BÜcher, p. 38, notes that this song, like many a lost refrain of the same kind, disregards the rules of classical metre, and follows the movement of the millstone.—Pennant (Second Tour in Scotland), Pinkerton, III. 314, compares the singing at the mill of the island women with Aristophanes’ Clouds, Act V. scene 11.

652.Pros. Edda, ed. Wilken, “SkÁldskaparmÁl,” xliii. pp. 123-134; cf. 4:—

653.BÖckel, work quoted, lxiii f., where there are other references of the sort. So in pounding wheat, women in North Africa sang a national song in chorus, always pounding in time with the music, Wallaschek, p. 220.

654.BÜcher, p. 60, is emphatic on this point, that the refrain is to be regarded as the oldest part of all songs of labour.

655.Act V.

657.In carrying loads, in cutting, and the like tasks, the Lhoosai in southeast India “clear the lungs with a continuous hau! hau! uttered in measured time by all; without making this sound they say they would be unable to work.” Lewin quoted by BÖckel, p. lx.

658.Arbeit u. Rhythmus, pp. 30 ff. This chapter, quoted above, pp. 107 ff., gives ample references for the subject.

659.Ehstnische Volkslieder, 1850, p. 1.

660.Deutsche Volkskunde, 1898, pp. 331 f.

661.Work quoted, p. cxxiii. The spinning-room for winter, and in summer the rundgÄnge, when youths and maidens arm in arm go by long rows singing songs to their march, are still a refuge for actual poetry of the people. But, as he says, it is dying fast.

662.BÖckel, work quoted, p. clii, notes that the three classes who spread and sing songs of the folk are women, soldiers, shepherds. Blind minstrels, of course, are to be added for the chanting and reciting guild, and in Russia the tailors. But women, soldiers, and shepherds best keep the old clan instincts.

663.Laura Alexandrine Smith, Music of the Waters, London, 1888; John Ashton, Real Sailor Songs, London, 1891. Boatmen’s songs changing or dying out: BÜcher, pp. 128 f. BÜcher’s little group of boatmen’s songs, pp. 118 ff., 66 ff., is far more valuable than these long and random collections. See his comments, pp. 68 ff. For example, the boat-song of North American Indians, taken from Baker, is foolishness to the Greeks who make collections for popular use, but is full of instruction for the student of poetry; it runs, without the musical notes:—

664.BÖckel, p. lx. Roman oarsmen had not only the celeusma to time their strokes, but often a song of their own: Zell, II. 208.

665.Ed. Murray, E. E. T. S., pp. 40 ff.

666.BÜcher, p. 68.

667.Wallaschek, pp. 41, 47. See, too, p. 166: “Mr. Reade observed that his people”—Africans—“always began to sing when he compelled them to overcome their natural laziness and to continue rowing.”

668.Chappell, Pop. Music Olden Time, pp. 482, 783; Skelton, Bowge of Court.

669.“Cantilenam his verbis Anglice composuit;” see Historia Eliensis, II. 27, in Gale, Hist. Script., I. 505; it gives the account here quoted, then the verses, adding “et caetera, quae sequuntur, quae usque hodie in choris publice cantantur.” ...

670.Danmarks Gamle Folkeviser, III. x f.; Nordboernes Aandsliv, II. 408.

671.Refrains of rowing are found in many Danish ballads, mostly irrelevant, as these refrains so often are, but unmistakable. See Steenstrup, Vore Folkeviser, p. 77, for several examples.

672.In Wright-Halliwell, Reliquiae Antiquae, I. 240: it belongs to the fourteenth century. Some rimes for St. Clement’s day are printed by G. F. Northall, English Folk-Rhymes, 1892, mostly begging verses (pp. 222 ff.): although there is a ceremony at Woolwich connected with blacksmiths, song, however, yielding to formal speech.

673.23 November. See Hampson, Medii Aevi Kalendarium, I. 61; and Brand-Ellis, Antiquities, same date. The Germanic year has been recently studied by Dr. A. Tille, Yule and Christmas, London, 1899; he corrects in some particulars the current ideas set forth by Weinhold, according to which the seasons were regulated by natural signs,—solstice and the like. Dr. Tille contends that this was rather done by economic conditions. Before the German had a settled agricultural life, Michaelmas superseded Martinmas, the oldest Germanic festival. Actual harvest festivals are comparatively late. While Dr. Tille’s idea of borrowing and of Christian influence goes entirely too far, his emphasis on economic conditions must be noted and approved.

674.Great Expectations, Chap. XII.

675.Or rather Mr. J. Cocke; see note to Works, ed. Rimbault, p. 288, and p. 89. See also the tinker as “master of music” and chief singer of catches, in Chappell, pp. 187. 353.

676.Among the Romans, too; see Tibullus, Eleg. II. 1:—

677.See letter in Evening Post, quoted above, p. 168; BÖckel, work quoted; and the preface written by “Carmen Sylva” for the Countess Martinengo’s Bard of the Dimbovitzka, London, 1892.

678.It is almost superfluous to mention Gretchen and the recurrent echo of her wheel in the stanza Meine Ruh’ ist hin. But this, of course, is art.

679.A version of “The Cruel Brother” (Child, I. 147), from Forfarshire, has along with the common refrain two lines at the end of the stanza which partly echo the refrain of labour:—

680.Northall, English Folk-Rhymes, p. 322. See the interesting notes from Southey’s Doctor, xxiv, about Betty Yewdale and the song she and her sister had to sing while learning to knit socks. The song kept time with the work, and had to bring in the names of all the folk in the dale. See on cumulative song above, p. 200.

681.Dyer, British Popular Customs, p. 42.

682.Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs, London, 1857, pp. 187 f. Greenside is near Manchester.

683.Voceri, pp. 244 f., with a specimen song taken from Viale.

684.E. H. Meyer, Volkskunde, p. 236.

685.Poes. Pop. Gasc., II. 224 ff. See his references for this interesting subject.

686.Coussemaker in his section of songs for the dance, work quoted, pp. 338 f., gives a “ronde” sung during the fÊte at Bailleul:—

then plucked, washed, dried, and so on. The list of these songs could be extended indefinitely; the fact that this of the salad is sung at a quite alien festivity simply proves the vogue of the thing. One must refer, however, to the dances of Catalonian peasants and children, the songs for which are little more than repetition and refrain descriptive of country toil, as quoted by Wolf, pp. 34 f., of his Proben Portugiesischer und Catalanischer Volksromanzen, Wien, 1856.

687.Ed. 1825, IX. 41. The phrase “to town” at which our editor boggles, ignorant of its real meaning, is a further proof of the traditional character of this song.

688.“Is your throat clear for hooky hooky?” asks Harvest; and the reapers sing the refrain again. Later he speaks of weeping out “a lamentable hooky hooky.” Drake connected hooky with hockey, the hock or harvest cart sung by Herrick. But perhaps “hooky” is to be kept without any such change. Leyden, see Complaynte of Scotland, p. xciii, speaking of ring dances at the kirn or feast of cutting down the grain, says that reapers who first finished the work danced on an eminence, in view of other reapers, and began the dance “with three loud shouts of triumph, and thrice tossing up their hooks in the air.” Cf. the Oxford Dict., s.v. hook, the common word for reaping scythe or sickle from Anglo-Saxon down.

689.In his Neydhardt mit dem Feyhel, 1562. See Uhland, Volkslieder, I. 58, and notes, Schriften, III. 24. BÖhme follows the song back to the fourteenth century. In the play it is sung by the duchess and repeated by the chorus, as in popular dances of the day.

690.In his edition of the play for Macmillan’s English Comedies.

691.The reapers now appear “with women in their hands.”

692.Described to the writer by a Japanese gentleman.

693.BÜcher, p. 49.

694.Twelve centuries before Christ, Chinese women gathered plantain with a song that is particularly rich in repetition and refrain; BÜcher quotes the translation of Strauss, of which a stanza runs thus:—

The whole song minutely follows the process of picking.

695.Grimm, Mythologies,4 pp. 1036 f. He notes the frequency of this shouting, leaping, and singing at the planting of crops. It all goes back, of course, to communal rites.

696.E. H. Meyer, Volkskunde, p. 225.

697.Grein-WÜlker, Bibliothek, I. 312 ff. To describe the whole ceremony in this case as original, is highly absurd.

698.Zell, Ferienschriften, II. 118, 212; see Plin. Nat. Hist., XXVIII. 2: “qui fruges excantasset.” Standard works for the investigation of these relics of ancient cult are Mannhardt, Wald-und Feldkulte, 2 vols., 1875-1877; the same author’s Mythologische Forschungen, already quoted; Pfannenschmid, Germanische Erntefeste, Hannover, 1878; and, pioneer of them all, Tylor’s admirable work on Primitive Culture. For children’s games, as last refuge of many of these rites, see F. M. BÖhme, Deutsches Kinderlied u. Kinderspiel, Leipzig, 1897, which could be enlarged by a judicious use of Firmenich, Germaniens VÖlkerstimmen, in four volumes. BÖhme says the Ringelreihen of these games are “uralte Reste chorischer AuffÜhrungen bei den Jahres-und Gottesfesten unserer heidnischen Vorfahren,” and gives cases which support his statement. Processional songs of the old cult survive in the Ansingelieder, Umzugslieder, and so forth, of the children, now mainly begging-rimes like the wren-song in Ireland and England, parallel to the swallow-song in Rhodes. Again, children have games which imitate sounds and movements of labour; BÖhme gives a few. See also G. F. Northall, English Folk-Rhymes, pp. 360 ff. Halliwell, of course, includes some of these in his nursery-rimes. See also W. W. Newell, Games and Songs of American Children, N. Y., 1883. These songs of the children would lead us too far a-field, and we shall cling to the scanty survivals of the songs and refrains of labour itself.

699.Grein-WÜlker, I. 323 f., especially version C.

700.Cattle.

701.Halliwell, Nursery-Rhymes, p. 129.

702.Mannhardt, Mythol. Forsch., pp. 228 ff., J. Grimm, Kl. Schr., VII. 229, in a paper on the “Nothhalm,” with account of harvest rites.

703.This child of destiny, asleep on a sheaf of grain, is wafted to the kingless land in a boat,—the Lohengrin parallel. For all the enticing material see Grimm, Mythologie,4 III. 399 ff.; MÜllenhoff, in Zeitschr. f. deutsch. Alth., VII. 410 ff., and in his Beowulf, pp. 5 ff., with strongly established probability that the myth celebrates the beginnings of agriculture among Germans by the North and Baltic seas.]

704.Mannhardt, Myth. Forsch., pp. 15 ff. That the Greeks sang at reaping, as at planting (Smythe, Melic Poets, p. 498, girls sing a sowers’ song), is beyond question. See Mannhardt’s note and references, as above, p. 2. He remarks that the Lityerses song in Theocritus (Id. X.) is an imitation of a real Greek folksong of labour, not, however, of the original Lityerses. Mr. Lang notes the resemblance of this situation to the famous scene in MoliÈre’s Misanthrope.

705.Work quoted, p. 17. See his Wald-u. Feldkulte, p. 262.

706.That the Romans had these refrains of harvest and vintage, as well as their Fescennine flytings and improvised satire, is beyond dispute (Zell, II. 122 ff.), but nothing of it all has come down to us. Fortune has been kinder with regard to the songs and refrains sung in processions about the Roman field.

707.Chappell, II. 580. See his quotation from Tusser. Even here, in the Eastern states of America, middle-aged men have watched the passing of the “wealthy farmer,” who now exists only in newspapers, and even there is kept at long range,—“of Indiana,” “of Texas.” Yet we knew him in our boyhood. The communal farmer occurs in old English novels, and in some new ones; but he is passing rapidly into tradition. See a paper on “England’s Peasantry,” by the Rev. Dr. Jessopp, in the Nineteenth Century and After, January, 1901; he tells of the communal conditions which once prevailed, of the change to the present, and is “inclined to doubt seriously whether before another century has ended there will be any such thing as an agricultural labourer to know.”

708.On the modern corruption of old refrains, see Pfannenschmid, pp. 207 ff., 468 ff.

709.Compare the song sung on this occasion in Bavaria as the peasants dance about the fire and leap over it for good luck (Firmenich, II. 703):—

710.Mannhardt, M. F., pp. 32 fl., 51.

711.Quoted by Reifferscheid, Westf. Volksl., Nos. 49, 50, 51. See the note, p. 188, and variants. The habit is widespread through Westphalia and the Rhinelands. A refrain printed by Firmenich, German. VÖlkerstimmen, III. 175, keeps time with the work (near Iserlohn):—

712.Aubrey, Remains of Gentilisme. Folk-Lore Soc., IV. (1881), pp. 81 f., under “Rymers.” On p. 169 he says, “when I was a boy, every gentleman almost kept a harper; and some of them could versifie.”

713.Wallaschek, p. 179.

714.He too heard a girl “singing an Erse song,” as she span; and he had his jest, “I warrant you, one of the songs of Ossian.” Hill’s Boswell, V. 133 f.

715.Before this he had been in a boat and heard one Malcolm sing “an Erse song, the chorus of which was ‘Hatyin foam foam eri,’ with words of his own.... The boatmen and Mr. M’Queen chorused, and all went well.” Ibid., V. 185.

716.A Journey to the Western Islands, Dublin, 1775, p. 97.

717.The doctor complaining that he never could get an Erse song explained, was told “the chorus was generally unmeaning,” which, of course, would point to a predominance of the refrain; Johnson himself slyly quoted an unintelligible refrain from an old English ballad. Hill’s Boswell, V. 274.

718.V. 203; Lockhart’s Life of Scott, IV. 307. Pennant tells the same story in his Tour in Scotland.

719.See above, p. 281, quotation from Leyden. See also for Scottish custom, Chambers, Book of Days, II. 376 ff.

720.Note to Passus, IX. 104, ed. of Piers Plowman, version C.

721.Above, p. 286.

722.E. H. Meyer, p. 133.

723.Kurschat, Litth. Gram., p. 445, quoted by BÖckel, p. cxx.

724.Pfannenschmid, p. 392. The song, “Die Ernt’ ist da, es winkt der Halm,” is clearly an outgrowth of the older refrain. See also p. 92. An actual refrain at the work is printed by Firmenich, III. 631:—

725.Étude, pp. 24 f.

726.In this dying of communal song, its heart, the refrain, beats strong to the end, despite the other failing powers. See Beaurepaire’s valuable testimony to this fact, Étude, pp. 39 ff., 48 f. “Deux lignes au plus composent le couplet. Le refrain est vraiment la partie importante, il supplie À la pauvretÉ ou À l’absence de la rime.... Au reste, il ne faudrait pas s’y tromper, la longueur du refrain, et son retour continuel, que nous serions tentÉ de considerer comme un dÉfaut, forme prÉcisement un des plus sÛrs moyens du succÈs de la Chanson de Filasse. Elle exige, en effet, peu d’efforts de mÉmoire, elle permet À tous les laboureurs de prendre part frÉquemment au chant; et avec son allure monotone, elle s’adapte merveilleusement À la marche lente et reguliere de travaux de la campagne. Aussi croyons-nous que c’est en partie À la predominance du refrain, que la chanson cuellissoire doit sa vogue et sa popularitÉ.” He gives another song with a refrain of planting.

727.Pfannenschmid (on the cries and songs) pp. 404 ff.; Mannhardt, M. F., pp. 167 ff., for the religious significance; J. Grimm, Kl. Schr., VII. 225 f.; Book of Days, II. 377 f. Other instances are presently to be recounted.

728.Firmenich, IV. (Anhang), 687. A longer version on p. 693. Keriole = Kyrie eleison,—substituted for an older heathen cry.

729.See Mannhardt’s chapter on “Demeter,” work quoted; also pp. 20 ff.

730.For all this English material, see Brand-Ellis, “Harvest Home,” in the Antiquities.

731.Chappell, I. 120.

732.Ibid., II. 745, one version. See for variants, and similar songs, J. H. Dixon, Ancient Poems, Ballads, and Songs of the Peasantry of England, e.g. pp. 175 ff., London, Percy Soc., 1846; Broadwood and Maitland, English Country Songs, pp. 150 ff., London, 1893.

733.In the fifth act of Dryden’s opera, King Arthur, is a harvest-song with this chorus:—

and the directions are that the actors shall sing this as they dance, a good communal trait. The words of this song grew popular, were varied, and became a ballad; it is in order for some one to show that harvest-home songs, like other popular verse, come from operas, plays, concerts, and the like.

734.Perhaps “we end,” as Brand suggests; but perhaps and probably not. At another place in Devonshire they cry “the knack,” and a rime is repeated:—

735.Five Hundred Points of Husbandry, Eng. Dial. Soc., 1878, p. 126, under August. Hentzner noted the shouting of the people in the cart. See Furnivall’s Harrison, Descrip. Eng., p. lxxxiv. A curious custom of the largess-shilling in Suffolk is described by Major Moor, note to Tusser, p. 294. The reapers answer their leader’s “Holla Lar! Holla Lar! Holla Lar!—jees,” with “o-o-o-o-,” head inclined, and then, throwing the head up, vociferate “a-a-a-ah.” This is thrice done by harvesters for a shilling.

736.Brand-Ellis, “Twelfth Day.”

737.See Uhland, Kl. Schr., III. 389 f., and note, with references, 467 f., for the “bornfart,” “bronnefart,” with “dantzen, rennen, springen, jagen,” closely connected with the May feasts. On the whole subject of processions, see Pfannenschmid’s second chapter along with his notes, pp. 342 ff.

738.Georg., I. 343 ff.

739.Translation of J. Rhoades. The last line—‘det motus incompositos et carmina dicat’—is suggestive: “spontaneous gestures and steps, with song,” emphasize a purely communal dance as compared with the ritual of the Brothers. Tibullus, by the way, has the Lares, not Ceres, in mind for the dance and song of his rustics: Eleg., I. 1, 23 f.

740.A “queen,” accompanied by a guard of brothers and young folk generally, goes on Whitsuntide in Servia from farm to farm; at each she stops and her companions form a circle (kolo) and sing their songs. Each line is thrice repeated, and then follows the refrain Leljo! Then the dancers hold one another by the belt and dance in a half-circle, led by an exarch. Between the songs any ready young man cries out a lusty phrase or two, or makes a verse, after the fashion of the German schnaderhÜpfl. See A. W. Grube, Deutsche Volkslieder, Iserlohn, 1866, pp. 132 f.

741.Germania, xl.

742.The procession of the Phrygian goddess, the magna deum mater materque ferarum et nostri genetrix, described by Lucretius in often-quoted lines, Rer. Nat., II. 598 ff., with its Dionysian features, cannot be discussed here; Germanic and modern examples must suffice.

743.It is a commonplace in sociology that agricultural communities worship female deities as representatives of fertility, while the god like Tiw or Woden springs from warlike and nomadic conditions.

744.For example, the rain-song in Servia, an interesting ceremony, full of cries and with a refrain sung by dancing maidens. The dodola, a girl otherwise naked, but entirely covered with grass, weeds, and flowers, goes with a retinue of maidens from house to house; before each house the girls form a dancing ring with the dodola in the middle. The woman of the house pours water over the dodola, while she dances and turns about; the other maidens now sing the song for rain, each line ending with the refrain, oj dodo oj dodo le! See Grimm, Mythologie4, p. 494. Similar customs prevail in Greece; the song is here full of repetitions. See Grimm, Kl. Schr., II. 447. In the AthenÆum, No. 2857 (1882), G. L. Gomme has some interesting notes on a survival of these processional rites.

745.E. H. Meyer, p. 223.

746.Grimm, Mythol.,4 I. 52.

747.References ibid., I. 214 ff., with similar cases. See also III. 86 f.

748.William of Malmesbury tells a story to show that the church could do better than condemn. In 1012 fifteen young men and women were dancing and singing in a churchyard and disturbed Robert the priest. He prayed at them, and for a whole year they had to dance and sing without ceasing until they sank to the middle in the earth.

749.Gregor. M. Dial., III. 28, quoted by W. MÜller, Geschichte und System der altdeutschen Religion, GÖttingen, 1844, pp. 74 f. The first book of this excellent treatise is even now the best summary of old Germanic rites,—clear, compact, and with all necessary references. For the boar’s head and the famous Latin song, at Oxford, see Grimm, Mythol.4, p. 178; for the vows, Grimm, RechtsalterthÜmer, pp. 900 f.

750.From Du Cange, s.v. Kalendae. See too Hampson, Med. Æv. Kal., I. 140 ff.

751.Broadwood and Maitland, p. 30. Survivals of procession song (Ansingelieder) are printed by BÖhme, Kinderlied, 331 ff. The refrain has some body in a song “’t Godsdeel of den Rommelpot,” printed by Coussemaker, Chants Pop. des Flamands, p. 95, and also found in different parts of Germany. The begging songs for Martinmas Eve, found in Flanders, are widespread in Germany; Firmenich, work quoted, prints a good dozen and more from different places. The steps of dance and march are best heard in his version from Oldenburg, I. 231.

752.Firmenich, I. 281.

753.Reuzelied, pp. 139 ff.:—

That is, “When the big bell sounds, Reuze (giant?) comes out. Turn back, Reuze, Reuze, turn back, good Reuze.” The text is corrupt, and Reuze is not easy to explain; but one need not appeal with Coussemaker to the Scandinavians to establish the antiquity of this procession and this refrain.

754.Hampson, I. 61.

755.For a good description of wakes, see Brand-Ellis, and Song 27 of Drayton’s Polyolbion, where such cheering is recorded of the villages—

756.Besides T. Wright’s Songs and Carols, Percy Soc., 1847, see W. Sandy’s Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern, London, 1833, with a long introduction, and the same editor’s Festive Songs, Percy Soc., 1848. Sandys (Carols) gives the cries or refrains of many Christmas songs:—

À moult granz cris, the familiar refrain in France.

758.See the Helstone Furry-Day Song, Bell, Ancient Poems, pp. 167 f., with a refrain of some value.

759.Also cross-week and grass-week. See Dyer, British Popular Customs, pp. 204 ff., for a sympathetic account of the customs still lingering in England.

760.The standard description of English May-games, of course hostile, is that of Stubbes in his Anatomie of Abuses, ed. New Shaks. Soc., p. 149. See also the diatribe in John Northbrooke’s Treatise wherein Dicing, Dancing ... are Reprooved. London, 1579. He leans to Chrysostom’s view (that is, Age takes this side against Youth, in the dialogue) that dancing “came firste from the Diuell”, and p. 68? (only one page of the leaf is numbered) he describes the May.

761.Compare the chorus of the Maypole song in ActÆon and Diana, in Chappell, I. 126:—

“Trip and go” was “one of the favourite Morris-dances,” and the words seem to have become a proverbial expression. See Chappell, I. 126, 302. It was on the basis of some refrain of this sort that the first part-song in English, the famous Cuckoo Song, was built up. Ten Brink is surely right in giving it a communal origin, though not communal making.

762.“We have brought the summer home,” is the spirit of all the May refrains, as the young folk come back with flowers and boughs. See Brand, “Maypoles.”

763.Still in vogue in some parts of Germany. See E. H. Meyer, p. 256.

764.Volkslieder, I. 23. For the whole subject, see Uhland’s Abhandlung Über die deutschen Volkslieder, pp. 17 ff. Suspicion has been expressed that these flytings are a late echo of the Vergilian eclogue through such a transmitting element as the mediÆval Conflictus Veris et Hiemis and the song to the cuckoo:—

Comparison of the fragments, however, shows this suspicion to be groundless, and it is thoroughly discredited by Uhland, Kl. Schr., III. 24. See also Ebert, Christ. Lat. Lit., II. 69.

765.Love’s Labour’s Lost, V. 2.

766.Ritson, Ancient Songs, 3d ed., pp. 113 ff. The text is a sort of dramatic description. See also T. Wright, Songs and Carols; and Brand, under “Morris Dancers.” The refrains are unfortunately seldom recorded, but they are the foundation of the little drama.

767.Used as refrain in ballads; see Child, I. 19 f., e.g.:—

768.Deutsche Volkslieder aus Oberhessen, p. xi. His list of references is valuable.

769.At a harvest-home at Selborne, 1836, Bell (pp. 46 ff.) heard two countrymen recite a “Dialogue between the Husbandman and the Servingman”; “it was delivered in a sort of chant or recitative,” though the rhythm is good for such doggerel; what suggests the older refrain is that the rime (second and fourth lines of each stanza) has to be either with “husbandman” or with “servingman” throughout. The odd lines have interior rime.

770.See Jeanroy’s chapter, “Le Debat,” in Origines de la PoÉsie Lyrique en France, pp. 45 ff.

771.BÖhme, Kinderlied, pp. 332 ff. See p. 347.

772.See Firmenich, II. 15, where children in the Palatinate on “Rose-Sunday” go about and sing:—

See ibid., II. 34.

773.Letourneau, L’Évolution LittÉraire, p. 21.

774.“Choruses are about all the Indians sing. They have probably four or five words, then the chorus. ‘They have brought us a fat dog’; then the chorus goes on for half a minute; then a repetition again of the above words ‘they have brought us a fat dog.’... Tukensha, a rock, or grandfather, is often appealed to in the choruses for aid.” Answer to question about Indian poetry by Rev. Mr. Fletcher, who lived several years with the Winnebago Indians. He says, too, “there are no Indian poets in this country.” Schoolcraft, IV. 71.

775.“Account of the History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations who once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighbouring States,” Transact. Amer. Philos. Soc., 1819, pp. 200 ff.

776.Quoted above, p. 255, from Indian Tribes, V. 563 f.

777.Die Korndaemonen, Berlin, 1868. See also his Roggenwulf und Roggenhund, Danzig, 1866.

778.Work quoted, I. 25.

779.Ibid., I. 248.

780.Ibid., I. 517 ff.; II. 189 f.

781.Ibid., I. 525.

782.Jean de Lery, Histoire, etc., pp. 268 ff.

783.Opposite p. 274.

784.See above, p. 253.

785.On pp. 25 ff.

786.The name of the brave.

787.One can readily understand that Stevenson heard his islanders sing, in chorus of perhaps a hundred persons, legendary songs about which not two of these singers could agree in their translation. Letters of R. L. Stevenson, II. 152.

788.Lais, p. 18. Professor Schipper, in his valuable treatise on Englische Metrik, I. 326 ff., follows Wolf in this definition; but in both cases the analytic purpose excuses this neglect of the communal origin, and the material presented allows the student to make his own comparisons and supply the neglected considerations.

789.A. W. Grube, Deutsche Volkslieder, Iserlohn, 1866, in his sections “Der Kehrreim des Volksliedes,” pp. 1-103, and “Der Kehrreim bei Goethe, Uhland und RÜckert,” pp. 187-306, follows Wolf in part, deriving refrains from the church hymns (p. 112), but adds a plea for the antiquity of folksong, which is “von Haus aus Chorgesang” (p. 183). So, too, on p. 125, he seems to view the origin of poetry of the people as a statement of contemporaneous events in one sentence—hence not “invented”—which is sung by the throng. He notes the increased power of the refrain with the preponderance of lyric over epic elements: though he neglects the dance and communal conditions generally. The close connection of Goethe (as in the Ach neige, Du Schmerzensreiche) and of RÜckert (as in the beautiful repetitions of Aus der Jugendzeit) with popular poetry, is admirably treated. See pp. 189 ff., 284 ff.

790.See a note in the author’s Old English Ballads, p. lxxxiv.

791.See Chappell, Popular Music, I. 222 ff., 34, 264; II. 426, 457.

792.III. 4. See also the Oxford Dictionary, s.v. “burden,” with the reference to Shakspere’s Lucrece, v. 1133.

793.III. 1.

794.English Rhythms, II. 290.

795.Child, I. 113.

796.Nordboernes Aandsliv, II. 434 ff.; but this evolution is stoutly denied by Steenstrup, Vore Folkeviser, pp. 120 ff., in a study of the refrain to be considered below.

797.Child, I. 403: printed after the sixth stanza, and so till the eleventh, when the chorus is slightly changed to suit the story, and kept so to the end. For the strophic refrain or chorus and its popularity in Old French, see Schipper, I. 328.

798.Child, I. 209, 214.

799.Ibid., I. 126 ff., in F., O. See H.

800.Studies in the English Ballad Refrain, with a Collection of Ballad and Early Song Refrains. Thesis presented by John Henry Boynton in candidacy for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English, May 1, 1897. In 3 vols., Ms., Harvard University Library. The material is excellently put together; but the genetic and historical elements are not sufficiently brought out. The comparative work is good, and as a study of actual refrains this dissertation is of distinct value. The burden-stem is discussed in section V., pp. 184 ff.

801.Chronik, ed. Dahlmann, I. 176 f. See also II. 559 ff.

802.Chappell quoted by Child, Ballads, I. 7. “I must avow myself,” says Professor Child, “to be very much in the dark as to the exact relation of stem and burden.” See also Ballads, II. 204, first note.

803.This technical side of the case is discussed by Valentin, Studien Über die schwedischen Volksmelodien, pp. 9 f.

804.Les Origines de la PoÉsie Lyrique en France au Moyen Age, Paris, 1889, pp. 102 ff. (see note 2, p. 111), and 387 ff. On the etymology of refrain, see pp. 103 f.

805.Ibid., p. 113. Jeanroy will not accept the view of Wackernagel and Bartsch that the refrains preserved in old French lyric poetry are actual “popular” songs, or fragments of them; but he willingly accepts the theory that all refrains were once of a communal kind. These, he thinks, are hopelessly lost. See pp. 115 ff. A few older refrains can be found in foreign lyric which imitated the French; pp. 177 ff.

806.Ibid., p. 396, note 1. Or, as in old Portuguese song, copied from the popular manner, one part of the dancers sang one verse, and another part, like strophe and antistrophe, repeated the verse with a slight change, usually in the final word which rimes with the other final word. The connection of this with the contrasto of lover and sweetheart, imitated in the dance, of debate, flyting, tenso, and the like, would lead too far afield. See p. 207, and below, p. 325.

807.Ibid., p. 405. This chapter, where Jeanroy traces the growth of artificial forms, like the rondel and so on, out of purely popular refrain and verse, is of distinct value to the student of communal poetry. It completely refutes the claim of superficial criticism, common enough of late, that ballad and folksong are merely dregs of an older art, and that some pretty comparison, say a tramp in an old dress-coat, solves the communal problem. As jaunty and insufferable a piece of comment as can be found anywhere in print is Mr. Gregory Smith’s chapter on “The Problem of the Ballads and Popular Songs” in his Transition Period, pp. 180 ff.

808.See above, p. 174. The refrain is very clearly an actual cry at the dance.

809.Quoted by Ritson, Anc. Songs³, p. xxxv.

810.Difference.

811.It is useless to pile up references; any collection has such refrains in plenty. This “springewir den reigen” (Carmina Burana, ed. Schmeller, p. 178), however, like Neidhart’s dance-songs, although it goes with the welcome to May, is conventional already and artistic.

812.Chambers, Popular Rhymes of Scotland, pp. 132 ff. “Another form of this game is only a kind of dance,” says the editor, without italics, “in which the girls first join hands in a circle and sing while moving round to the tune of Nancy Dawson:—

and so on. Then:—

with refrain, or chorus, as before, and imitative actions.”

813.Lucian, in his treatise on the dance, is no authority for primitive dancing and refrain; but it is noteworthy that he gives such an exhortation as a kind of refrain. “The song that they sing as they dance,” he says of the LacedÆmonians, § 11, “is an invitation to Venus and the loves.... One of these songs is a lesson in dancing (!): ‘On,’ they sing, ‘young people, stretch your legs and dance your best.’”

814.Coussemaker, I. 328; Firmenich, I. 380, IV. 679.

815.In the other version “nonnetje,” “nÖnneke,” little nun.

816.Bujeaud, Chants et Chansons ... de l’ouest, I. 88, from Poitou; reprinted by Crane, Chansons Populaires, pp. 87 ff. See a similar song, Crane, pp. 162 ff.; many more could be instanced, and some have been already named.

817.Waitz, Anthropologie, VI. 606.

818.Vore Folkeviser, pp. 75-112, “Omkvaedet.” Geijer denied that the refrain is necessary to a ballad, but Steenstrup’s argument is convincing; out of 502 Scandinavian ballads which he examined, not more than 20 lacked a refrain. The ballads in Child’s collection point the same way, at least for the older and shorter ballads; the Gest, of course, and others of that sort, as well as broadside copies, have passed from the lyrical stage. But even these must go back to an earlier song with a refrain. Of the two-line ballads, the older form, there are 31, and of these only 7 lack the refrain in their present form. Of the 305 ballads in the collection, 106 in at least one version show evidence of refrain or chorus,—more than a third; while of some 1250 versions in all, about 300 have the refrain. This count was made very carefully by Mr. C. H. Carter, of Haverford College. Of course, Wolf had long since proved that the refrain is characteristic of all early poetry in the vernacular, and played a leading part in popular verse everywhere, from its first collection in the fifteenth century down to the present time. See his Lais, pp. 27, 191.

819.“Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft,” Schriften, III., pp. 87, 89. See also Ribot, Psychology of the Emotions, p. 334, who calls dancing the “primordial art,” and shows that here is the transition from mere movement to Æsthetic activity.

820.Geschichte des Tanzes, p. 4. This is the best treatise on the subject, though mainly confined to Germany. A History of Dancing from the Earliest Ages ... from the French of Gaston Vuillier, with a Sketch of Dancing in England, by Joseph Grego, London, 1898, is of scant use for the student of origins and development. Dancing “was probably unknown to the earliest ages of humanity,” a bold assertion, is followed by another, that “it is certain that dancing was born with man.” Information of value can be found, however, on special topics; e.g. on the branle, p. 100, and its connection with children’s games.

821.Sociology, II. 123.

822.See also YrjÖ Hirn, FÖrstudier, pp. 89 f. Dismissing exceptions, he declares that “dancing in its widest sense is as universal as laughing and weeping.”

823.No dancing in Iceland, says Kerguelen, who visited there in 1767. See Pinkerton, Voyages and Travels, I. 751. Volumes of proof could be furnished for refuting this light-hearted assertion.

824.See Bastian, “Masken und Maskereien,” Zeitschr. f. VÖlkerpsych., XIV. 347.

825.Anthropologie der NaturvÖlker, VI. 78 ff.

826.Wallaschek, p. 189.

827.Letourneau, p. 28.

828.Work quoted, pp. 95 ff. He refers to Hartshorne, “The Weddas,” Indian Antiquary, VIII. 316 f.; E. Tennent, Ceylon, II. 437 ff.; and E. Schmidt, Globus, LXV. 15 f.

829.See above, p. 95. It is interesting, however, particularly in connection with the idea of rhythm as the chief factor in the social process, that these Veddahs live mainly in pairs; “except on some extraordinary occasion they never assemble together,” and this dance is evidently their chief means to express a social union. See Bastian, Der VÖlkergedanke ..., p. 72.

830.See also the Brazilian dances noted by Lery, above, p. 312.

831.BÉowulf, 631 ff., 2631 ff. The bÉot is the same thing; Battle of Maldon, 213.

832.Pinkerton, Voyages and Travels, London, 1808 ff., XI. 535, 543, 648.

833.Pinkerton, Voyages and Travels, pp. 652, 723.

834.Ibid., p. 667; no italics in the original. So, p. 654, twenty young women dance to their own singing, and in many other cases; the fact is beyond dispute. For a dance of more complicated character, but with chorus and refrain, see pp. 678 f.

835.Three Years’ Travel, etc., Phila., 1796; the travels were in 1766-1768. See pp. 171 ff., 220.

836.See Lescarbot, Histoire de la Nouvelle France, Paris, 1609, pp. 317 ff., an account of the tribal dances of the Algonquins in honour of a victory, with interesting particulars. So, too, pp. 691 ff., another account, with a dance where they “do nothing but sing HÉ or Het! like a man cutting wood, with a movement of the arm; and they dance a ‘round’ without holding one another or stirring from one place, beating their feet upon the earth.” So, says Lescarbot, they make fires and jump through them, like our French peasants on the eve of St. John, who shout and dance the whole night. His fifteenth chapter, pp. 765 ff., is on Danses el Chansons, and accents the dance after a feast. Here, too, he says, “aprÈs la panse vient la danse.” Savages, he says, always sing to their dancing.

837.It is unfortunately not superfluous to suggest that the dances described by Homer are anything but primitive, though they retain some primitive traits. The dance pictured on the shield of Achilles (Il. XVIII.), youths dancing and fair maids, hand in hand, is a ronde, to be sure, in form, but a society affair as well, with full dress, complicated figures, and a “divine minstrel” for the music. However, the vintage dance to the Linos song, described in the preceding verses, holds, like our harvest refrains, an older fashion.

838.Ten Broeck, in Schoolcraft, IV. 84.

839.Clavigero, History of Mexico, trans. Cullen, London, 1787, I. 399 f., a description of the great public dances.

840.Schoole of Abuse, p. 34.

841.When M. Gaston Paris, Les Origines de la PoÉsie Lyrique en France au Moyen Age, p. 42, says he has found no dance among the old Romans except the professional dance, he overlooks the fact that this rustic dance in procession about the fields is proof of similar dances for pleasure. It is no professional affair which Vergil has in mind: det motus incompositos et carmina dicat. Surely the dances were not danced by slaves.

842.Described by Mr. Arthur Symons in Harper’s Monthly Magazine, March, 1901, p. 503.

843.Pfannenschmid, Germ. Erntef., p. 400.

844.See above, p. 301.

845.See the suggestive treatment of this subject by Posnett, Comparative Literature, pp. 117 ff., with his references to RÉville and Burnouf.

846.Silius Italicus, naming the troops which Hannibal led out of winter quarters, comes to the Gallician contingent, and describes their youth—

Lemaire (Bib. Class. Lat., Sil. Ital. Punic., III. 345 ff.), explains this as a heroic ballad which the soldiers sing, as they dance and strike their shields, when going into battle. He refers to the classical passages for this as well as for the Pyrrhic dance; but see note at the end of this chapter. The perhaps similar custom of the Germans, noted by Tacitus, is treated in a masterly way by MÜllenhoff. See the next note but one.

847.Pantomime, as early form of dance leading to poetry and drama, was noted by Adam Smith, Essays, p. 151. For older literature, see Blankenburg, ZusÄtze, I. 153 ff. Erotic dances were exaggerated by Scherer into the protoplasm of all poetry, Poetik, pp. 83, 114; and are more moderately treated by Hirn, FÖrstudier, pp. 88 ff., and Grosse, Anf. d. Kunst, pp. 21 ff. It is a developed art, of course, that Lucian has in mind in his treatise on the dance. See, however, Lucian, §§ 36, 63, 65.

848.Manley, Specimens of the Pre-Shaksperian Drama, I. 296 ff., from the Folk-Lore Journal, VII. 338 ff. The date of the play is 1779. For the Germanic sword-dance, see MÜllenhoff, Festgabe fÜr G. Homeyer, “Ueber den Schwerttanz,” p. 117. A bibliography of this subject is printed in the Zeitschr. f. VÖlkerpsychol., etc., XIX. 204, 416; especially see p. 223; and other references may be added from Paul’s Grundriss, II. i. 835, for the German. For the sword-dance in Shetland noted by Scott, see Lockhart’s Life, ed. 1837, III. 162. For other gymnastic plays, see the two books of Groos, Spiele der Thiere and Spiele der Menschen.

849.See Bruchmann, Poetik, p. 212.

850.Skill, of course, and rivalry are early provocatives of art in the dance. As to ball-playing as a part of it, references could be given for all times and climes.

851.See Old English Ballads, p. lxxvi.

852.Such as the author of the Complaynt of Scotland watched at their dancing, and noted the songs.

853.See below, Chap. VII.

854.See Uhland, Kl. Schr., III. 399 ff., and 484 ff., who gives other well-known instances of this panic dance, as well as the tarantella of Italy. The shaman, of course, even among a tribe as low as the Veddahs, dances himself into a fit.

855.See book of this title by Sir J. G. Wilkinson, London, 1848, I. 399.

856.It translates “dance” in Luke xv. 25.

857.See KÖgel, Gesch. d. deutsch. Lit., pp. 7 ff.

858.SigelÉoÐ in Anglo-Saxon, sung after a victory, was doubtless the same thing. KÖgel notes that leikr, leik, in Norwegian dialects down to this day, means both “war” and “dance”; and he conjectures that winelÂc, in Anglo-Saxon, goes back to an originally erotic dance, as it may go forward to a children’s “kissing-game.”

859.Wolf, Lais, pp. 18, 183 f., puts too much stress on the singing of church music, though he concedes popular origins; p. 22.

860.Work quoted, p. cxvii.

861.BladÉ, PoÉsies Populaires de la Gascogne (Vol. III. is devoted entirely to songs for the dance), III. i. ff. “En gÉnÉral on ne danse aux chansons que faute de mieux,” although even now, at times, “they bid the music cease, and dance to the sound of their own voices.” The dancing is literally a round, a circle.

862.See Wolf’s note, Lais, pp. 185 f. On this carole or ronde, danced mainly by women, but now and then by men and women, see Jeanroy’s chapter, already quoted, and the additional suggestions of M. Gaston Paris, Origines d. l. PoÉs. Lyr., pp. 44 ff., really a review of Jeanroy’s book. “Ce qui caractÉrisait surtout les caroles, c’Était le chant qui les accompagnait,” says M. Paris. The only use of instruments, and these very simple, was to mark the rhythm. Dancers turned to the left.

863.An early reference, from “Ruodlieb,” may be added to show the connection of dance and song; the passage occurs in a description of the dancing bears (III. 84 ff., ed. Grimm-Schmeller, Lat. Ged. des X. u. XI. Jhrh., p. 144):—

The bears dance, then, along with the singing and dancing women; Grimm calls them spielweiber, and quotes an ecclesiastical prohibition (ibid., p. xv); but part of the description, witness the plebs, will pass for a communal dance.

865.De vulg. Eloq., II. iii. See note in Howell’s translation, London, 1890. Crescimbeni, L’Istoria della volgar Poesia, Venez., 1731 (written in 1697), quotes, though in disapproval, Minturno for the primacy of ballate (p. 148): “ballads,” says M., because “si cantavano ballando,” which is the root of the matter.

866.It has been repeatedly noticed that older English dances are known by the ballads sung to them. Even some of the tragic ballads were used for the dance; but one must think of gay little songs and refrains as staple for the merry rounds; nothing else will fit the seasons when “maydes daunce in a ring.”

867.3?, Bodley copy of 1568. See also the refrain for a dance in the Four Elements, above, p. 322.

868.See Kind-Harts Dreame, ed. Rimbault, Percy Soc., 1841, p. 38, and note, p. 79.

869.English Minstrelsie, I., p. ix.

870.In 1767 a “young lady from Scotland” sang as she danced, at the royal theatre in Copenhagen; but there, too, in 1726, a Stockholm dancing-girl had done the same thing. “Novelty” is not the word. See Steenstrup, Vore Folkev., pp. 8 f.

871.Brand, “New Year’s Day.”

872.Mannhardt, Baumkultus, in many places; Pfannenschmid, Germ. Erntej., pp. 271 ff., 580 ff. For love-songs and the dance, Uhland, III. 391 ff., and notes, 471, with valuable account of the manner of dancing, and of the leader, the voresingen and the voretanzen.

873.See BÖhme, Altd. Liederb., p. xxxv.

874.’T Boertje, Coussemaker, pp. 329 f., and ’t Patertje, already quoted.

875.PÉtition pour des Villageois que l’on empÊche de danser. Par Paul-Louis Courier, Vigneron, ... Paris, 1822, addressed to the Chamber of Deputies, asking that the folk of Azai may dance on Sundays “sur le place de leur commune.” Despite the mystification, there is some serious intent behind this fooling.

876.In Germany itself: cf. Meyer, Volkskunde, pp. 158, 160, 163.

877.Arbeit u. Rhythmus, pp. 103 f.

878.See note, end of chapter.

879.Grosse, Anf d. Kunst, p. 218; Donovan, Lyre to Muse, pp. 91, 127 ff.; Jacobowski, AnfÄnge d. Poesie, p. 127. This author’s discussion of circle and straight line, as of women and of men in the dance, and of other formations, is a bit fanciful although interesting and suggestive. See, too, Donovan on the ring of folk (choral) about a centre of interest,—altar or the like. Work quoted, p. 204.

880.The development of the dance into different kinds of poetry is foreshadowed by many of the older writers, although the first really comparative treatment of the subject must be assigned to A. W. Schlegel in the lectures at Berlin a century ago. Herder has some valuable remarks on the subject in his early essay Vom Geist der ebrÄischen Poesie, following, of course, many hints of Lowth. Two hundred years ago, Burette, a really learned writer, drew up his “MÉmoire pour servir À l’Histoire de la Danse des Anciens,” published in the MÉm., Acad. of Inscript., etc., I. 93 ff., Paris, 1717. Movement and imitation caused the dance, which is “nearly as old as man,” and sprang from joy. Cadence is the mainspring; avoid, he says, Lucian’s prattle about the stars. Wedding, festival, vintage, harvest,—look to these, says Burette, in quite modern spirit, for the origins of the dance. He traces metres to the rhythm of songs sung by the dancers. Another article of this writer investigates ball-playing, often combined with dance and song. Another writer on the dance was John Spencer, D.D., master of Corpus Christi College (1630-1693), the founder of the science of comparative religions; his “Dissertatio de Saltandi Ritu,” is printed in the Thesaurus Antiquitat. Sacrar. complectens selectissima clarissimorum Virorum Opuscula in quibus Veterum Hebraeorum Mores, Leges, etc., illustrantur, Vol. XXXII., Venet., 1767. Spencer studies the dance of the Hebrews, and his references are valuable; he is comparative, and uses dances of modern Turks to illustrate his subject. Hebrews got some of their festal dances from heathen,—the saltationes promiscuas; for erotic dances he thinks to have been early and everywhere. For a man of his date, he concludes very boldly “probabilius est, sacras choreas agendi morem, ex antiquissimo gentium usu primitus oriundum,” and so came to the Hebrews. The festal dances, where Jews bore about branches and sang a choral full of repetitions and with a constant refrain, he compares with pagan affairs of the sort; the pÆan is compared with refrains like Hallel and Hosannah. In fine, this is sharp, clear, comparative work, and good reading still. From Joannis Meursi Orchestra sive de Saltationibus Veterum ... Lugd. Batav., 1618, not much is to be learned except a list (alphabetical) of the old dances, with references to the classic passages. Most of the articles are short, but the Pyrrhic Dance has twelve pages. An early essay on dancing, with considerable scope for its time, is inserted in Elyot’s Governour, edited by Croft, London, 1880, from the edition of 1531, I. 202 ff. Elyot seems to be the first Englishman who wrote about the art.

881.See above, p. 128.

882.Essai Comparatif sur l’Origine et l’Histoire des Rythmes, Paris, 1889.

883.Even this may be questioned in a literal sense. “Formen,” says Usener, Altgriechischer Versbau, p. 111, “werden nicht geschaffen, sondern sie entstehen und wachsen. Der schÖpferische KÜnstler erzeugt sie nicht, sondern bildet das Ueberkommene veredelnd um.” He is speaking of the popular four-accent verse found in so many languages.

884.L’EsthÉtique du Mouvement, Paris, 1889, Cap. iv. See pp. 54, 65.

885.In the First Principles.

886.Essai, pp. 102, 104.

887.MÉlusine, I. 1 ff. See, too, PoÉsie du Moyen Age, pp. 77, 89.

888.Zeitschr. f. VÖlkerpsychol., XVII. 113 ff.

889.Kalewala, p. 38.

890.Nordboernes Aandsliv, II. 437 ff.

891.The refrain of two lines, he thinks, was added to the two-line stanza of narrative ballads; and so resulted the common ballad stanza. This is denied by Steenstrup.

892.“Proved” by that old primitive-Aryan process now something discredited: danz is an imported word (meaning both song and dance). See Vigfusson’s Icelandic Dictionary, s.v. More formidable, but far from final, is the silence of the sagas.

893.A similar denial, not only of the original character of recorded ballads, but of the ballad habit itself, is made for Denmark by Professor G. Storm in his otherwise valuable book, Sagnkredsene om Karl den Store og Didrik af Bern hos de nordiske Folk, Kristiania, 1874, pp. 174 f.

894.See below on the schnaderhÜpfl and stev.

895.Comparetti, Kalewala, 1892. pp. 3, 264 ff. The very name of the Finnish song is probably borrowed; but its original and native character is successfully defended by Comparetti, pp. 37, 272, against the attempt of Ahlqvist to prove alliteration in Finnish verse a loan from the Scandinavians.

896.Set forth in Tarde’s Les Lois de l’Imitation, Paris, 1890; but the best recent summary of his views is Les Lois Sociales, Paris, 1898. Special problems of the crowd as imitative, dangerous, weak, are treated in his Essais et MÉlanges Sociologiques, Lyon-Paris, 1895. See also “Les deux ÉlÉments de la Sociologie,” in Études de Psychologie Sociale, Paris, 1898, an address delivered in 1894 before the first international Congress of Sociology.

897.Les Lois de l’Imitation, p. 279. So p. 48,—“A l’origine un anthropoÏde a imaginÉ ... les rudiments d’un langage.”

898.Of the Origin and Progress of Language, I. 318 ff.

899.He concedes that a different relation exists when two are working together at the same thing (Lois Soc., p. 129); although here are “model and copy,” suggestion at least.

900.Ibid., p. 159.

901.He sees light ahead for a world now hung in Schopenhauer-black; the infinitesimal shall cheer us. Ibid., pp. 87, 105, 110.

902.Lois Sociales, pp. 40 f. This passage will repay close attention.

903.Critique Scientifique, pp. 191 ff. Carstanjen made a fierce attack on the milieu in art, and, by implication, in literature: Vierteljahrsschrift f. wissenschaftl. Philosophie, XX. (1896), 1 ff., 143 ff. He explains the art of the renaissance by the artists of that time, and not by their environment. For a fine defence of the milieu, however, see the late M. Texte’s book on Jean-Jacques Rousseau et les Origines du Cosmopolitisme LittÉraire, pp. xvii. ff.

904.Outlines of Sociology, trans. F. W. Moore for the Amer. Acad. Pol. and Soc. Sci., June, 1899, pp. 45, 88. See the translator’s abstract, p. 7.

905.Die Philosophie der Geschichte als Sociologie, Leipzig, 1897, I. 183, 213 f.

906.Principles of Sociology, New York, 1896.

907.“Ueber Ziele und Wege der VÖlkerpsychologie,” in Philosophische Studien, 1888, IV. 1 ff., particularly pp. 11 ff. and 17.

908.In his VÖlkerpsychologie (Vol. I., Leipzig, 1900, has appeared), he undertakes to study the making of these three products, which he calls a gemeinsames Erzeugniss. See pp. 4, 6, 24 f. A sensible plea for the volksseele, “which need not have any mystical connotation,” was made by Gustav Freytag in the introduction to his Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit, I. 13 ff.

909. Psychologie des Foules; and in English translation, The Crowd.

910.“Das Wesen des Gesammtgeistes,” Studien und AufsÄtze, pp. 504 ff.

911.Significant is the change from VÖlkerpsychologie to Volkskunde. The new journal is edited by Professor Weinhold, and began in 1891.

912.In Paul’s Grundriss der Philologie, II. i., 512 ff. See also Ten Brink’s Beowulf, pp. 105 f.

913.DÉbute. See Lois de l’Imit., p. 233. He is arguing against Spencer’s doctrine of the development of the arts, and implies the same “high initial source” for music, architecture, and the rest.

914.“Enfin ce triple poÉsie dÉcoule de trois grandes sources, la Bible, HomÈre, Shakspeare.”

915.Lois Sociales, p. 49.

916.The abstract question is foreign to the present purpose; but it may be urged that one is wise to take neither the extreme position of Buckle, Gumplowicz, and Bourdeau,—who said that if Napoleon had been shot at Toulon, Hoche, or Kleber, or some one, would have done what Napoleon did,—nor yet the equally extreme stand of Tarde and his school. Some sensible remarks on the whole matter may be found in Bernheim’s Lehrbuch d. historischen Methode, pp. 513 ff. of the second edition, Leipzig, 1894.

917.See Lloyd Morgan, Habit and Instinct, Chap. II. Solitary chicks hatched in an incubator can be heard chirping, all in the same way, before they break the shell, and with no chance of imitation in the case. Weismann, “Gedanken Über Musik,” Rundschau, LXI. (1889), 63, remarks that a young finch brought up alone will sing the song of its kind, “but never so beautifully as when a good singer is put with him as teacher.” The concession is enough.

918.Morgan, work quoted, p. 90. Even Mr. Witchell, for whom the song of birds is traditional, grants that call-notes, alarm-notes, and all such utterances are instinctive. See Morgan, p. 178, and Romanes, Mental Evolution in Animals, pp. 222 f.

919.Psychology of the Emotions, p. 265. The part assigned to imitation in seemingly spontaneous expression of emotion in a child, Baldwin, Mental Development in Child and Race, pp. 260 ff., does not affect this study of emotion in throngs.

920.Die Spiele der Thiere, Jena, 1896, p. 8. See, however, Spiele der Menschen, pp. 4, 365 ff., 431, 446 ff., 511 f.

921.So NoirÉ explained the case in the section on the development of language in his book, Die Welt als Entwicklung des Geistes, Leipzig, 1874. Like Donovan, too, he assumed that the first words were uttered under pressure of communal excitement, elation, joy, social sense. He assumes that social conditions quite overwhelmed the individual, who hardly existed as such. See pp. 266 f.

922.Quoted, p. 328, by Morgan, from Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology, p. 397.

923.See Wallaschek against this idea, above, p. 100.

924.Work quoted, p. 21.

925.Work quoted, p. 340. Play is thus tabulated:—

Compare with this the table given in Mr. Baldwin Brown’s useful book on The Fine Arts, p. 36.

926.Lyre to Muse, pp. 127 f. Mr. Baldwin Brown, The Fine Arts, p. 23, also regards art in general as an outgrowth of festal celebrations.

927.At the end of his Lyre to Muse, p. 209.

928.Arbeit und Rhythmus, pp. 17, 25, 82.

929.In Ribot’s Psychology of the Emotions, e.g., p. 332, ample justice is done to spontaneous emotion and expression.

930.See Butcher’s translation, pp. 15 ff.

931.So Butcher explains, p. 252: “a wild religious excitement, a bacchic ecstasy.”

932.Kunstlehre des Aristoteles, Jena, 1876, pp. 83 ff. Gerber, Die Sprache als Kunst, I. 32, follows Aristotle in denying that improvisations are ever poetry, which is enthusiasm plus deliberation and selection.

933.Vorlesungen, I. 356 ff. Compare I. 340.

934.Waitz-Gerland, Anthropologie, I. (2d. ed.), 345.

935.Vorlesungen, II. 117, 119. He calls the Homeric epos an artistic improvisation as compared with earlier spontaneous, instinctive improvisation. See also II. 20.

936.Ibid., III. 141,—a mere note for his lecture.

937.Die Geburt der TragÖdie, oder Griechenthum und Pessimismus, 3d. ed. 1894; the immediate title, however, is Die Geburt der TragÖdie aus dem Geiste der Musik.

938.Welt als Wille, etc., I. 416. Nietzsche, pp. 22, 35 f.

939.Lyric and folksong, according to Nietzsche, p. 48, are outcome of music. “Diesen Prozess einer Entladung der Musik in Bildern haben wir uns auf eine jugendfrische, sprachlich schÖpferische Volksmenge zu Übertragen, um zur Ahnung zu kommen, wie das strophische Volkslied entsteht.”

940.The usual references for Bacchic or Dionysian orgies are Livy, IX. 4 ff., where minute particulars are given; Strabo, bk. X.; AthenÆus, X.

941.In Nietzsche’s mystic phrase, the chorus “auf seiner primitiven Stufe in der UrtragÖdie,” is “eine Selbstspiegelung des dionysischen Menschen ... eine Vision der dionysischen Masse.”

942.See pp. 60 f. This artistic power is his definition of the poetic process. Professor Giddings, on hints of Mr. Spencer, has drawn a picture of solitary, primitive man arguing a spirit from the phenomenon of his shadow and of the echo of his voice. It may be pointed out that communal shouts and cries, echoed from the rocks, would be more likely to rouse a belief in that horde of spirits with which the primitive human horde thought itself surrounded. Early religion was social, communal; individual meditation, a process of individual thought, was utterly subordinate to communal thought. Even now superstition is a lingering “they say.”

943.“Eine Gemeinde von unbewussten Schauspielern,” p. 61.

944.Journal d’un PoÈte, p. 38.

945.“Das charakteristische Merkmal der Volkspoesie,” Zeitschr. f. VÖlkerpsychol., XIX. (1889), 115 ff.

946.Zeitschr. f. VÖlkerpsychol., XIX., p. 120.

947.See Schultze, Der Fetischismus, pp. 30 ff., with his authorities.

948.Two famous utterances voice this feeling. Swift loved his Peter, Paul, John, and the rest; he hated the human race at large. This for the outer circle. As for crowds, Schiller put the antithesis in a distich:—

949.“Foules et Sectes,” in Essais et MÉlanges Sociol., p. 4.

950.Principles of Sociology, I. 459, 704 f. Tribe to nation, I. 584. Rise of professions due to “specialization of a relatively homogeneous mass,” III. 181. See II. 307 ff. In the First Principles, §§ 125, 127, he had defined the process as “change from an incoherent homogeneity to a coherent heterogeneity,” and had applied the idea not only to the primitive union of poetry, music, and dancing, but within poetic limits to that undifferentiated song which held in germ the epic, the lyric, the drama.

951.Revue des deux Mondes, 15 Feb., 1898, p. 880; “le passage de l’homogÈne À l’heterogÈne,” that “idÉe mÈre, l’idÉe substantielle de l’Évolution or in Haeckel’s words, “gradual differentiation of matter originally simple.”

952.L’Évolution des Peuples, pp. 37 f. See also pp. 43, 167.

953.Primitive Folk, p. 57.

954.So the reviews summarize the doctrine of A. H. Keane, Man Past and Present, 1899.

955.Critique Scientifique, pp. 112, 115.

956.In the Rassenkampf and especially in Outlines of Sociology, trans. Moore, pp. 39, 124, 139 note; on p. 142 he names the factors which made a horde homogeneous.

957.Dr. Richard Mucke, Horde und Familie in ihrer urgeschichtlichen Entwicklung, Stuttgart, 1895.

958.Grosse, Format der Familie, pp. 30 ff. See p. 39. He takes as “representatives of the oldest form of social life” those scattered tribes which subsist entirely by hunting; we know nothing so primitive, and while checked in culture, these tribes are probably not degraded (32 f.). The statements in the text are based on careful arrangement of the statistics, a very important point. See Mucke, Horde und Familie, pp. 181 ff. Spencer describes the “small, simple aggregates,” coÖperating “with or without a regulating centre, for certain public ends,” of which the “headless” kind must be regarded as the primitive type; and gives a list of these not very different from the list of Grosse. Prin. Soc., I. § 257.

959.Grosse refuses to extend this lack of individual power to promiscuity in sexual relations. That precious theory was doubtless carried to an absurd point; but the reaction may likewise go too far, and the case of those Andamanese (p. 43) with their “absolute conjugal fidelity even unto death,” uncannily suggests Sir Charles Grandison and even Isaac Walton’s mullet.

960.Anthropology, p. 79.

961.Anthropologie, I. 74 ff., 349 ff.

962.Waitz, I. 446, answers objections to this view, and disposes of the idea that civilization levels mankind.

963.See above, p. 372, note 942.

964.AnfÄnge der Kunst, p. 224.

965.Ibid., pp. 300 f.

966.Ibid., p, 236.

967.Comparative Literature, p. 72. See pp. 89 ff., 155 ff., 347 f., and the whole chapter on “The Principle of Literary Growth.” He glorifies sympathy as the poetic mainspring; but he fails to study the dualism in terms of actual throng and actual artist. The spirit and plan of the book, however, are worthy of the highest praise, whatever its shortcomings in detail.

968.Catullus, lxiv.

969.Werke, VI. 26.

970.EsthÉtique de la Tradition, pp. 69 ff.

971.Spencer, Sociology, I. 56 ff., 70 f., II. 271, note; Grosse, Formen der Familie, p. 57, with quotation from Petroff’s book on Alaska; Schultze, Fetischismus, pp. 51 f.

972.The Theory of Law and Civil Society, London, 1888, pp. 106 f. See above, p. 26.

973.Professor Baldwin, Social and Ethical Interpretations, p. 214, puts the beginning of the social period just after man’s release from the animal. See too his appendix. Ribot, work quoted, p. 281, says the gregarious life—of animals in hordes, that is—“is founded on the attraction of like for like, irrespective of sex.” See this whole chapter on “The Social and Moral Feelings.”

974.See, however, the case of New Zealanders who work in large numbers and in perfect accord by singing their song totowaka. Wallaschek, Prim. Mus., p. 43.

975.Even Mr. Spencer points out that this is no bar to communal consent, Sociology, I. 59; for the variability implies “smaller departure from primitive reflex action ... lack of the re-representative emotions which hold the simpler ones in check.” Bastian, too, has shown that in the formation of society out of individuals, the social element as such, the social whole, must precede the element of social individuality or of the individuality within the mass. This is what one gathers from Bastian’s books in general; in one case, Die Welt in ihren Spiegelungen unter dem Wandel des VÖlkergedankens, p. 413, he applies this idea to the priority of social property as compared with individual property.

976.Perhaps there is some connection between the fervour and merit of French war-songs like the Marseillaise, the Ça ira, and the fact that French literature as a whole is averse from undue stress upon the individual and does not suffer, whatever its other defects, from “too much ego in its cosmos.” Texte points out that Jean-Jacques, Germanic by nature, noticed this trait in the French. “Le je ... est presque aussi scrupuleusement banni de la scÈne franÇaise que des Écrits de Port-Royal, et les passions humaines ... n’y parlent jamais que par on.” How contemptuously M. BrunetiÈre, who has no superior in the appreciation of French literature as a whole, speaks of that new personal note, set in fashion by Rousseau, “most eloquent of lackeys!” See “La LittÉrature Personnelle,” in B.’s Questions de Critique, pp. 211 ff., and his review of Hennequin’s book in the same collection, pp. 305 ff.

978.Anf. d. Kunst, p. 132.

979.On this baffling theme there is good reasoning in a neglected book by NoirÉ, Die Welt als Entwicklung des Geistes, pp. 240 f. He notes the mnemonic force of earliest words, which were few and used under strong emotional excitement; language was a kind of “thinking aloud.”

980.Stated in different terms by W. von Humboldt, Werke, VI. 198.

981.Wallaschek, Prim. Mus., pp. 70 f.

982.I. von DÖllinger, BeitrÄge zur Sektengeschichte des Mittelalters, Munich, 1890, II. 623 f., from an old Ms., “de hystrionibus et officiis inutilibus.” Priests are instructed what professions bar the granting of absolution,—an interesting passage. “Cum igitur meretrices ad confessionem venerint, vel hystriones, non est eis danda poenitentia, nisi ex toto talia relinquant officia,” etc.

983.See Dana’s account of an improvising islander working in California, Two Years before the Mast, Chap. XIX.

984.Wallaschek, quoting Portman, p. 278.

985.J. Darmesteter, Chants Populaires des Afghans, Paris, 1888-1890, p. clxxxvi. The Afghans have got to a Browning level in poetry, if we may believe Captain Rafferty, Selections from the Poetry of the Afghans, London, 1862. “Shaida’s poetry ...” he says, “is deep and difficult.”

986.Ahlwardt, Über Poesie und Poetik der Araber, Gotha, 1856, p. 7.

987.F. Michel, Le Pays Basque, Paris, 1857, pp. 214 f. The same is true of the Poles. See Talvj (here spelled Talvi) Historical View of the Languages and Literatures of the Slavic Nations, New York, 1850, Part IV., pp. 315 ff. Speaking of the Polish ballads, Mrs. Robinson says, “Their dances were formerly always accompanied by singing. But these songs are always extemporized. Among the country gentry ... the custom of extemporizing songs ... continued even down to the beginning of our own century.”

988.“Etwas Über William Shakspeare,” Werke, VII. 57 f.

989.He refers to the Homeric hymn to Hermes, vv. 54-56: “The god sang to the playing what came into his mind, quickly, readily, just as at festal banquets youths tease one another with verses sung in turn.”

990.Quoted by Chappell, II. 623.

991.See the Greville Memoirs, III. 122, 202.

992.Spence, Anecdotes (for Italy), pp. 116 ff., 120 note.

993.Travels in Africa, reprinted in Pinkerton, XVI. 844.

994.Improvisation of labour songs by women, solitary or in bands, is very common. See BÜcher, Arbeit u. Rhythmus, passim, especially, p. 78, and above, p. 269.

995.Improvisations at dance, funeral, wedding, and the like, among these Africans, are summed up by Spencer in his unfinished Descriptive Sociology, pp. 24 f.

996.See above, p. 20.

997.Compendium, 4th ed., p. 641. Cf. Spencer, Princ. Social., II. 151, American ed.

998.Mental Evolution in Man, p. 358, American ed.

999.FÆrØiske QuÆder om Sigurd, etc., Randers, 1822. P. E. MÜller wrote the preface and made the extracts from Lyngbye’s journal; so that the evidence is at first hand and by an exact observer. The remoteness of the place is equivalent to centuries in point of time. See, too, V. U. Hammershaimb, FÆrØsk Anthologi, Copenhagen, I. xli ff.

1000.See the author’s Old English Ballads, p. xxxiv.

1001.Popular Tales of the West Highlands, 2d ed., IV. 164 f.

1002.Described at length by MÖbius in the “ErgÄnzungsband” for Zacher’s Zeitschrift f. d. deutsche Philologie, 1874, p. 54. For the dÉbat, tenso, sirventes, jeu-parti, conflictos, and all the rest on romance ground, see Jeanroy, pp. 48 f., and Greif, Zst. f. vgl. Lit., N. F., I. 289.

1003.For Portugal, see Dr. C. F. Bellermann, Portug. Volkslieder u. Romanzen, Leipzig, 1874, p. viii.

1004.On ease of improvisation among the Finns proper, see Comparetti, Kalewala, p. 17.

1005.Chambers, Popular Rhymes of Scotland, pp. 166 f.

1006.Coussemaker, p. 271.

1007.Wallace is thinking of music and song in the nobler sense when he denies them to primitive races; and Wallaschek’s answer is conclusive, for it is based on evidence that all goes one way, Primitive Music, pp. 277 f. Another absurd reaction against romantic ideas is to deny lyric propensity to primitive folk and substitute an acute sense of “business.” So Norden, work quoted, I. 156, says the prayer of early man was anything but a “lyrical outpouring”; it was “a contract with deity, give and take.” But emotional fear and emotional thanks precede any such shrewd rationalism as this, if psychology is to be regarded, let alone ethnological evidence.

1008.Schmid, 2d ed., p. 366.

1009.Romanisches und Keltisches, pp. 363 f. The four-line stanza, he says, is easy to compose, and one pennill suggests another; so that each is half tradition, half improvisation, belonging “to everybody and nobody.” This description approaches very closely the hypothetical description given by Ten Brink in his sketch of Old English poetry for Paul’s Grundriss, of the making of ballads in a more primitive day.

1010.Mr. Gregory Smith’s facile explanation, The Transition Period, pp. 182 f.

1011.Ep. II. i. 145 f. See Zell, Ferienschriften, II. 122 ff. Soldiers sang in pairs, or in two sections, these alternate mocking verses.

1012.Douglas Hyde, Love Songs of Connacht, 1895, pp. 88 ff. The prose translation has less artificial suggestion than the translation in verses.

1013.AthenÆus and Diodorus are quoted as authorities for the Sicilian origin of such combats in verse; but Jeanroy disposes of this theory by an effective use of the argument from comparative literature. See his Origines, pp. 260 ff.

1014.On the meaning and relations of strambotto, stornello, rispetto, ritornello, and the other terms, see Count Nigra’s Canti Popolari del Piemonte, Torino, 1888, pp. xi ff. He corrects Schuchardt’s use of ritornell for stornello. This latter is really an amoebean form of verse, has but one stanza, and this of three lines; the strambotto is one stanza, too, but has four, six, ten, or even more lines. Still, the four-line stanza, as comparison shows, is clearly the primitive form. Southern Italy is, of course, far richer in these songs than Piedmont, the home of lyrical narrative or ballad.

1015.Found, too, in India; but here not in the really communal stage. See Gustav Meyer, Essays und Studien, pp. 293 f.

1016.Bayerisches WÖrterbuch, III. 499, explaining them as SchnitterhÜpflein, songs of the reapers.

1017.With references to the literature of these songs, work quoted, pp. 332 ff.

1018.On the form cf. O. Brenner, “Zum Versbau der SchnaderhÜpfl,” in Festschrift zur 50 jÄhr. Doktorjubelfeier Karl Weinholds, Strassburg, 1896, who gives fresh references for the various subjects of discussion. He emphasizes the fact that these schnaderhÜpfl are always sung.

1019.Dr. H. Dunger, RundÂs und ReimsprÜche aus dem Vogtlande, Plauen, 1876. A rund is originally “a little song sung while drinking,” but is made to include the schnaderhÜpfl; and in the author’s opinion all these forms go back to songs of reapers during harvest. That, however, is of no great moment here.

1020.“Ueber Poesie der AlpenlÄnder,” in a reprint from a magazine whose title does not appear.

1021.Firmenich, Germaniens VÖlkerstimmen, II. 716. I have made these translations solely to reproduce, if possible, the spirit of the original, and have tried to keep the false “literary” note at arm’s length.

1022.Ibid., II. 715, 777.

1023.G. Meyer, p. 357, prints a number of such variations on the standing first verse:—

and so on.

1024.Firmenich, II. 779.

1025.Firmenich, II. 661.

1026.Of the dance,—the vorsinger.

1027.Variants of this are found in many places.

1028.Firmenich, III. 39.

1029.Ibid., II. 716.

1030.Ibid., II. 737.

1031.“Go from my window,” pp. 140 ff., with variations (as “Come up to my window”) and parodies.

1032.Firmenich, II. 715.

1033.Od., III. X.

1034.It is well to note here that development is one thing and imitation is another. The authorities agree that a schnaderhÜpfl cannot be imitated. See Gustav Meyer, p. 351.

1035.Firmenich, II. 717.

1036.Firmenich, III. 396.

1037.Ibid., II. 280. This is widespread. See Meyer, p. 356.

1038.Meyer, p. 341. The rimes are identical in the original. Meyer gives seven versions.

1039.Child, III. 236.

1040.On this opening touch from nature in the ballads, exemplified in English by the beautiful beginning of Robin Hood and the Monk, much has been written; but this use of the same device in a schnaderhÜpfl is very significant, and has aroused little comment. See Meyer, pp. 377 ff.

1041.Child, I. 399 ff.

1042.Essays, pp. 365 ff.

1043.On p. 358.

1044.When the Greek youth leaves his home, Fauriel says, his family sing songs of farewell, traditional and improvised, to which he often improvises a reply. Improvisation, too, and presumably once in the village throng, lies at the foundation of the German prentice songs of leave-taking, the eternal note of scheiden, das thut grÄmen, with culmination in that exquisite poem, probably not improvised, InnsprÜck, ich muss dich lassen. The ennobling process is interesting, and is of a piece with the process assumed by A. W. Schlegel for the ennobling of Greek epic out of rude improvisation.

1045.Uhland, Volkslieder, I. 78. In spite of the two melodies, I have put the refrain at the beginning, and slightly changed, as in Uhland’s B., at the end. The actual song is for the dance. See BÖhme, Altd. Liederb., p. 268. Only two stanzas are given,—one for the happy girl and one for the lovelorn, one the vortanz, the other the nachtanz.

1046.See above, p. 208.

1047.Firmenich, II. 742.

1048.The translation fails to bring out the simplicity of these two stanzas; they run thus:—

1049.Essays, p. 370; and see also KÖgel, Gesch. d. d. Lit., I. 7, who thinks that Scandinavian ljÓÐ (plural) meant once a series of these strophes composed by dancers and so coming to be a lied. E. H. Meyer, Volkskunde, p. 317, notes the independent quatrains combined into an almlied.

1050.Also G. Meyer, Essays, pp. 370, 375.

1051.Ibid., pp. 377 ff.

1052.Norske Folkeviser, Christiania, 1853. See especially pp. 365 ff., 423 ff.

1053.Ibid., p. 366.

1054.Lundell, Paul’s Grundriss, II. i. 730, says that even now any adult in Iceland can make verses.

1055.Landstad, pp. 370 ff.

1056.Ibid., p. 376.

1057.The vocero is far less individual than this quatrain or stave just considered, because the former is an outburst rather of public grief than of private emotion.

1058.See above, p. 269.

1059.Definitions are notoriously unsatisfactory in poetics. Contrast Schleiermacher’s formula for lyric as poetry plus music, Aesthetik, p. 628, with the laborious definition in R. M. Werner’s Lyrik und Lyriker, Hamburg and Leipzig, 1890, p. 10, based mainly on the subjective element. Confusion of form and conditions, which makes lyric poetry one with music (see DÖring, Kunstlehre d. Aristoteles, p. 88), with inner meaning and purpose, has caused most of the trouble. In one sense the old choral was the very foundation of lyric. The congregational psalm of the Hebrews is lyric, and so is the solitary cry of the modern poet.

1060.Uralt, says Usener, Altgr. Versbau, p. 45. See above, p. 95.

1061.As Matthew Arnold reminds us:—

For the prevailing tone of lyric is sad, and Euterpe treats her poet as Genevieve treated Coleridge:—

1062.The claim of Usener may be noted (“Der Stoff des griechischen Epos,” Sitzungsber. d. Kais. Acad. d. Wiss. zu Wien, Bd. 137, pp. 18 ff.), where he puts the ceremonies at the hearthstone, primitive ancestor-worship, as the real beginning of epic song. The offering to an ancestor must have been made “with music, prayer, and song.” Hence the epos. It is true that a lyric of this sort is older than any epic,—the epic which Hegel pushed forward as earliest form of poetry, just as the renaissance had put it above the drama in dignity,—and may well have helped the later epic process. But the evidence of ethnology shows that rude songs at the tribal dance, which refer to tribal doings, must be far older than any ceremonies of the primitive hausvater at his family altar.

1063.A. W. Schlegel said that the Homeric poems were improvised; but he distinguished between rude communal improvisation and that of incipient art. Vorlesungen, II. 119 f., 243.

1064.Livy, VII. 2, gives an account of this change.

1065.See Maurice Drack, Le ThÉÂtre de la Foire, la ComÉdie Italienne, et l’OpÉra-comique, Paris, 1889. Vol. I. has a sketch of the movement—from 1678 on—indicated in the title. It began with the piÈce À couplets, and passed gradually into modern comic opera. The great popular fair of St. Lawrence, at Paris, was the scene of part of this development.

1066.Garnett, Italian Literature, p. 306, traces this comedy back through Tuscan and Neapolitan peasants to the “Greek rustics who smeared their faces with wine-lees at the Dionysiac festivals, and from whose improvised songs and gestures Greek comedy was developed.”

1067.Burckhardt, Cultur der Ren., II. 40, thinks that such well-known characters as Pantalone, the Doctor, Arlecchino, may be in some fashion connected with masked figures in the old Roman plays.

1068.Ticknor, Spanish Literature, I. 232 f.

1069.Second Part, Chap. XX.

1070.Malone’s Shakspere, 1821, III. 131.

1071.Tarlton’s Jests ... ed. J. O. Halliwell, London, 1844, pp. xviii f. (Shakspere Society). “As Antipater Sidonius,” says the comparative Meres, “was famous for extemporall verse in Greeke ... so was our Tarleton.”

1072.See Bolte, Die Singspiele der englischen KomÖdianten und ihrer Nachfolger, Hamburg u. Leipzig, 1893, pp. 50 ff. He prints parallel copies of “Singing Simpkin” and the German “Pickelhering in der Kiste.”

1073.“Passages were often left for the extempore declamation of the actors. Sometimes the whole conduct of the piece depended on their powers of improvisation.” Symonds, Shakspere’s Predecessors, p. 66.

1074.Vorlesungen Über Aesthetik, pp. 84 f.

1075.Ed. Grosart, V. 200.

1076.Hazlitt-Dodsley, V. 149, 151.

1077.As, for example, Schwab takes it: Das Schauspiel im Schauspiel, Wien u. Leipzig, 1896, p. 32.

1078.Bruchmann, Poetik, p. 17.

1079.The material has been set forth above in the section on the communal dance; for early dramatic dances of fight, hunting, and the like, see especially pp. 336 ff., and the passage on lÂc, p. 340.

1080.On gesture as common and universally understood expression, see Darwin, Descent of Man, 2d ed., I. 276 f. “Men of all races” have a “mutual comprehension of gesture-language”; they all have “the same expression on their features,” and “the same inarticulate cries when excited by the same emotions.” See also Tylor, Early History of Mankind, chapters on Gesture-Language; and American Antiquarian, II. 219, G. Mallery on Indian Sign Language. This universal validity of gesture is highly significant for the beginnings of poetry, for the rude cries which precede language are probably of the same order as the gestures. See Chap. II., Wundt’s VÖlkerpsychologie.

1081.Bastian, “Masken und Maskereien,” Zst. f. VÖlkerpsych., XIV. 347.

1082.See Grosse on the two “roots” of the drama, Anf. d. Kunst, pp. 254 f. On the mimicry of different tribes in the communal dance, see Bruchmann, Poetik, pp. 208 ff.; Wallaschek, Prim. Music, Chap. VIII.

1083.The conspicuous performer,—the “entertainer” or soloist,—grows less and less prominent as one gets upon lower levels of culture. The earliest distinction of this sort was probably achieved by the priest, conjurer, medicine-man, shaman, or whatever his special function.

1084.As Wallaschek recedes from his proposition, the examples have more and more mention of words and song together with the action; for example, pp. 217 ff.

1085.This must always be taken into account. As Wallaschek says of an Australian “corrobberee,” however primitive it may seem, “it is a well-prepared and elaborated dance, which it takes both time and practice to excel in.”

1086.Wallaschek, pp. 223 f.

1087.From gesture back to facial expression and other signs now unknown because speech has taken their place, is an inviting path, but not to be trodden now. From the Kansas City Star, date unfortunately lost, may be quoted an interview with Hagenbeck, the lion-tamer. “We can’t see,” he said, “the expression of a lion’s face, except of rage, but his companions can.... Did you ever see one animal fail to understand another? I never saw such an instance.... I am inclined to think that what we call mind-reading is mere survival here and there of the lost sixth sense, which was probably common to primitive man, and which animals possess to this day.” Mr. Hagenbeck could furnish an interesting supplement to Darwin’s book On the Expression of Emotions.

1088.Work quoted, p. 28, speaking of Australian song and dance. See also p. 201.

1089.Sign-language of later date, as studied by Mallery among the American Indians, cannot be regarded as primitive in this genetic sense. It comes to be a highly developed art and calls for considerable skill in the making as well as acuteness in interpretation.

1090.As in dances of the Greeks, now felt to be a lost art. On this matter of gesture and signs, see an excellent book by Sittl, Die GebÄrden der Griechen und RÖmer, Leipzig, 1890; his accounts of the attempt “die VÖlker durch die Zeichensprache zu verbrÜdern,” with reference to Leibnitz and others; of orgiastic ecstasies; and, of course, the study of Greek gesture in art and poetry, are all instructive. For primitive relations, Darwin’s book On the Expressions of Emotions, etc., 1872, is still main authority. Gestures, like sounds, are either instinctive or called out by the will; and any study of progress in the dramatic art must concern itself with these fundamental elements of acting.

1091.It would be useless to attempt a bibliography of this subject. A. W. Schlegel’s historical account of the drama and its relations to epic and lyric is still useful. See especially Vorles., I. 124; II. 317, 321, 325. Eugen Wolff’s return to the priority of epic,—Prolegomena, etc., p. 10; “Vorstudien zur Poetik,” Zst. f. vgl. Litt., VI. 425,—fails to satisfy the student of ethnological evidence; like most writers from the Æsthetic point of view, Wolff neglects to study the poetry of the throng, the choral, the dance. Barring this same fault, there is considerable truth in the view of Burdach (letter to Scherer, in the latter’s Poetik, pp. 296 f.), that epic and drama are wrongly taken as extreme antithesis in poetry, whereas lyric and drama are really “die beiden UrphÄnomene.” Little profit for the historical student of poetry is to be found in essays like Veit Valentin’s “Poetische Gattungen,” in Zst. f. vgl. Litt., N. F., V. 35 ff.

1092.See Blankenburg’s excellent article on the ballet in his ZusÄtze, I. 154 ff. La Motte, in his ballet of Europe Galante, 1697, made the ballet an object in itself and in its own action; here “entspringt Tanz und Gesang aus der eigenen GemÜthsstimmung der handelnden Personen.” This is communal revival.

1093.That is, ????.

1094.“Daudet me dit ... ‘Je crois dÉcidÉment avoir trouvÉ la formule; le livre c’est pour l’individu, le thÉÂtre c’est pour la foule.’” Journal des Goncourt, VIII. (30 Jan., 1890), 129.

1095.Vorlesungen, Stuttgart, 1884, I. 329 ff., 342, 344 ff.

1097.See the present author’s article on “Mythology” in the new edition of Johnson’s CyclopÆdia.

1098.A dozen years ago or more, a professor lecturing on this subject in a German university, after giving all the myths about a certain goddess, spoke somewhat as follows: “Gentlemen, this goddess is either a star or the early summer grass, I am not certain which. I am studying the matter carefully, and hope soon to reach a positive conclusion.”

1099.Compare Lucretius, dealing now lovingly with the Venus of myth—alma Venus, the beloved of Rome’s own god—and now, a few lines below, scornfully, passionately, with the cruel rites of the worship of Diana and the sacrifice of Iphigenia at her shrine: “illa Religio,” he says, with a touch almost of blasphemy.

1100.See the chapters on animism and mythology in Tylor’s Primitive Culture. A. W. Schlegel was on this trail, but let himself be befogged by Schelling’s philosophy. See the Vorlesungen, I. 329, 337.

1101.See his Germanische Mythen.

1102.Mythologische Forschungen (Quellen u. Forschungen, No. 51, Strassburg, 1884), Vorrede, p. xxv; the lesson came from Tylor’s book which MÜllenhoff had set Mannhardt reading. This letter was written in 1876. See also MÜllenhoff’s own definition of mythology in his Deutsche Alterthumskunde, V. 1, 157.

1103.Cultur d. Ren. in Ital., I. 288.

1104.Zeitschrift f. Gymnasialwesen, Berlin, Nov., 1861, p. 837.

1105.Mr. Tylor lets animism of this sort have too free a play among quite primitive men.

1106.Too much stress is laid by some writers on primitive studies of death, and of dreams about the dead, as productive of myth. Modern peasants, like savages, often show a heavy and stupid indifference in the presence of death; and its problem, though it doubtless suggested a cult of spirits, was far less insistent with early man than the problem of life. Before he thus worked out a world of dead spirits, he knew by instinctive, really unconscious inference, a world of living spirits, not of his own breed, but vaster, subtler, in those operations of nature which struck into his actual life, interfered with it, or conspicuously helped it.

1107.“It hurts me; it makes me cry,” says the child, pointing to the seat of affliction; this “it” corresponds with savage and primitive animism. It is not personification, as one is often told. Human beings do not crawl into other human beings and hurt them; not he or she, but “it” hurts. One remembers the remark of J. Grimm, that the neuter gender means not lack of sex, but the undeveloped, initial stage. Deutsche Grammatik, III. 315.

1108.Posnett, Comparative Literature, pp. 162 ff. The idea, however, is by no means as new as Posnett thinks it to be.

1109.See above, p. 380.

1110.Vignoli, in his Myth and Science, notes that a dog growls or bites at a stick thrust toward him, a kind of animism; although as Spencer said,—with quite unwarrantable inference in the denial of nature-myths among primitive men,—a dog takes no notice of ordinary natural doings, swaying boughs, sunrise, and all the rest.

1111.Max MÜller’s “disease of language” as source of myth is absurd; the myth does not wait for the misunderstanding of a metaphor, but begins with the metaphor and lives with its life,—both being, of course, unconscious at the start.

1112.A child who saw a flash of lightning once said, “God is winking at me”; and the phrase was seized upon as a fine illustration of primitive myth-making. But the child had been presented, by the whole process of human culture and thought, with at least two-thirds of this “myth,”—the idea of God, of a distinct, supreme personality, and the reference to God of whatever goes on in the sky.

1113.See E. H. Meyer, Indogerm. Mythen, Berlin, 1883, I. 87.

1114.In the reaction from ideas of a golden age one must not go too far, and “call names” which now mean vice, degeneration, rottenness. It is possible that even earliest myth touched here and there a chord of poetry as we now know poetry, and appealed to that constant element which belongs to our humanity and not to our history.

1115.Or, of course, a tradition; so Prometheus and the origin of fire may account for the stealing of fire from some neighbouring tribe. See Gruppe, Griechische Culte and Mythen, p. 206.

1116.See above, p. 236.

1117.Comparetti, Kalewala, pp. 154 f., in his excellent remarks on popular myth and popular poetry, has left his analysis incomplete by leaving throng-poetry quite out of the account.

1118.Grimm’s chapter on gender in the third volume of his Grammar remains the masterpiece of investigation in this subject; but his theory has been attacked by Brugmann. See, too, President Wheeler, “Origin of Grammatical Gender,” Journal Germanic Philology, II. 528 ff. Grimm defines gender, III. 346, “eine in der phantasie der menschlichen Sprache entsprungene ausdehnung des natÜrlichen auf alle und jede gegenstÄnde.”

1119.Ibid., III. 354.

1120.Grimm says the Englishman calls “she” whatever is dear to him—the sailor his ship, the miller his mill; III. 546.

1121.Reflexions Critiques, ed. 1770, I. 298. “La PoËsie du style fait la plus grande diffÉrence qui soit entre les vers et la prose.... Les images et les figures doivent Être encore plus frÉquentes dans la plupart des genres de la PoËsie, que dans les discours oratoires.... C’est donc la PoËsie du style qui fait le PoËte, plutÔt que la rime et la cÉsure.... Cette Partie de la PoËsie la plus importante.” See also p. 312, in § xxxv.

1122.Essay on Poetry with Reference to Aristotle’s Poetics, ed. Cook, p. 11.

1123.Some representative definitions of this sort are collected and quoted by Dr. Gertrude Buck in an interesting paper, The Metaphor: a Study on the Psychology of Rhetoric, being No. 5 of the “Contributions to Rhetorical Theory,” edited by Professor Scott, Ann Arbor,—no date, but about 1899,—p. 40.

1124.Poetik, p. 87 f. See also p. 83. On p. 262 he opens, however, a dangerous door for the interests of this theory.

1125.Altgermanische Poesie, p. 20.

1126.Modern writers on Æsthetics make the same error: so Biese, “Das Metaphorische in der dichterischen Phantasie,” Zst. f. vgl. Lit., N. F. II. 320, makes the primitive process from simile to metaphor.

1127.On pp. 90 ff.

1128.St. Evremond thinks them distracting; in any case he will banish such things from drama. Œuvres MeslÉes, London, Tonson, 1709, III. 72 f., in an essay, “Sur les poËmes des Anciens.”

1129.See above, p. 190.

1130.It is the case with later reaches of poetry. Chaucer, for example, offers very few figures or metaphors as compared with later poets; “no other author in our tongue,” says Professor Lounsbury, Stud., III. 441, “has clung so persistently to the language of common life.”

1131.The Anglo-Saxon Metaphor, Halle, 1881. The theory of the metaphor there advanced was due to the study of poetical material alone, and had no help from psychology. The latter, however, is quite favourable to the theory of poetic evolution as stated in the text. See the quotations from Taine and others in the essay of Dr. Buck. The false conclusions of Heinzel in regard to simile and metaphor are of little moment compared with the general value of the essay which contains them: Ueber den Stil der altgermanischen Poesie, Strassburg, Q. F., 1875, a stimulating piece of work.

1132.Modern Language Notes, I. 83.

1133.Logically Gerber is right, Die Sprache als Kunst, I. 256, in putting interjections at one end of the linguistic process and metaphor at the other; but chronologically, historically, genetically, the assumption fails to hold.

1134.The subject is too wide for further treatment, and can be regarded here only in its relations to the beginnings of poetry. See, however, for the early stages of a metaphor, J. Grimm’s essay on “Die FÜnf Sinne,” Kleinere Schriften, VII. 193 ff.; and F. Bechtel, Ueber die Bezeichnungen der sinnlichen Wahrnehmungen in den indogerm Sprachen, Weimar, 1879, where he shows how the idea of “bright” underlies so many of our words,—“glad,” for instance, which even in Anglo-Saxon meant “gleaming.” See, too, in this book the confusion, or flexibility, of words for the “bright” and the “loud,” seeing and hearing; also J. Grimm, “Die WÖrter des Leuchtens und Brennens,” Kl. Schr., VIII. 263 ff.

1135.Allegory, now a huge projection of metaphor from the style into the subject-matter, is a consistent series of personifications not unlike the later stages of myth; in fact, late myth is allegory.

1136.On the tendency of rhythm and music to suggest images and stir the powers of language, see the wild but interesting words of Nietzsche, Geburt d. TragÖdie, p. 48.

1137.See above, p. 211.

1138.Joshua Poole, English Parnassus, London, 1677, like Italians just before him, and like Vinesauf and others of earlier time, has an array of kennings whence the poet may pick and choose. Abel, for example (pp. 221 ff.), you may call “death’s first fruit,” or “death’s handsel.” Then there are “forms of invocating Muses” (p. 630), followed, alas, by “forms of concluding letters”—in prose.

1139.“The language of the age,” wrote Gray to West, April, 1742, “is never the language of poetry.”

1140.Kennings often read like riddles: so in Finnish, “contents of Wainamoinen’s milk-bowl,”—the sunshine. See, moreover, Scherer, Geschichte d. deutsch. Lit., pp. 7, 15; and R. M. Meyer, Altgerm. Poesie, p. 160.

1141.In this sketch of differentiation in poetic style only outlines are essayed. The subject is uncommonly attractive, and a book on the history of metaphor would be welcomed by all students of style. Nothing has been said here of symbolic metaphor from animals and the like. See Brinkmann’s study of “Thierbilder in der Sprache,” Die Metaphern, Bd. I. Bonn, 1878. His researches in German, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Latin, Greek, should be extended to half civilized and savage conditions, and should take a historical and genetic range. Of course, the Æsthetic side of this whole subject is treated in Gerber’s well known book, quoted several times on preceding pages, Die Sprache als Kunst.

1142.It is noteworthy that Aristotle excludes improvisation from poetry; and in modern times Gerber (Die Sprache als Kunst) finds this rude kind of verse so opposed to his definition of poetry (“die Kunst des Gedankens,” ibid., I. 50; “enthusiasm plus deliberation,” I. 77), that he too rules it out, and says it belongs simply to “the art of language.” It is not well to drag such a ball-and-chain by way of definition when one is dealing with primitive poetry.

1143.See above, p. 215. There is a lively if exaggerated account of the rhapsode in Blackwell’s Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer, pp. 104 ff. Limits already transgressed forbid the author to add any material on the minstrel in his relations to the making of poetry. See a brief account, with a few references, in Old English Ballads, pp. 310 ff. Further, see Piper, Spielmannsdichtung (Vol. 2 of the Deutsche National-Litteratur); Scherer, Gesch. d. deutsch. Dichtung im 11 u. 12 Jhrh. (Quellen. u. Forschungen, XII.); Wilmanns, Walther v. d. Vogelweide, especially pp. 39 ff.; the general account in Axel Olrik’s Middelalderens Vandrende Spillemaend (Opuscula Philologica), Copenhagen, 1887; Freymond, Jongleurs und Menestrels, Halle, 1883 (for the Romance side of the question); and portions of many other works, such as Jusserand, ThÉatre en Angleterre, p. 23, note; F. Vogt, Salman und Morolf, pp. cxxiii f.; notes here and there on Widsith and DÉor, the earliest types of English minstrel; and so on.

1144.There were pedants before paper, however, in the days of great mnemonic feats. See Max MÜller, in the Nineteenth Century, November, 1899, pp. 798 ff.

1145.This evolution of the solitary and deliberate poet has been outlined in Chap. IV.

1146.Burckhardt, Ren., I. 172. See also p. 250.

1147.Della Storia e della Ragione d’ogni Poesia, Vol. I., Bologna, 1739, pp. 155 ff.

1148.“Tutta volta bisogna ancor confessare, che questo fu il primo genere di Poesia, che fosse al Mondo.” There is a long account of improvisation in Crescimbeni, L’Istoria della Volgar Poesia, Venice, 1731 (written in 1697), pp. 219 ff. An old and very interesting gradus ad Parnassum is Ruscelli, Del Modo di Comporre in Versi nella Lingua Italiana, Venice, 1582 (a new edition), “nel quale va compreso un pieno ordinatissimo Rimario,” and there are directions for using the voice both for prose and for verse. The seventh chapter is on the “stanze d’ottava Rima,” and treats of improvisation, mentioning even an infant phenomenon in this art (“essendo ancor fanciullo ... non arrivava ai sedici anni”), who made verses off-hand on any subject which was given to him.

1149.From two books, one Italian, Saggi di Poesie parte dette all’ improvviso e parte scritte dal Cavaliere Perfetti patrizio Sanese ed insigne Poeta estemporaneo coronato di laurea in Campidoglio ... dal Dottor Domenico Cianfogni, 2 vols., Florence, 1748 (Vol. II. has the account of the crowning); and a Latin pamphlet of 56 pp., Josephi Mariani Parthenii S. J. de Vita et Studiis Bernadini Perfetti Senensis Poetae Laureati, Rome, 1771. They are interesting in many ways.

1150.Latin, xix.

1151.The pious father tells elsewhere of mitigating contrivances: “Frigida inter canendum uti solebat, ad fauces nimirum recreandas et ad nimium fervorem, quo incendebatur, restringuendum!”

1152.Along with Perfetti’s moribund art of individual improvisation dies as well the improvised flyting, even in its more complicated and artistic phases. Through sundry references made above (pp. 208, note, 325, 416 f.) in regard to the interlaced stanzas of ballad and song. I have come into a bit of unintentional and quite explicable confusion. These serranas were called artificial, and yet were cited in the proof of communal origins. Artistic and even artificial these serranas undoubtedly become; and yet so does the refrain. They are very common; as Professor Lang points out in his Liederbuch des KÖnigs Denis von Portugal, Halle, 1894, pp. xlvii, lxiii, they make “die Norm des altportugiesischen Kunstgedichtes,” and are found alike in songs of love and in the various kinds of flyting. Here, in the public song-duel, one crosses into communal territory; and the serranas go back to that rivalry of variation based upon a refrain or a repeated traditional verse.

1153.See above, p. 349.

1154.I regret that all references to BÜcher’s Arbeit und Rhythmus have been made from the first edition, and not from the second, which came to my hands after the foregoing chapters were printed. In bulk the book has more than doubled, increase lying mainly in new songs and refrains of labour, particularly of Bittarbeit and Frohnarbeit. Neither this new edition, however, nor the new edition of BÜcher’s Entstehung der Volkswirthschaft (see my note above, p. 107) changes materially his theory as quoted in defence of communal poetry. Not so much the priority of play is conceded as the early lack of a definite boundary between play and work. Again, references have been made above to YrjÖ Hirn’s book, FÖrstudier till en Konstfilosofi; this material, and much more of the sort, are now to be found in the same author’s Origins of Art, London and New York, 1900. Possibly some modification, due to the chapter on “Erotic Art,” should be made in the statements of ethnologists with regard to the lack of this motive in savage poetry.

1155.The science of poetry has had its share of wild theories meant to establish “laws” of progress. See Tarde, Les Lois Sociales, pp. 24 ff. But the play of collective and individual forces is too evident, too reasonable, to be classed with Vico’s Ricorsi and with Plato’s or Bacon’s cycles.

1156.In Chapters III and VII.

1157.See the brilliant description of this epoch in the opening chapter of Pellissier’s Mouvement LittÉraire au XIX? SiÈcle, 5th ed., Paris, 1898.

1158.Notably BÜcher, Entstehung der Volkswirthschaft,² TÜbingen, 1898, “Der Urzustand.”

1159.See Professor Keasbey, International Monthly, April, 1900: “The Institution of Society.”

1160.Arbeit u. Rhythmus, 2nd ed., p. 340.

1161.In dances, of course, as well. To references scattered through the preceding pages, add Mommsen on the Camenae, Hist. Rome, trans. Dickson, 2d ed. London, 1864, I. 240.

1162.See above, p. 155.

1163.You see me, Lord Bassanio, where I stand ...

1164.See above, pp. 140, 155.