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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

turns at the end to—

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

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

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