The Hebrew psalms[626] show very clearly a more or less artistic use of the refrain sung under congregational and therefore to some extent communal conditions.[627] These communal conditions can be guessed in their older and simpler form from such an account as is given of David and his dancing before the ark, when he “and all the house of Israel brought up the ark of the Lord with shouting and with the sound of the trumpet”;[628] the personal song detached itself from the rhythmic shouts of the dancing or marching multitude precisely as the song of the wife and sister over their dead came out clearer and clearer from the wailings of the clan. So, if D. H. Müller be right, following in the path marked by Lowth, the form of Hebrew prophecy was at first choral, then was divided into strophe and antistrophe, yielding in time to an impassioned solo of the prophet himself. In any case, this single prophet, in historical perspective, lapses into the throng, into those “prophetic hordes” which Budde compares with modern Dervishes, “raving bands” now forgotten or dimly seen in the background of a stage where noble individuals like Amos, still in close touch with the people, play the chief part, and hold the conspicuous place.[629] As Amos and his brother prophets yield to the later guild whose prophecies were written, so one goes behind Amos to the “bands,” to communal prophecy, to the repeated shouts and choral exhortation, and so to the festal horde of all early religious rites. The backward course would be from a prophecy written to be read, to the chanted blessing or imprecation of the seer; thence to a singing and shouting band under the leadership of one man, with constant refrain; and at last to the shouting and dancing of purely communal excitement, the real chorus. Moses and the children of Israel “sang a song unto the Lord, saying, I[630] will sing unto the Lord.... And Miriam the prophetess ... took a timbrel in her hand, and all the women went out after her with timbrels and with dances. And Miriam answered them, Sing ye to the Lord.” Here is certainly no premeditated verse; and it must be borne in mind that refrains, except where they have a sacred tradition behind them and are kept up by the priests, as in the Arval “minutes,” easily drop from the record. Oral tradition, on the other hand, is fain to hold fast to all these vain repetitions; they are the salt of the thing. Now and then an unmistakable refrain is preserved. “And it came to pass as they came, when David returned from the slaughter of the Philistines, that the women came out of all the cities of Israel, singing and dancing, to meet King Saul, with timbrels, with joy, and with instruments of music. And the women sang one to another in their play, and said:—
That women in all nations and at certain stages of culture make songs of triumph like this, as they dance and sing, is known to the most careless reader; one or two chorals, strangely similar to these songs of the Hebrew women, may be noted from mediæval Europe. Now it is the singing of Gothic songs of welcome by those maidens who come from their village, as the women of Israel from their cities, to meet and greet Attila,[632] dancing as they sing. So the daughter of Jephtha greeted her sire with the singing and dancing maidens; and so in Cashmere a stranger is still met by the women and girls of a village, who form a half circle at the first house where he comes, join their arms, and sing eulogies of him, dancing to the tune of the verse. Malays and even Africans do the same.[633] Again, it is in the seventh century, and an obscure saint, Faro by name, has won the gratitude of a community; straightway a song is made and sung “by the women as they dance and clap their hands.”[634] It was not often that a saint’s name lent grace to these songs of the women and saved them from clerical wrath; the decrees of councils, the letters of bishops, refer perpetually to the wicked verses and diabolical dances in which maids and even matrons indulged at the very doors of the church. Sometimes, however, national glory covered the shame. In the chronicle of Fabyan,[635] who is here telling no lies, it is said that after Bannockburn songs were made and sung with a refrain “in daunces, in the carols of the maidens and minstrels of Scotland, to the reproofe and disdaine of Englishmen”; and Barbour,[636] mentioning a fight in Eskdale where fifty Scots defeated three hundred English under Sir Andrew Harcla, says he will not go into details, seeing that any one who likes may hear—
One is even fain to believe that Layamon[637] was thinking of the women when he said that after a treaty of peace,
That the record of these refrains is so meagre and baffling need cause no surprise. The histories of national literature are disappointing to the student of beginnings, for the reason that they almost invariably[638] study these beginnings as conditioned by the habits of authorship in modern times; they are always looking for original composition, for expression of individual feeling, for a story, and therefore turn aside from these stretched metres of an antique song. But the story, and the expression of personal emotion, are precisely what one seldom if ever finds at the beginning of a literature; one finds there, when one finds anything, the chorus or its deputy the refrain. The refrain was a constant element in early Greek song, “an essential mint-mark”;[639] not only the early melic verse, but a study of the chorus[640] in dramatic survival, proves this beyond doubt, and one is amazed to find Rosières, in the essay quoted above, saying that the ancients, particularly the Greeks, had no need of the refrain, and hardly used it at all. How important, on the contrary, this refrain must have been, how it works back through the alternate strains of chorus and solo to the throng of communal singers and dancers, could be shown for classical poetry, and can be proved by mediæval and modern refrains, some already noted under the vocero, and others presently to be considered in songs of labour and of the harvest. True, the records are scanty; and the unwary historian of English poetry in the early stage, reviewing his material, announces that, with the exception of some insignificant charms, there is just one poem with a refrain, the “Consolation” of Deor, the king’s minstrel out of place,—taking, that is, a lyric of individual and artistic reflection as the only example of that part of poetry which above all belongs to the communal and spontaneous expression of the throng. Recorded poetry has here a poor tale to tell, and even that is usually marred in the telling. Where, then, is the old refrain of the English folk, and where was the chorus? Had they no dances, no ballads, no communal singing? If the evidence of ethnology from tribes and communities of men in every degree of culture is to be accepted, it is certain that Englishmen of that early day had dance, ballad, chorus, and refrain. We know that their old heathen hymns went with the dance; and the dance means a strophic arrangement. What, then, has become of this refrain? So far as the old English poetry has found record at the hands of the monk, it is in a fixed alliterative metre, without strophes,[641] suited to epic and narrative purposes, suited to recitation and a sort of chant, but not, in its literary shape, suited to refrain and chorus.[642] One does not dance an epic, or sing it; it is chanted or recited; and even Anglo-Saxon lyric, barring that little song of Déor, is elegiac and highly reflective. The refrain, says Dr. R. M. Meyer,[643] is to be assumed for oldest Germanic poetry, although it was thrown out by the recited alliterative verse, only to come again into recorded literature with the introduction of rime; but no one supposes that Englishmen ceased in that interval to dance and sing. It is a defect of the record. The chorals and refrains, even the ballads of which William of Malmesbury speaks as crumbling to pieces with the lapse of time, were simply deemed useless if not harmful, and had no claim whatever to the life beyond life. Nor is this chorus, this refrain, simply assumed for oldest Germanic poetry; it is proved, and nowhere proved so well as in Müllenhoff’s essay.[644] Many conclusions of this sturdy and often too intolerant scholar have been rejected by later investigation; but his assertion in regard to choral poetry as the foundation of every literature remains an article of faith among those who deal at first hand with the material involved, and writers since his day who have undertaken to describe the different kinds of Germanic choral song have done little more than follow in his steps.[645] There is no need, then, to rehearse this proof of the existence of refrain and chorus as main form[646] of poetry among the ancient Germans; it is in order simply to trace these and other choral songs in the later fragments and the surviving refrains, whether sung at the solemn procession round the fields, or sung to the festal dance at harvest-home, or in whatever survivals they may be found, and to compare them with kindred refrains and kindred customs elsewhere. From this point of view, even the blackness of thick darkness which broods over Anglo-Saxon communal song, that darkness of superstitious fear felt by monks who knew these customs and these songs to be of the devil himself, and would not write them down, is lifted a little. We look, then, at refrains of labour, refrains of actual work, too trivial usually for record, and at those refrains and chorals of the harvest feasts, of plantings, sowings, reapings, which had the taint of heathendom upon them, and so were either left in silence or coaxed into a harmless formula; we look, too, at refrains and chorus of the dance, the sunnier side of life, and still more provocative than labour as an occasion of communal song. For the refrains of war, and even for the choral raised by a whole army as it marched to battle, an occasion which Müllenhoff calls the supreme moment of all Germanic life, the fierce and clamorous words needing no leader,[647] and the wild rhythm asking no aid from trumpet or drum, there is ample evidence; and indeed these war chorals might be connected by easy stages with the ridiculous marching songs already noted above. From the barditus to “ma poule a fait un poulet” were a pretty journey; but we will keep to the ways of peace, and the saure wochen, frohe feste of everyday life will yield material enough in regard to this communal refrain.
Songs of labour are found everywhere; but there is a great chasm between the actual refrains, the survivals of communal or even solitary song which come from the real scene of labour and from the real labourers, and those songs which are made for the labourer. Nowhere is the difference between volkspoesie and volksthümliche poesie so evident; and we have here no concern with poetry, however successful, which has been written for the edification of “honest toil.”[648] It is the song of actual labour to which we now turn, as it has abounded in all the activities of life, and which, like the ballad, is fast vanishing from the scene. Sometimes the labour was solitary, and the song was a plaintive little lyric when it was made by the lonely maiden grinding at her hand-mill:
but often even this grinding of the mill was social, as in Poland, where it was the manner of the women to repeat a word in chorus.[650] Plutarch has preserved an old Greek “song of the millstone,”[651] which he heard a woman sing; from the older Scandinavian literature[652] comes a lay, sung by two maidens, Menja and Fenja, as they grind out King Frodi’s fortune, which may hold bits of the actual refrain of labour, and has, too, its touch of folklore, explaining “how the sea became salt”; but the real and primitive choral of such labour is sufficiently attested by those women in Poland, and by a similar case among the Basuto tribe,[653] where, as Cassilis says, to relieve the fatigue of solitary grinding, “the women come together and grind in unison, by singing an air which blends perfectly with the cadenced clinking of the rings upon their arms.” There is plenty of evidence for this choral of the grinding women in places and times so widely sundered as to forbid all idea of borrowing, and to leave the conditions of communal labour and communal consent as the only explanation. Originally there was a spontaneous chorus or refrain[654]—in the strictly choral sense, that is, and not in the technical meaning presently to be considered—suggested by the movements, cadence, and sounds of the work itself; improvisation added words at will, until at last art seized upon the material and gave now a song like that of Fenja and Menja, now even a jolly refrain such as one finds in an audacious song of Beaumont and Fletcher’s Maid of the Mill.[655] Everywhere labour had its refrain and song, and even the scanty remains of Hellenic communal poetry tell of songs for reaper, thresher, miller, for the vintage, spinning, weaving, for the drawers of water, oarsmen, rope-makers, watchmen, shepherds, and for the common labourers marching out to their work. Rome itself, in the old silent period, has something of this song for the attentive ear;[656] and allusions scattered throughout the Bible show that the Hebrews sang at their work in house and in field. A few echoes of such singing come from Egypt; while darker and darkest Africa, along with savage tribes over the world, shows yet more elementary, and hence more insistent and necessary[657] connection between work and song. With the breaking up of communal conditions, with the advance of individual and initiative art, these songs of labour, like the ballad, like all communal poetry, tend to disappear or yield to alien verse. Often the individual works in silence, when his labour demands intelligent thought, but where labour is automatic or monotonous, wherever it is collective, the labourer sings, and always will do so; the important fact is that he now ceases to sing the old refrain or song of the labour itself, born, as Bücher[658] shows so plainly, of the very movements and sounds which it called forth. For good reason, andere zeiten, andere lieder. Neus[659] noted that the Esthonians, a century ago, sang their own songs, and sang always as they worked in the fields or came together for festal occasions; now,—and “now” is fifty years ago—he says that either the song is silent, or else it is changed for an imported German ditty. All the more need, then, to collect and study such survivals of the refrains of labour as can be found. Speaking of the decline of folksong in Germany, not only of the making but even of the singing, Professor E. H. Meyer[660] remarks that collective labour still has some power here and there to stir the old instinct into a fitful activity. Now it is in the spinning-room,—where Böckel[661] a few years ago could hear Hessian folksongs in the making—now at the berry-picking in Nassau, at the flax-breaking, and elsewhere in cases where companies of peasants still ply the monotonous tasks of their forefathers. And in all these cases, as in the beginning, so in the end, women are the mainstay of communal song.[662]
Of particular trades and callings, perhaps sailors, oarsmen, and watermen generally, would furnish more refrains than could be found in any one industry of the land. Sailors’ chanteys are still heard in every ship;[663] but they are now apt to echo those songs of the street and the dance-hall which have been picked up at port, and they have seldom a traditional interest. Here and there, however, the genuine refrain is clear enough, and attests itself by its power to withstand the discrimina rerum and the changes of time; it is said that modern Greek sailors, when reefing sails, have nearly the same melodious calls as those preserved in a play of Aristophanes.[664] Negro roustabouts on the Mississippi sing interminable refrains, while a capable leader improvises stanzas on the work in hand or on current events; a process which is matched by refrains and songs of manual labour in every part of the world. A well-known passage in the Complaynt of Scotland[665] gives the cries and songs both of weighing anchor,—where a leader sings and the rest answer “as it had bene ecco in an hou heuch,” like the echo in a hollow ravine, mainly in repetitions,—and of hoisting sail, with iteration of short running phrases such as:—
and not stopping here, undertakes to set down the “chorus” of guns heavy and light as a spirited sea-fight begins. In the old play Common Conditions occurs a pirates’ song, the stanzas in quatrains, with a jolly refrain or chorus:—
Hoisting, pulling, however, and work of the sort on shipboard, yield in importance, so far as refrains are concerned, to the regular cadence of the oar, where voices have kept tune and oars have kept time from earliest days. Not only in the classical period, where actual song and music came to take the place of the refrain,[666] but with Egyptians, Africans, Tonga Islanders, wherever rowing is practised, these refrains are known; the Maoris, for example, “row in time with a melody which is sung by a chorus sitting in canoes.” The same thing is told of the Indians of Alaska.[667] A refrain already noted seems to have served in England both for hoisting and for rowing; Skelton mentions it:—
and D’Israeli says that sailors at Newcastle in heaving anchor still have their Heave and ho, rumbelow; while it is recorded that in 1453, Norman, Lord Mayor of London, chose to row rather than ride to Westminster, and the watermen made this roundel or song:—
so that two refrains are confused in the laureate’s account, and the exquisite reason, with a Lord Mayor in the case, is no more probable than such stories of origins are wont to be. For example, Cnut is credited[669] with a little song, which he is said to have composed as he rowed by Ely and heard the chanting of the monks; “ordering the rowers to pull gently, and calling his retinue about him, he asked them to join him ... in singing a ballad which he composed in English and which begins in this way:—
Several things here are noteworthy; both Grundtvig and Rosenberg have pointed out[670] that this song is composed in a two-line ballad strophe of four accents to the verse, the kind afterward so common in Scandinavia and in England; and whatever Cnut’s share in the making of it, it is at least of the eleventh century, and is the first recorded piece of verse to break away from the regular stichic metre of our oldest poetry. Moreover, it is said that Cnut improvised the song, and that he called on the others to join him; the lines quoted then, so Grundtvig infers, are the burden or chorus of the song itself; and it is interesting to know that in the days of the chronicler, say about the middle of the twelfth century, this refrain as well as the song was sung in the choral dances of the English folk. Doubtless it was sung to the oar itself; and that may have been the first of it, with royalty as an afterthought.[671]
Coming to land, one would think that the blacksmith, rhythmic as his work may be, must have little breath to spare for song; and, indeed, Bücher could find but one specimen which seemed to hold the genuine rhythm of the anvil. Had he looked to the English, however, he would have met more; an old “Satire on the Blacksmiths”[672] preserves a refrain probably sung to the work itself, or, at worst, imitated from its cadence:—
St. Clement is the patron of blacksmiths, and while Brand’s account of the festivities gives no refrain, but only poor doggerel and mimicry, it is clear that processions, songs, and dances were a feature of the saint’s day,[673] once regarded as the beginning of winter; so that communal origins may even lurk in the traditional anvil song, quoted by Dickens,[674] “that imitated the measure of beating upon iron, and was a mere lyrical excuse for the introduction of Old Clem’s respected name”:—
Again, there is the tinker with his catches, which moved Overbury[675] to a theory of origins; “from his art was music first invented, and therefore is he alwaies furnished with a song,” to which his hammer keeps time. Of course, the only point of interest in these songs of the trades is the survival of a refrain which carries the sound and cadence of the work itself. Thus in the old play of Tom Tiler and his Wife, it is probable that an actual refrain has crept into the lively song of which Dame Strife sings the first staff, with its
clearly an echo from the roof. But there is more of the communal strain in spinning-songs;[676] for here is the home of balladry, a city of refuge even to this day,[677] and here the women make as well as sing the song. Echoes of the wheel itself[678] are not infrequent; perhaps they are too close to art in that pretty song of sewing, knitting, and spinning, sung by three women in the first act of Roister Doister:—
although, what with incremental repetition in other stanzas, and the audible whir of the wheel, this is like the songs which still move women to emulation under like circumstances in the spinning-rooms of Europe. “In Northamptonshire, when girls are knitting in company, they say”—surely sing?—
The ‘old woman,’ ‘out,’ and ‘in’ are the arrangements of the wool over and under the knitting-pins.”[680] The same authority gives other rimes of this sort, more or less suggested by the movements of the work; for instance, a song of Cumberland wool-carders:—
Slightly different is the song of Peterborough workhouse girls in procession, where the refrain is quite primitive in form:[681]—
Bell[682] records what seems to be a real refrain of the spinning-wheel in the Greenside Wakes Song:—
The flyting that goes with this refrain is negligible,—a man and a woman on horseback with spinning-wheels before them, singing alternate stanzas in the midst of the fair, with its dancing and merriment, a sort of side-show; but the refrain may well be old.
Songs of the crafts, however, are less likely to hold the festal, gregarious, communal note than those old refrains which took their cadence from the movements of workers in the field. An agricultural community, whether in its rudest stages, a horde that lives in fertile river bottoms as distinguished from the nomadic, predatory bands of the plain, or in the civilization of feudal Europe, always tends to homogeneous conditions and always fosters communal song. Where these conditions survive, this song in some degree survives with them. Corsican labourers in the field, says Ortoli,[683] still sing so at their work; the Styrian threshers, eight together, make their flails chorus thus:—
while Silesians, with two, three, four, five, six, hear as many different refrains made by the strokes of the flail;[684] and Bladé[685] prints a song of Gascon peasants which seems to give again all the stages in the culture of the vine,—a stanza or two may follow for example of the repetition and the refrain:—
Early English drama was evidently fond of songs not unlike this, and in Summer’s Last Will and Testament Nash brings harvesters on the scene singing what appears to be a song of harvest-home, if one may judge by the refrain of Hooky, Hooky, said by a Dodsley editor[687] to be heard still in some parts of the kingdom. “Enter Harvest,” run the directions, “with a scythe on his neck, and all his reapers with sickles, and a great black bowl with a posset in it, come before him; they come in singing:—
The tendency to put popular and traditional songs into a play was common everywhere. Hans Sachs[689] used a May-song for the ring-dance which is clearly made in its turn out of a lusty old refrain:—
Best of all, however, George Peele, who in his Old Wives’ Tale gives tryst to countless waifs of folklore and popular stories, makes room there for a pretty song of harvesters. “Ten to one,” cries Madge, when they first enter upon the stage, “they sing a song of mowing,” but they are sowing, it seems; and once again they come in, this time with a song of harvest. The present writer has ventured[690] to change the first song so as to make it agree with the second, not an audacious feat when one considers the case. The songs, with an interval between, would then run as follows:—
The refrain is easy to detach from the rest; and it is clear, too, that actual imitation of sowing, reaping, binding, often went with the song, probably in this case a combination of gesture and word known still in games of modern children.
These songs, particularly the Gascon vintage chorus, are simply a festal recapitulation of the rustic year, with more or less echo of actual refrain sung to the labour in its various stages. From the moment when communal labour began to sow the seed—in Japan[692] the peasants still plant their rice in cadence with a chorus, and in Cashmere[693] the onions are sown with accompaniment of “a long-drawn, melancholy song,”—through process after process, down to the picking,[694] reaping, harvesting, and so to the festal imitations just noted, even to the ritual of priestly thanksgiving, every stage is marked by communal singing, except that in the function last named the community turns passive, the guild replaces the throng, and art has begun its course. Hence it is that most of the survivals of song and refrain come down to our day with more or less magic in the case. Rites are performed by the head of a family, and are even transferred from the field to the home; as when[695] at flax-planting a German wife springs about the hearth and cries, “Heads as big as my head, leaves as big as my apron, and stalks as thick as my leg!” In Silesia,[696] again, husband and wife sing together a song with the refrain,—
Even in the field itself, song is mingled with these symbolical and even religious rites; incantations, such as that Anglo-Saxon charm[697] for making barren or bewitched land bear again, are strongly tinged with clerical lore, and in this case involve a visit to the church altar. The Romans, too, had spells and charms for restoring fields to fertility when other spells and charms had bewitched them; harmful rites of this sort were forbidden in the laws of the twelve tables.[698] Corruption is rife in these things; but in a charm[699] for the old English peasant to get back his strayed or stolen cattle, amid the hocus-pocus of Herod and Judas and the holy rood and scraps of Latin, a few lines echo the old repetition, but have no refrain:—
A thousand things of the sort survive, but seldom touch the refrain; perhaps the charm to make butter come from the churn, common in 1655,[701] had a choral element:—
We turn back to the actual labour of the fields, and the songs and refrains that went with it. A refrain[702] has come down to us from the harvesters of ancient Hellas,—“Sing the sheaf-song, the sheaf-song, the song of the sheaf,” which is not unlike the type just considered in George Peele’s “Lo, here we come a-reaping”; while that waif of Germanic myth,[703] the story of Scéaf, where the “sheaf” is made the name of an agricultural god, or culture-hero, as one will, reminds us of Phrygian countryfolk who at their reaping sang “in mournful wise” the song of Lityerses, itself said to be the outcome of an old refrain, lapsing into a vocero for the hero’s death. Burlesque laid unholy hands upon the custom and the myth; the story growing out of the song passed into a tradition which coldly furnished forth the satire and comedy of a later day; since any song of the harvest-field or the threshing-floor came to be called a Lityerses,[704] the name was seized upon for certain comic features, and grew to be a symbol of an insatiable eater. Yet dramatic allusions and uses of more serious nature, like the song recorded by Peele, were doubtless common in Greece and throughout the Orient. It has been said already, in speaking of the vocero, that the song of Maneros was sung by Egyptian reapers, just as they sang on the threshing-floor the song of the oxen treading out the corn; while at the harvest-home Greek husbandmen, if Mannhardt’s surmise[705] is right, sang a variant of the Maneros; and Homer is witness for the singing of the Linos at the time of vintage.[706] If, now, one seeks for similar songs in the fields of modern Europe, one finds, to be sure, hints in plenty, descriptions by this and that traveller, and fragments of actual verse; but conditions of religious ceremonial have broken up the old refrains and barred any handing down of a Germanic Linos or Lityerses. Customs, too, have changed; and few are the places where folk at harvest-home do as their forbears did, when “the whole family sat down at the same table, and conversed, danced, and sang together during the entire night without difference or distinction of any kind” as between master and man, mistress and maid.[707] Add to the case that great transfer of vital interests upon which economists lay such stress, from open-air life to home-life, from the throng with its indiscriminate dance and merriment, often, too, its indiscriminate morals, its communal habit of thought and expression, to the individual responsibility, the sober pleasures and the stricter morals of the fireside, from the delight in movement, noise, cadence of many voices, to lamplight and the printed page and meditation: add this to the account, and one sees how ill it must have fared with the communal refrain of work, feast, and ceremonial rite. Reactions come, of course, and no one denies a constant market for cakes and ale; but what is a church fair, even a camp-meeting, to the old vigil? The wife of Bath is still with us, but she has to make shift with an afternoon tea. Disintegration, due to the lapse of communal feeling, has either broken up the traditional refrains, leaving only Hooky, hooky,[708] and unmeaning things of the kind, or else has favoured the making of doggerel which may or may not mean something, and which in any case threatens the student with perils of a too curious interpretation of chops and tomato-sauce. Even where there is neither corruption nor distortion, there is unblushing if often innocent substitution of modern mawkishness. Precisely as one boggles, when reading Herd’s Scottish Songs, to find under the title “I wish my Love were in a Myre” the familiar translation of Sappho’s “Blest as the Immortal Gods,”—so, in coming to the “Cornish Midsummer Bonfire Song,” in Bell’s collection, a title to make any student of communal poetry get out a fresh pen, and in reading, too, that here “fishermen and others dance about the fire and sing appropriate songs,” one pulls up with a rude shock at—