which, while appropriate in sentiment, has not the note of simplicity that one expects from Cornish fishermen dancing round the bonfire of heathen tradition. True, this is a very bad counterfeit; but many a verse quite as alien at heart, if not on the face, has been foisted upon communal and traditional song.

The best survivals come from the harvest field, and mingle refrain with improvisation. Very common in old times and in new is the note of ridicule, particularly for the wayfaring man, converted temporarily into a fool, who passes by the labourers; such a man even now gets rude handling as well as rude rimes, and this was the case in Hellas.^[710] In an often-quoted Idyll of Ausonius there is reference to the exchange of abusive lyric compliments between workers in the field and the boatmen on the Moselle; while any one can note how this instinct for a flyting between labourers in a band and the spectator ab extra, alone or in company, holds always and everywhere, while, on the other hand, the solitary labourer and the solitary wanderer are wont to pass the time of day with full courtesy and often with an inexplicably kindly feeling. German peasants breaking flax in the fields still sing to the rhythm of their strokes; as in the old days, a stranger who passes by them is sure to be hailed in improvised verses not of a complimentary kind. Particularly if the stranger be a young gentleman, a possible suitor for one of the daughters at the great house, sarcastic song greets him from twenty or thirty throats, mainly a refrain, and that partly of an imitative character, with derisive lines like:—

with the refrain for conclusion,—

All this, of course, to the exact time of the work in hand. When no stranger offers, mutual flytings will serve. Near Soest all the young people shout and sing throughout the entire process of preparing flax,—“unsung flax,” they say, “is good for nothing,”—and songs are improvised in satire of one another, with a refrain rummel dumm dum or rem sen jo jo. Travelling in Wales, by the bye, had once these chances of satire, and Aubrey tells about them, thinking doubtless of his favourite time “before the civil warres.” For in Wales there were not only “rymers ... that upon any subject given would versify extempore halfe an hour together,” but “the vulgar sort of people ... have a humour of singing extempore upon occasion: e.g. a certain gentleman coming to ——, the woemen that were washing at ye river fell all a singing in Welsh, wʰ was a description of ye men and their horses.”^[712] How facile the black fellows of Australia, Africans, and savages everywhere, can be with this improvised ridicule, mainly practised on the march, or at some sort of labour, all travellers testify. Samoans sing instead of talking “as they walk along the road, or paddle the canoe, or do any other piece of work. These songs often contain sarcastic remarks, and in passing the house or village of parties with whom they are displeased, they strike up a chant embodying some offensive ideas.”^[713]

We must keep to the harvest fields. Wordsworth’s solitary reaper called forth an exquisite lyric; but there is material more attractive for the student of refrains, however it lack poetic merit, in Boswell’s and Johnson’s stories of a Highland harvest, and one would be glad indeed if the doctor, who had all of Wordsworth’s curiosity on this point, could have made the reapers tell him what they sang.^[714] He was coming close to Rasay in a boat, while, as Boswell says, the boatmen “sang with great spirit,” and Johnson remarked that “naval music was very ancient”;^[715] then the men were silent, and from the near fields was heard the song of reapers, “who seemed to shout as much as to sing, while they worked with a bounding activity.” Johnson’s own account^[716] of reaping on Rasay may refer to this or to another occasion. “I saw,” he says, “the harvest of a small field. The women reaped the corn, and the men bound up the sheaves. The strokes of the sickle were timed by the modulations of the harvest-song in which all their voices were united. They accompany in the Highlands every action which can be done in equal time with an appropriate strain, which has, they say, not much meaning;^[717] but its effects are regularity and cheerfulness.” These hints from the Highlands are of peculiar importance because of the undoubted homogeneous conditions of life in the clans, keeping songs of this sort in an almost primitive state. Significant is the rhythm of shouts, significant the preponderance of the refrain. Lady Rasay showed Johnson “the operation of wawking cloth. Here it is performed by women who kneel upon the ground and rub it with both their hands, singing an Erse song all the time.” Boswell speaks of their “loud and wild howl”; and Dr. Hill^[718] quotes Lockhart that women at this work screamed “all the while in a sort of chorus. At a distance the sound was wild and sweet enough, but rather discordant” at close quarters.

The Lowlands of Scotland, too, had their kirn,^[719] and the English harvest-home, practically the same thing, had merry songs and refrains down to living memory. What must these songs have been, when, if Professor Skeat^[720] is right in his estimate and inference, on one estate of two hundred acres in Suffolk no less than five hundred and fifty-three persons were assembled for harvest? At almost any period of English country life one finds the rural philosopher looking back, like the Rev. Dr. Jessopp now,^[721] to kindlier and more communal times, greater harvests, keener jollity, a wider and deeper social sense; so Overbury’s franklin felt that he held a brief for the tempus actum. “He allows of honest pastime, and thinkes not the bones of the dead anything bruised, or the worse for it, though the country lasses dance in the churchyard after even-song. Rocke Monday, and the wake in summer, shrovings, the wakefull ketches on Christmas eve, the hoky or seed-cake, these he yearly keepes.” Of this festal round harvest-home was culmination, since it knitted the bond between labour and rest, and was the pledge of plenty, the high tide of the agricultural year. Three elements may be noted in this harvest-home so far as the refrain is concerned; first, the shouting, the choral cries and songs of the labourers in the field as the last sheaf is cut and bound; secondly, the march homeward with the hock-cart to the cadence of loud refrains and songs, with the thrice-repeated procession about barn and yard; and thirdly, the more elaborate ceremonial of those gatherings which marked the safe accomplishment of harvest. Moreover, in any of these cases a progress may be noted from the rude but cadenced shouts, the refrains and chorals, through definite songs of harvest, up to all manner of offshoots and distortions,—fixed rites, speeches, sermons, pantomime, beggings, what not; but even in the last and worse estate of the communal harvest-song there is everywhere echo of the refrain, everywhere echo of the dance. The breaking up of communal labour has left mainly the songs and cries of working folk on any given farm or estate; but the songs of a common festival for harvested crops still linger in customs of the village,—now a traditional march of the elder folk, now some half-understood dance and walk of the maidens, such as Hardy describes in his Tess, and now a mere song of village children coming in a band from the search for berries, as in the Black Forest:—

Lithuanians coming back from the field, or in any communal gathering, when they have sung through their traditional stock of songs, call for a new ditty; amid jest and jollity some one strikes up a daina of his own, composing as he sings; the rest repeat in chorus, correct the words, add to them,—and so a new song is made, and, if it finds favour, is handed down, and even passed to the neighbour villages. This custom, however, is fast going out of date.^[723]

In some places the day when harvest begins is still a time of communal and ritual importance; Würtemberg reapers, men and women, gather in the early dawn and sing a choral for blessing on their work.^[724] As they go to the field, the throng still sing choruses, improvised verses, and traditional ballads; and when they march home at dusk to their village, they sing songs, often modern enough, but, as Pfannenschmid points out, substitutes for older and doubtless far more communal singing, which indeed lingers in the unintelligible refrain. In many places, however, chorus, refrain and song, whether communal or alien, to be sung at harvest and threshing, are dying out or dead; in Normandy, says Beaurepaire,^[725] at the fête de la gerbe, when the last of the wheat is threshed, no song of any sort is heard, though elsewhere the festival is loud with chorus. A scrap of the refrain sung in another part of France—

Beaurepaire heard, to be sure, here and there in Normandy; but it was no longer a refrain of labour, and was attached to a love-song.^[726]

The main ceremony, of course, is at the end of harvest. In many places a custom still prevails, that when the last sheaf is to be cut, a portion of grain is left standing, and the reapers now dance about it with repeated cries, sometimes of vague mythological tradition like “Wold, Wold, Wold,” and with songs; now bare their heads, and pour food and drink upon the spot; now let the “bonniest lass” cut this remnant, dress it, and bring it home as the “corn-baby”; now throw their sickles at it to see who can cut it down;^[727] and so on, in variety of form, but all to the same purpose. In Flanders they sing, when the last load is taken from the field,

There is every reason to think that some rite of this sort, accompanied with communal refrain and song, was once universal in agricultural life.^[729] The corn-baby just described as decked in silk and ribbons and brought home with singing, is also known as the kirn-baby, the ivy-girl, and the maiden; so that harvest-home is here and there called the maiden-feast.^[730] The songs belong primarily on the field and with the homeward faring cart; but customs change. In Suffolk at harvest suppers some one is crowned with a pillow and the folk all sing I am the Duke of Norfolk,^[731] though elsewhere in the country the old note remains. Still farther from the field, Hertfordshire countrymen sing The Barley Mow in alehouses after their day’s labour; but in another part of Suffolk this is a festal song chanted at the harvest-supper “when the stack, rick, or mow of barley is finished.” It is a song of repetitions, and holds an old refrain.^[732] For this song at the harvest-home supper, its variations, corruptions, survivals, its refrains, and its choruses, one would need a book; a description or two of recent doings must suffice. “At the harvest suppers up to some twenty years ago,” say Broadwood and Maitland, “while the other guests were still seated at the table, a labourer carrying a jug or can of beer or cider filled a horn for every two men, one on each side of the table; as they drank, this old harvest-song was sung and the chorus repeated, until the man with the beer had reached the end of the long table, involving sometimes thirty repetitions of the first verse. After this, the second verse was sung in the same manner.” The chorus—from Wiltshire—ran thus:—

What is left here of communal song is the fact of the chorus and the infinite repetition; the song has a poor mixture of the bucolic with the buckish. The older collection of Dixon gives a better song:—

with another repetition of the line.^[733] The men who sang this chorus were still in thrall to an old custom at the barley harvest. On putting up the last sheaf, which is called the craw, or crow sheaf, the man who has it cries out,—

Another asks,—

And the answer comes,—

Then wild cheering, and off they go to the supper, where they sing a well-known cumulative song about the brown bowl, the quarter-pint, the half-pint, and so on.

These repeated cries, however, take us back to the field. In Devon, as Brand relates, they still cried “the neck”; a little bundle was made from the best ears of the sheaves, and when the last field was reaped, all gathered about the person who had this neck, who first stooped and held it near the ground. All the men doffed their hats and held them likewise and then cried, in a very prolonged and harmonious tone, The Neck, at the same time raising themselves upright, and elevating arms and hats above their heads, the holder of the neck doing likewise. This was done thrice; after which they changed their cry to wee yen,^[734] way yen, prolonged as before, and also sounded thrice; then boisterous laughter, amidst which they break up and hurry to the farmhouse,—a maimed rite, indeed, but of interest when compared with kindred doings. For the words are surely wreckage of an old refrain, full of repetitions, like that song Montanus rescued from the rites of midsummer-eve along the Rhine. Under the “crown,” boys, girls, and their elders dance in a ring and sing as they dance a sort of refrain which is made of incremental repetitions into a description of the game they are playing; meantime one person stands in the midst of the ring until he has played his part to the choral suggestion, a common element in other games of children. In these and kindred ceremonies it is clear that a concerted shouting was the main feature, but the shouts were rhythmical and went with the communal dance, not with a disintegrated, howling mob. At Hitchin farmers drove furiously home with the last load of harvest, while the people rushed madly after, shouting and dashing bowls of water on the corn; but this is chaotic, for old Tusser^[735] knew a better way:—

In Germany the last load of grain is brought home with throwing of water and singing of traditional songs and shouts for the master. So too in English “youling,” when cider is thrown on the apple trees, at each cup “the company sets up a shout.”^[736] Doubtless the elaborate chorus of the Arval brothers had once its wild but cadenced shout of the whole festal throng, as they “beat the ground” in communal consent of voice and step; and this primitive shout recurs in all folksong, not only in the schnaderhüpfl, in the jodel which ends a stanza, but in those cries at the dance which have crept into the ballad itself. But the cadenced shout, the refrain, the infinite repetition of a traditional song, pass with the dance that timed them, and decorous reapers may now depute one of their number to act as spokesman; hence, as in Mecklenburg, the recited poem, or the little speech, or even, as in Hanover, a figure made of the stalks is furnished with a letter to be read aloud for the behoof of neighbours; and there are other infamies of the sort. So passes the old Harvest-home.

Of vast importance for agricultural life, and resonant with refrain and song, were those processions about the field, about parish boundaries, to sacred wells,^[737] to woods and groves to bring in the May, and for a hundred other purposes to a hundred other resorts. The solemn procession of a community, along with the festal dance, forms the oldest known source of poetry; and Kögel points out that in German even now the proper word for celebrating a festal occasion is begehen, while the corresponding noun is used in a mediæval gloss for ritus and cultus. The song of the Arval brothers had its origin in such a procession about the fields; and Vergil’s advice^[738] to the farmer shows that this rite was no monopoly of priests, or even of the man skilled in incantations, but a communal affair,—marching round the young crops, and dance and song at harvest:—

There can be no question of borrowing in these songs and dances, even in the simpler forms of ritual, which are found wherever rudest agriculture has begun. Doubtless only a change of religion deprives us of those songs, or some echo of them, which were sung in the famous procession of Nerthus,^[740] the terra mater, goddess of fertility and peace among the Germanic tribes who lived by the northern oceans two thousand years ago. These people, so Tacitus^[741] records the rite, “believe that she enters into human activity, and travels among them.” Drawn by cows, she is accompanied in her mysterious wagon by a priest; “those are joyful times and places which the goddess honours with her presence, and her visit makes holiday.”^[742]

Tacitus was interested in the mysteries of the rite; would that he had heard and transmitted the songs that rang out in honour of this German Demeter, and had described the dances of the folk about their fields!^[743] For, as Kögel points out, the later procession to bless crops and to ban all things hostile to their thriving, a custom still common in certain parts of Europe, is only a repetition of this old progress. Half-way between the time of Nerthus and the present occurs that Anglo-Saxon charm for making barren or bewitched land bear fruit; amid its excrescences of ritual, and under the alien matter, still lingers a hint of the old communal procession, the old communal song and dance; and perhaps Nerthus is dimly remembered in the cries of,—

which has a repetition familiar from many survivals,^[744] and in the lines:—

Again, one has the extremes of shouts, communal cadenced cries, and songs which are often quite irrelevant; thus in Brandenburg on Easter Monday girls march by long rows, hand in hand, over the young corn of each field, singing Easter songs, while the young men ring the church bells;^[745] but one learns that Wends of the fifteenth century greeted the early corn as they ran round it in wild procession, and hailed it “with loud shouting.”^[746]

About the year 1133, and along the lower Rhine, a procession was in vogue which may have been a survival of the worship of that goddess recorded by Tacitus and called Isis because her symbol was a ship; for in the mediæval rite such a ship was placed on wheels and carried about the country, followed by shouting bands and hailed at every halt with song and dance.^[747] The songs, turpia cantica et religioni Christianae indigna concinentium, were condemned by clericals,^[748] and the dances of scantily clad women, not unlike the festal dances of savage women in many places at this season of the year, were doubtless not only intrinsically objectionable, but pointed back to the heathen doings from which our Germanic folk were so slowly converted. A glimpse at this older worship is given by Gregory in his often-quoted story of the Langobards who offered a goat’s head to their “devil,” running about in a circle and singing impious songs.^[749] A survival of some such heathen rite, with ridiculous perversion of Christian legend, is the feast of the ass, the festival of fools, on Christmas or on St. Stephen’s day, when during mass the priest brays thrice and the congregation respond in kind; here and there, as in France, a hymn is sung, with refrain from the throng:^[750]—

and ending in what Hampson oddly calls “an imitation of the noisy Bacchanalian cry of Evohe!”—

a very far cry, indeed. After service, crowds marched through the streets, sang Fescennine songs, danced, and ended by “dashing pails of water over the precentor’s head.” It is needless to follow this degenerate choral over Europe, as it blends thus with rites of the church, passes into the song of the waits, and lingers in degraded form with the beggars or children who parade the countryside at Martinmas or in Christmas week, singing refrains that echo older and better song and doggerel that echoes nothing.

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

printed here with full apologies to all outraged friends of the immensities and the eternities, who sought nobler stuff in a book on the beginnings of poetry. On Palm Sunday, near Bielefeld in Germany, the children go about with branches of willow and sing “all day long”—

Most stubborn, of course, is this converted or Christian survival, and almost as stubborn the custom of the village and of remote agricultural communities; such a procession as Coussemaker^[753] describes, popular throughout Flanders and Brabant, with a fixed refrain, held its place even in the cities. Occasionally Church and State were opposed;^[754] a proclamation of Henry VIII forbade processions “with songes and dances from house to house,” and even carols were forbidden by act of Parliament in Scotland. Wakes^[755] were either abolished, or else passed into that curious communal revival, the love-feast and the watch-meeting of Methodists. But the communal song and procession are fast dying out, and the new century will hear little of them; although early in the old century the Christmas days^[756] heard many a shouting throng, now with cries of an guy, now gut heil, now hogmenay trololay, give us your white bread and none of your gray! and whatever other etymological puzzles the scanty records can show. These fragments of festal song are too far gone in corruption for profitable use. Aubrey^[757] felt the lapse, and made such memoranda as these: “get the Christmas caroll and the wasselling song;” “get the song which is sung in the ox-house when they wassell the oxen,” that is, with echo of an old refrain, where they drink “to the ox with the crumpled horne that treads out the corne”; and he has noted a few of these songs. The civil wars, he thinks, made an end of these old customs; “warres doe not only extinguish Religion and Lawes, but Superstition; and no suffimen is a greater fugator of Phantosmes than gunpowder.” But peace has its victories of this sort. Not long ago the procession about village and parish boundaries was common enough; the whole community took part in this festal affair, and all sense as of an individual purpose or individual ownership was laid aside. Shout, dance, song, banquet, even directly ceremonial acts, were the concern of a homogeneous throng, “our village” in strictest communal sense. On the march—for example, the boundary march at Hamelin, in the late autumn,—rose traditional songs, varied by noise of every sort; and at the feast which followed, gentle and simple joined hands in the dance, until, with recent innovations, the gentry withdrew, became mere onlookers, and at last left the old rite to fall, like most communal traditions, into a shabby, vulgar, discredited uproar of the lower classes, a thing common and unclean. A quite similar case of degeneration is quoted by Brand from the Gentleman’s Magazine for June, 1790, as going on at Helstone in Cornwall.^[758] But where the prosperity of crop and barn is in question, the rites are more stubborn and hold their ground. This Helstone song welcomes summer; but before that was sung, processions of all kinds were wont to go about the fields, and in 1868 what the Times newspaper called a “ritualistic revival” came off in Lancashire, priest and choir making a progress through the fields with cross and banners, and singing as they went. Rogation week is still known as gang-week.^[759] In older times the community itself was priest and choir; the cases are plentiful and may be read in Brand’s account of “parochial perambulations.” Then there is the song of bringing home the May,^[760] the dance and song about the Maypole, with material and survival beyond one’s compass; enough to let them echo in the verses put by Nash into his chaotic but pretty play, where the clowns and maids sing as they dance:—

The voices of the real maying folk are here, and the steps, lightly touched by art in the transfer to the play; in that Furry-Day Song at Helstone, with its opening about Robin Hood and Little John, there is a rougher but less effective refrain:—

What the poet can do with a fragment of communal song, with a heart full of communal sympathy, and with that final touch of art and individual reflection, may be felt by any one who will read in the echo of this rough old chorus those exquisite verses of Herrick to Corinna.

Songs that may pass as communal drama hold something of this old refrain of labour; so, for example, in the flytings of winter with summer or with spring,^[763] which seem to go back in England to times before the conquest. A refrain, with change of “summer” to “winter” in alternate stanzas, runs through a ballad printed by Uhland:^[764]—

Another refrain is sung “by all the youth,” when a mock fight between the two is ended, and winter lies at jocund summer’s feet:—

In the strife by deputy,^[765] owl appearing for Hiems, and cuckoo for Ver, there is the call of the bird for refrain; or else it is holly for summer and ivy for winter, a chorus,^[766] said to have been written down in Henry VI’s time, running—

These flytings came to be extraordinarily popular, and it is hard to draw a line between the volkspoesie and the volksthümliche; learned allegory, which was early on the ground, has the mark of Cain upon it, and cannot be missed. Probably Böckel^[768] is right in looking on the winter and summer songs as originally communal, with those dialogues between soul and body, which one finds in nearly every literature of Europe, as a learned and allegorical imitation; a combination of the two kinds is not unusual.^[769] So one passes to all manner of debates,^[770]—riches and poverty, wine and water, peasant and noble, priest and knight, down to Burns’s Twa Dogs; but it is the old communal sap that keeps holly and ivy green, and an old communal rite, the driving out of winter or of death, lingers in the verses which German children still sing to the dance:^[771]—

Refrain and chorus of labour among savages have been noted here and there in the foregoing pages; to collect them to any extent would be useless. They are found everywhere, and show that stage of development at which the repetition of a single sentence, often of a single word, affords unmeasured delight or ease. Individual singing is almost unknown in many savage tribes,^[773] and the refrain in its function as deputy of the older chorus, is less common than the chorus itself.^[774] Where the savage is still mainly a hunter, mainly a warrior, the refrain is insistent whenever a connected bit of description breaks away from the choral song, as if artistic poetry could not yet walk by itself; and where he has begun to till the soil, or even merely to gather plants and fruits, there is the chorus and there is the refrain of a rude harvest-home. For the hunter and warrior we may quote Heckewelder’s account.^[775] “Their songs are by no means inharmonious. They sing in chorus; first the men and then the women. At times the women join in the general song, or repeat the strain which the men have just finished. It seems like two parties singing in questions and answers, and is upon the whole very agreeable and enlivening.... The singing always begins by one person only, but others soon fall in successively, until the general chorus begins, the drum beating all the while to mark the time.” Their war-dance is described in the familiar terms; but Heckewelder adds a more interesting account of the feast which under agricultural conditions would be a harvest-home. “After returning from a successful expedition,” he says, “a dance of thanksgiving is always performed.... It is accompanied with singing and choruses, in which the women join.... At the end of every song, the scalp-yell is shouted as many times as there have been scalps taken from the enemy.” As to the rhythm, Heckewelder makes a statement much clearer than the accounts given in Schoolcraft’s question and answer, for he does not undertake to express Indian metres in terms of civilized poetry, but simply says that “their songs ... are sung in short sentences, not without some kind of measure harmonious to an Indian ear.”

These Indians, however, were not in the absolutely primitive stage, and the artist had elaborated dance, speech, song; in short, like European peasants of isolated communities a century ago, the redskin was at that point of poetical development where improvisation is a general gift, and every one is expected to compose his bit of song, leaning, of course, on the chorus, on refrain and repetition, and on those traditional phrases which even more than modern speech realized Schiller’s lines about the poet:—

“The Indians also meet,” says Heckewelder, “for the purpose of recounting their warlike exploits, which is done in a kind of half-singing or recitative ... the drum beating all the while.... After each has made a short recital in his turn, they begin again in the same order, and so continue going the rounds, in a kind of alternate chaunting, until every one has concluded.” It is easy to see that while the chorus of war is an eminently communal performance, asking an exactness of consent which makes strongly for rhythm at its best, the conditions of nomadic and belligerent life must breed excellent differences, set apart the great warrior, the great orator, and work in certain ways toward communal disintegration and the triumph of the artist. Agricultural communities, on the other hand, foster the choral and social side of poetry, and discourage individual feats. So even with the Indians; witness that “cereal chorus,” as Schoolcraft calls it,^[776] at the corn-husking, sung whenever a crooked ear is found by one of the maidens:—

with additions and variations. This crooked ear, wa-ge-min, is the symbol of a “thief in the cornfield,” and may have some relationship with Mannhardt’s corn-demon.^[777]

Older views of the American savage show him in the warlike guise, to be sure, but with poetry overwhelmingly choral. Lafitau,^[778] who says that commerce with the white man has materially changed the savage’s customs, is determined to paint him in his unspoiled state. During an eclipse, for example, all the tribe dance in a peculiar manner, filling the air with lugubrious cries; that rhythm is in them, though it is no song in Lafitau’s ear, is proved by the dance, which, of course, compels a rhythm, and by that picture of the girl who shakes pebbles in a calabash, “trying meanwhile to make her rough voice accord with this importunate jingle.”^[779] Singing and dancing are the chief features of Indian social life, and constitute the main charm of the life to come; improvised songs, even speeches, occur, but general singing and dancing make the background of their poetry and fill their festivals.^[780] Everybody improvises, and has his special song,—a trait noted among the Eskimo; the dancers always sing, and apparently the singers always dance; the verse is measured, but has no rime, and individual songs are always supported by an accompanying he! he! in cadence from the throng, a sort of burden. Dramatic songs of war are common; and Lafitau gives a case marvellously like that Faroe ballad of the luckless fisherman, with satirist and victim in full view, although here the latter is passive, and is often forced by the laughter and scorn of the tribe to break away and hide his head in shame.^[781] Song-duels, too, as among the Eskimo, are frequent, with throwing of ashes, which makes Lafitau call on Athenæus for a parallel among the ancient Greeks. But, after all, what sticks in Lafitau’s mind about Indian dances is the fury of them and that wild he! he! which gave them cadence, but which often “made the whole village tremble and shake.” The war-dance is described in terms familiar to the reader of later accounts.

Lery gives an older story, but in the same spirit as that found in Lafitau. Of great interest is the Huguenot’s account^[782] of a festivity which he and one Jacques Rousseau saw and heard performed by five or six hundred savages in a certain village. The men retired into one house, the women to another; Lery and his friend were shut in with the women, about two hundred in all. From the house of the men came a low murmur, like that of folk at prayers; and the women, pricking their ears, huddled together in great excitement. Then the noise grew in volume, and the men could be heard singing in concert, and often repeating their interjection, he, he, he, he; the women now began to reply in kind, crying, he, he, he, he, for more than a quarter-hour, leaping, meanwhile, and foaming at the mouth, till it was quite plain to Lery that the devil was entering into them. But this was not all. From another house a mob of children now tuned the hallowed quire; and the Huguenot, despite his year and a half in those parts, is free to say he felt a desire to be “en nostre Fort,” doubting the sequel of all this coil. Suddenly the women and children were quiet; and Lery could now hear the men singing and shouting “d’un accord merveilleux,” so that these “sweet and more gracious sounds” heartened him to go near the house of the men. He made a hole in the soft wall and looked in; then, with two friends, he went inside, saw the dance, and heard the songs, which ran on without stop. All the men stood in a close circle, but without clasping hands or stirring from the place, bent forward, moving only the leg and the right foot, each having his right hand on his buttocks, the arm and left hand hanging, and so danced and sang. It seems to have been a communal dance, like that of the Botocudos, save that certain priests—caraïbes—richly arrayed, holding in their hands “little rattles or bells made of a fruit bigger than an ostrich egg,” had evidently extraordinary powers. There is a remarkable picture by way of illustration,^[783] showing the naked dancer, bent over, as described, with a priest behind him, a parrot on a perch just above the dancer’s shoulder, and a monkey at his feet,—these doubtless an exuberance of the artist.

The social foundation, the communal dance, the incessant refrain, the festal excitement, are here plain outcome of primitive conditions in survival; the priest, and the ritual functions which are left to one’s guessing, show that mingling of ceremonial tradition and art which is bound to spring up with even savage culture. Despite this mingling, however, the overwhelming characteristic of the whole affair is communal, and the songs are in close tether to the refrain. An excellent summary of American savage songs and American savage poetry in general has been already quoted in part from a paper by Dr. Brinton,^[784] and may be used here as a conclusion of the whole matter. Repetition is the groundwork of this poetry; it is always sung; it has no rhythm,—no metre, that is,—no alliteration, but depends on two kinds of repetition. Either one verse is repeated indefinitely, or a refrain is used. “The refrain is usually interjectional and wholly meaningless; and the verses are often repeated without alteration four or five times ever.” This is the case with Eskimo poetry. Now and then, each line “is followed by an interjectional burden.” A little ballad may be quoted from Dr. Brinton’s paper^[785] to show how events passed into poetry, without forming what could be called in any sense narrative or epic verse. About the year 1820, the Pawnees captured a girl and put her to the torture; but a Pawnee brave, of generous vein, made a daring rescue and flight. After three days he came back; and as the thing was so mad, it was counted inspiration, and no one harmed him. Whereupon this song was sung:—