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

446.  Ibid., pp. 23 f.

447.  Child, Ballads, I. 21.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

453.  Schröer, p. 274.

454.  Ibid., p. 277.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

460.  Primitive Culture, I. 86.

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

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

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

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

465.  

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

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

467.  Carm. lxii. 39 ff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

473.  Uhland, Volkslieder, I. 78.

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

no advance; otherwise in a refrain:—

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

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

476.  Proben der Volkslitteratur der türkischen Stämme Süd-Siberiens, St. Petersburg, 1866 ff.

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

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

479.  Radloff, III. 34, note; 41.

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

481.  Radloff, III. 48 f.

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

483.  Ibid., I. 218 ff.

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

485.  Radloff, II. 669.

486.  See Vilmar, Deutsche Altertümer im Hêliand, Marburg, 1862, pp. 3 f.

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

488.  Odyssey, I. 352.

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

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

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

492.  Old English Ballads, pp. xxxii ff.

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

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

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

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

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

498.  Kögel, pp. 44 f.

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

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

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

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

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

504.  Kl. Schrift., III. 445.

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

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

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

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

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

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

510.  Odyssey, XXIV. 59 ff.

511.  1117 f. It has been noted that Kögel, Gesch. d. d. Lit., I. 54, says, without good reason, that this was a magic song, a spruch. It was surely what it is called, a song of lament, a vocero, and doubtless asked the same old question.

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

513.  Béow., 1322, 2124 f.

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

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

516.  Child, I. 182.

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

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

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

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

521.  Ibid., p. 101.

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

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

524.  Work quoted, p. cxxxiii.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

532.  C. T., 4537 ff. The Latin:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

540.  Ortoli, p. 248.

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

542.  See Marcaggi, pp. 157, 231, for a vocératrice célèbre. “La vocératrice marche toujours à la tête des pleureuses,”—in going to the funeral.

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

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

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

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

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

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

549.  “The men, old and young, take no part,” Bladé, I. xiii.

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

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

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

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

554.  Taken from the German rendering of Brugsch.

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

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

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

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

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