561. Æn., X. 473 ff.
562. Perhaps best in Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall’s Ireland: its Scenery, Character, etc., 3 vols., London, 1841-1843. See I. 222 ff. The authors mention the women who wept over Hector, with the odd explanation that the Greeks were once in Ireland. Other accounts of Irish funerals are quoted in Brand-Ellis, Popular Antiquities, as of “the men, women, and children” who go before the corpse and “set up a most hideous Holoo, loo, loo, which may be heard two or three miles round the country.”
563. Quoted by J. C. Walker, Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards, London, 1786, pp. 20 f. The keening of women who follow the hearse, dressed sometimes in white and sometimes in black, “singing as they slowly proceed ... extempore odes,” is sufficiently like the march of the praeficae at a Roman funeral; and in neither case has one the primitive form of the rite.
564. Transact. Royal Irish Academy, IV., “Antiquities,” pp. 41 ff., read December, 1791.
565. “Present State of Ireland,” Works, ed. Morris, pp. 625 f. Camden, about the same time, Britannia, trans., ed. 1722, p. xix, speaks of the bards as men who “besides ... their poetic functions do apply themselves particularly to the study of genealogies.” See also Evan Evans, Specimens of the Poetry of the Antient Welsh Bards, ... London, 1764, p. 91. This is not primitive song.
566. Spenser, p. 633.
567. “Totenklagen in der litauischen Volksdichtung,” Zst. f. vgl. Litteraturgesch., N. F., II. 81 ff.
568. A similar series of questions, with interesting details of the ceremony, is given in the Itinera Constantinopolitanum et Amasianum ab Angerio Gislenio Busbequij ... Antverpiæ, 1681, p. 28: “deuertimus in pagum Semianorum Iagodnam: ubi ejus gentis ritus funebres vidimus multum à nostris abhorrentes. Erat cadauer in templo positum detecta facie: iuxtà erant apposita edulia, panis et caro et vini cantharus: adstabant coniunx et filia melioribus ornata vestibus, filiae galerius erat ex plumis pavonis. Supremum munus, quo maritum jam conclamatum uxor donauit, pileolum fuit purpureum, cuius modi virgines nubiles illic gestare solent. Inde lessum audiuimus et naeniam lamentabilesque voces; quibus mortuum percunctabantur quid de eo tantum meruissent, quae res, quod obsequium, quod solatium ei defuisset; cur se solas et miseras relinqueret: et hujus generis alia.”
569. Compare the pathetic word of David about his dead child: 2 Sam., xii. 23.
570. Spencer, Sociology, I. § 142, quotes Bancroft, of the Indians of the West, that for a long time after a death, relatives repair daily at sunrise and sunset to the vicinity of the grave, to sing songs of mourning and praise. Hahn tells the same thing of his Albanians, Alb. Stud., I. 151 f.
571. Radloff, III. 22.
572. Often quoted from Kranz, Grönländische Reise. See also Boas, “The Central Eskimo,” in Report Bur. Ethn., 1884-1885, Washington, 1888, p. 614.
573. Quoted Spencer, Soc., III. § 126.
574. There was also a lament sung hard upon the death of a warrior in battle. As the Goths bore away their dead king, singing a song of woe in the midst of flying weapons, so with many savages. In a skirmish which followed the murder of Captain Cook, a young islander was killed, and the Englishmen next morning saw “some men carrying him off on their shoulders, and could hear them singing, as they marched, a mournful song.” Cook’s Last Voyage, in Pinkerton, Voyages and Travels, XI. 723.
575. On neniae as incantations, see Grimm, Mythologie,⁴ p. 1027.
576. The phrase for a capable person in incantation is found for Germanic usage in the Merseburg Charm, here said of Wodan himself,—sô hê unola conda; in Anglo-Saxon the same phrase is used for a skilled poet: se þe cuðe, Béow., 90; and in Old Saxon for a wise man: én gifrôdðt man the sô filo konsta wisaro wordo, Hêliand, 208.
577. For example, in mere invocation, the Erce, Erce, Erce, eorðan modor of an Anglo-Saxon charm (Grein-Wülker, I. 314), and the actual spell against stitch in the side (ibid., p. 318):—
with more of the sort, and the solemn,—
and so on, with a refrain in the epic part,—
578. Schoolcraft, Indian Tribes, I. 367 ff.
579. Translated from the French in Pinkerton’s Voyages and Travels, XVI. 598 ff. See pp. 623 f.
580. Ibid., XVI. 877, 685, 596.
581. Ibid., VII. 534.
582. Histoire d’un Voyage fait en la Terre de Bresil autrement dite Amerique ... à la Rochelle, MDLXXVII. pp. 336 f.
583. “Au surplus au refrein de chacune pose.”
584. Histoire de la nouvelle France, Paris, MDCIX. See pp. 691 ff. On the title-page he declares himself “témoin oculaire d’une partie des choses ici recitées.”
585. Mœurs des Sauvages Ameriquians, Comparées aux Mœurs des Premières Temps, ... 2 vols., 4to, Paris, 1724. See II. 321. Lafitau spent five years in a mission in Canada, and also got information from a brother Jesuit of sixty years’ experience in the new world (I. 2). It was this book which moved Dr. John Brown, a century and a half ago, to write his essay on the history of poetry and music, and to use so effectively the comparative method in literature.
586. Ibid., II. 395.
587. Anf. d. K., p. 229.
588. Indian Tribes, IV. 71, question 254 (see I. 556): “Is it the custom to call on certain persons for these laments? Are the laments themselves of a poetic character?” Answered by Mr. Fletcher for the Winnebago Indians.
589. Ibid., answer to question 253.
590. Three Years’ Travel through the Interior Parts of North America (1766-1768), Philadelphia, 1796. See p. 179.
591. Rep. Bureau Ethnol., I. 194 f.
592. Wallaschek, Prim. Mus., p. 54.
593. Ibid., p. 198.
594. Wallaschek, Prim. Mus., p. 199. It is needless to insist on the custom of dancing at funerals, and, in memorial rites, over the graves of the dead; mediæval councils were full of warning against this habit. The “dance of death,” of course, became symbolic and artistic.
595. Denied as a literal fact, as an affair of government and authority, the matriarchate, so called, is sufficiently proved as the early form of family life.
596. As the clan or horde had its song of triumph, and this is echoed and prolonged in “national” songs like the Marseillaise, or, better, the Ça ira, so the clan grief can expand into a national lament. Something of this sort is found in that wail over the downfall of their power sung by the Moors in Spain and so potent to stir the heart that it was forbidden by government; its refrain, Woe is me, Alhama, has all the iterated passion of grief that one finds in the primitive vocero. Then there is the song or psalm of the captives in Babylon,—and the list could be extended indefinitely.
597. The story is at first hand.
598. Work quoted, II. 324.
599. Account of Shelley’s last days, quoted in Harper’s Magazine, April, 1892, p. 786.
600. Schoolcraft, III. 326, “Poetic Development of the Indian Mind.”—For a good collection of facts about iterated words as song, see the sixth chapter of Wallaschek’s Primitive Music. For example, p. 173, “The Macusi Indians in Guiana amuse themselves for hours with singing a monotonous song, whose words, hai-a, hai-a, have no further significance.” See also pp. 54, 56 f.
601. Report Proceed. Numism. and Antiquar. Soc., Philadelphia, 1887, pp. 18 f. (Printed 1891.)
602. Lectures, as quoted, II. 117, speaking of poetry before Homer. On the origin of poetry in unintelligible sounds, see Ragusa-Moleti, Poesie dei Popoli Selvaggi, Torino-Palermo, 1891, pp. vi ff., and Jacobowski, Anfänge der Poesie, p. 66, who assumes that early man held fast to those tones and gestures which expressed an original sensation or emotion. On the repetition of mere sounds to express emotion, see Alice C. Fletcher, Journal American Folklore, April-June, 1898, p. 87.
603. Travels in West Africa, pp. 66 f.
604. V. 559 ff. “Original Words of Indian Songs literally translated.”
605. “Choral chant, four times repeated.” All Schoolcraft’s examples here are full of repetition.
606. Ibid., III. 328.
608. See above on Rhythm. In addition to the references given there, see some sensible remarks in Emerson’s “Poetry and Imagination”; for scientific discussion of repetition as basis of rhythm, see Gurney, Power of Sound, pp. 455 f., and Masing, über Ursprung u. Verbreitung des Reims, pp. 9 f. J. Grimm pointed out that alliteration is really a form of repetition, Kl. Schr., VI. 161 f. Adam Smith, Essays, pp. 154 f., has some curious remarks on repetition as possible in music, but impossible in poetry.
609. W. von Biedermann, in two articles,—“Zur vergleichenden Geschichte der poetischen Formen,” Zeitschr. f. Vergl. Litteraturgesch., N. F., II. 415 ff.; IV. 224 ff., and “Die Wiederholung als Urform der Dichtung bei Goethe,” ibid., IV. 267 ff.,—traces the development of poetical style from this fundamental fact of repetition. First, simple words were repeated, then only part of the words in a sentence: such is the case in old Chinese, in Zend, in Accadian. Then came parallelism; then the repetition of similar sounds; and finally metre or rhythm (Versmass). Where were the dancing throngs in this interesting stretch of development, with rhythm as an afterclap of rime? As later in his review of Bücher’s Arbeit und Rhythmus, so here, Biedermann denies that rhythm came into poetry through music and the dance. He fails, however, to make good this assertion by any show of proof (see above, p. 75); but his references are useful for the student of repetition. For another scheme of repetition in poetry, see R. M. Meyer, Altgermanische Poesie, pp. 12 f.
610. Hence the inadequate character of its treatment, say for Old Norse, by Vigfusson and Powell, Corp. Poet. Bor., I. 451 ff. R. M. Meyer, Altgerm. Poesie, p. 341, takes a more excellent way, but he lays too much stress on the ancient refrain, and not enough on the ancient choral and the primitive communal conditions of song. Much more to the point is the admirable though incomplete chapter on “Early Choral Song” in Posnett’s Comparative Literature: see especially pp. 127 ff.
611. Wolf, Lais, pp. 23 f. The refrain was insistent in all poetry of the troubadours and trouvères, and so leads back to refrains as the prevalent characteristic of all songs in the vernacular. See Wolf’s references, pp. 22 ff., and notes, pp. 184 ff. For a modern study of this development of artistic forms of the refrain, see the third chapter of the third part of Jeanroy’s excellent Origines de la Poésie Lyrique en France au Moyen Age, Paris, 1889.
612. Ebert, Lit. d. Mittelalters, II. 63 f., 64 note.
613. See lxi, lxii. The Hymen cry, taken from the Greek, was there a lending of communal wedding songs: see Smythe, Greek Melic Poets, p. 496. More artistic refrains are the
of Catullus, lxiv. 323 ff., and the recurrent lines in Spenser’s Prothalamion and Epithalamium, which, of course, are on the same artistic plane with that marriage-song of Peleus and Thetis.
614. Walter Pater’s pleasant account of the making of this song (Marius the Epicurean, p. 73) is not improbable, in spirit at least; and it must be borne in mind that this was the metre of marching songs of Roman soldiers and other popular verse. See Du Meril, Poésies Populaires Latines, Paris, 1843, pp. 106-117, including the Pervigilium Veneris.
615. Bujeaud, “Refrains des Chansons Populaires,” in Le Courier Littéraire, 25 Mai, 1877, pp. 256 ff. For reference to this article, the present writer is indebted to Boynton’s dissertation, named and quoted below.
616. “Le Refrain dans la Littérature du Moyen Age,” in Revue des Traditions Populaires, III. 1 ff.; 82 ff.
617. J. Darmesteter, Chants Pop. des Afghans, Paris, 1888-1890, p. cxcvi, calls the strophe “abstraction faite du refrain,”—a more excellent way than these theorists take with their “little poem stuck in the cracks of a big poem,” and such clever nonsense.
618. “Der Kehrreim in der mhd. Dichtung,” Jahresber. d. Königl. Gymnas. zu Paderborn, 1890.
619. Neuhochdeutsche Metrik, p. 392. See R. M. Meyer, below.
620. Zeitschr. f. vergleich. Lit., I. 34 ff.; Euphorion, Zeitschr. f. Litteraturgesch., V. (1898), 1 ff. He points out that nobody heeded his view of the case, but that the works of Grosse, Groos, and Bücher all brought confirmation to it.
621. All early accounts of dances among savages, South Sea islanders, and the like, assert this priority of chorus over refrain. There are no spectators, no audience, or “public”; all sing and all dance. See Wallaschek in his first chapter, and Yrjö Hirn, Förstudier till en Konstfilosofi, Helsingfors, 1896, p. 148.
622. Zell, Ferienschriften, II. 111 f., notes that this sort of repetition is found in old Etruscan prayers as well as in the liturgy of the Roman church.
623. By Wordsworth, work quoted; see, too, F. D. Allen, Remnants of Early Latin, p. 74, with interesting remarks on the fragments of the Carmina Saliaria, the axamenta.
624. Kögel, Gesch. d. d. Lit., I. 31, 34 f., points out the close resemblance of the conditions and circumstances of this hymn with those of the old German hymns, of which we have no example; he therefore infers for the latter the same repeated cries to the god, and finds confirmation for this inference in the dancing, the repetitions and the cries of a Gothic Christmas play, written in Latin, in Greek characters, but with a Gothic original peeping through. Müller’s attempt to restore this Latin-Gothic hymn is highly interesting.
625. Westphal, Allgem. Metrik, p. 37.
626. Also dramatic poetry, as in Job; for example, the refrain in the speeches of the messengers who tell Job of his calamity, “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” See Moulton’s arrangement in his edition of Job, pp. 10 f.
627. For these refrains see Driver, Introd. to the Lit. of the Old Test., p. 366 (original ed., p. 344). They are sometimes exactly repeated, sometimes varied. For the poetry due to the Hebrews in general, see Renan, Mélanges, p. 12.
628. 2 Sam. vi, 14 f.
629. Lowth, de sacra Poesi Hebr., ed. Rosenmüller, p. 205, citing “Nehem. xii, 24, 31, 38, 40, et titulum Ps. lxxxviii.” D. H. Müller, Die Propheten in ihrer ursprünglichen Form, Vienna, 1896, I. 246 f.,—a somewhat discredited work with regard to the theory of Hellenic and Hebrew relations, but seemingly sound in these facts. Budde, Religion of Israel to the Exile, pp. 97, 100. The “prophets” who came to England from the Cevennes make another modern instance; and there are many more in the great development of religious enthusiasm in the seventeenth century.
631. 1 Sam., xviii. 1 ff. Lowth says of the one to another: “hoc est, alternis choris carmen amoebaeum canebant; alteris enim praecinentibus ‘Percussit Saulus millia sua,’ alterae subjiciebant ‘et David suas myriadas.’” Perhaps. Amant alterna Camenæ. But it was rude amœbean, then, a tumultuous chorus, just as in the Fescennine songs of old Italy, and in the songs of Roman soldiers, a roughly divided pair of choruses sang alternately: see Zell, Ferienschriften, II. 149. On the choral nature of old Hebrew poetry see this whole passage in Lowth, pp. 205 f.
632. In the year 446. The story is often quoted from Priscus, 188, 189.
633. Böckel, work quoted, p. cviii.
634. “Ex qua victoria carmen publicum juxta rusticitatem per omnium ora ita canentium, feminaeque choros inde plaudendo componebant.” Mabillon, Acta Sanctorum ordinis S. Benedicti, Venetis, 1733, II. 590. This clapping of hands as one dances and sings is often found in communal records, and is common among savages, negroes, and the like. Among tribes on the White Nile, where no musical instruments were to be had, girls clapped their hands to the song and dance: Wallaschek, p. 87, and also cf. p. 102, the account of women seen by Captain Cook to snap their fingers in marking time for their song. The practice is common elsewhere; for Polynesia generally, see Waitz-Gerland, Anthropol., VI. 78 f. Sidonius Apollinaris speaks of it, I. 9:—
while a dance to this hand-clapping is represented on an Assyrian monument: see Herrig’s Archiv, XXIV. 168, quoted by Böckel in the introduction to his Hessian ballads.—That actual songs were made by these women is clear; see the passage from Guillaume de Dôle, quoted by Jeanroy, Origines, p. 309:—
635. London, 1811, p. 420. See also Ritson, Scottish Song, I. xxvi, f.
This refrain, as will be seen, is a kind of water-chorus.
636. Bruce, ed. Skeat, E. E. T. S., p. 399.
637. Brut, ed. Madden, 9538 f.
638. A notable exception is K. O. Müller, who studied early Greek song in connection with early Greek life, an example—as Posnett notes in some excellent remarks, Compar. Lit., p. 104—which subsequent historians have neglected to their own harm.
639. Smythe, Melic Poets, p. 490.
640. For reference to the older literature of this subject, see Blankenburg, Litterar. Zusätze, I. 235 ff.
641. Déor’s song, of course, is divided into strophes or stanzas by means of this refrain.
642. See above, p. 86, on the dispute between Sievers and Möller, and their agreement regarding this change from song to recitation.
643. Altgerm. Poesie, pp. 341, 345.
644. De Antiquissima Germanorum Poesi Chorica ... Kiel, 1847. “Antiquissimum enim omnium poesis genus haud dubie illud est, quod choricum dicitur.” See p. 5: “Carmina vero haec sacra ... ex communi populorum usu, non a rhapsodis recitata neque a singulis, sed semper a choro sive pluribus simul et cantata et acta sunt.”
645. The best recent summary is that of Kögel in the first volume of his Geschichte der deutschen Litteratur.
646. See p. 6 of Müllenhoff: “Actionum autem choricarum triplex est genus: pompa, saltatio, ludus; quorum et simplicissimum est pompa et quasi primitivum.” He treats only the first of these three; but a valuable paper on the sword-dance (“Ueber den Schwerttanz,” in the Festgabe für G. Homeyer, 1871), the essay De Carmine Wessofontano, and many hints in his introduction to the Sagen, Märchen u. Lieder d. Herzogth. Schleswig-Holstein u. Lauenburg, 1845, make up the omission.
647. Kögel, work quoted, p. 18. See his references, p. 17, for these refrains and songs of war.
648. Well meant but ludicrous compilations, designed to offer songs of solace and cheer to all sorts of labourers, and to drive out the idle rimes which they are wont to sing, are cleverly noted in Hoffmann von Fallersleben’s Unsere Volksthümlichen Lieder, Leipzig, 3d ed., 1869; the specimens he gives in his introduction are highly amusing, and are taken from Becker’s Mildheimisches Lieder-Buch, 1799, which provides special songs for the butcher, the chimney-sweep, the scissors-grinder, and all the rest. See Hoffmann, pp. vii ff.
649. A Lithuanian mill-song: see Bücher, p. 39. See also Porthan, work quoted above, p. 198. He gives a pretty little song of a Finnish woman who calls for her absent husband in no recondite terms, ending:—
that is, “prope, prope, deliciae meae; juxta, juxta, corculum meum.”
650. “Agrestum quendam concentum edere solent ... hocque verbum ad cantilenae similitudinem repetunt.” Pistorius, Polon. Hist. Corp., I. 46, quoted by Bezzenberger, Zeitsch. f. vgl. Lit., N. F., I. 269.
651. Smythe, Greek Melic Poets, pp. 160, 510 f.—Bücher, p. 38, notes that this song, like many a lost refrain of the same kind, disregards the rules of classical metre, and follows the movement of the millstone.—Pennant (Second Tour in Scotland), Pinkerton, III. 314, compares the singing at the mill of the island women with Aristophanes’ Clouds, Act V. scene 11.
652. Pros. Edda, ed. Wilken, “Skáldskaparmál,” xliii. pp. 123-134; cf. 4:—
653. Böckel, work quoted, lxiii f., where there are other references of the sort. So in pounding wheat, women in North Africa sang a national song in chorus, always pounding in time with the music, Wallaschek, p. 220.
654. Bücher, p. 60, is emphatic on this point, that the refrain is to be regarded as the oldest part of all songs of labour.
655. Act V.
656. Zell, Ferienschriften, II. 99 ff., “Ueber die Volkslieder der alten Römer,” is still the best piece of information on the subject, although it was published in 1829.
657. In carrying loads, in cutting, and the like tasks, the Lhoosai in southeast India “clear the lungs with a continuous hau! hau! uttered in measured time by all; without making this sound they say they would be unable to work.” Lewin quoted by Böckel, p. lx.
658. Arbeit u. Rhythmus, pp. 30 ff. This chapter, quoted above, pp. 107 ff., gives ample references for the subject.
659. Ehstnische Volkslieder, 1850, p. 1.
660. Deutsche Volkskunde, 1898, pp. 331 f.
661. Work quoted, p. cxxiii. The spinning-room for winter, and in summer the rundgänge, when youths and maidens arm in arm go by long rows singing songs to their march, are still a refuge for actual poetry of the people. But, as he says, it is dying fast.
662. Böckel, work quoted, p. clii, notes that the three classes who spread and sing songs of the folk are women, soldiers, shepherds. Blind minstrels, of course, are to be added for the chanting and reciting guild, and in Russia the tailors. But women, soldiers, and shepherds best keep the old clan instincts.
663. Laura Alexandrine Smith, Music of the Waters, London, 1888; John Ashton, Real Sailor Songs, London, 1891. Boatmen’s songs changing or dying out: Bücher, pp. 128 f. Bücher’s little group of boatmen’s songs, pp. 118 ff., 66 ff., is far more valuable than these long and random collections. See his comments, pp. 68 ff. For example, the boat-song of North American Indians, taken from Baker, is foolishness to the Greeks who make collections for popular use, but is full of instruction for the student of poetry; it runs, without the musical notes:—
664. Böckel, p. lx. Roman oarsmen had not only the celeusma to time their strokes, but often a song of their own: Zell, II. 208.
665. Ed. Murray, E. E. T. S., pp. 40 ff.