and now, again, she takes the refrain bodily into her own song, beginning thus a new stanza. “Di, di, dih! Woe is me! Make one great cry of sorrow, brothers and sisters all,” sings a wife over her husband; and this inarticulate bit of chorus, always sung, as Marcaggi says,[[539]] at the end of each stanza, by the women who surround the corpse, may be the imitation—echo would better hit the truth—of the old sobbing of the throng. As for the text, repetition is hardly to be expected in print, and the editors have doubtless done as Lyngbye did with Faroe ballads, though here and there occurs a line[[540]] like,—
Chéta, chéta, chéta, o Sàgra,
Chét’ é nun piegna piu tantu.
They are keen to record the power of improvisation shown by their countrywomen; what use to print pages of iteration? A fine hint, however, can be found in Marcaggi’s forewords, not only of the silly sooth but of the old time; he saw, he says, “one day a poor woman run shrieking from her house, her hair disordered, and coming to the public square, where the corpse of her sister-in-law lay, sing in a mournful and monotonous note, with grotesque leaps and bounds:—
O commari Mari!
O commari Mari!
People said,” adds Marcaggi, “that she was following the custom of a former age, and that she lacked proper reserve.”[[541]] This is, indeed, the more primitive note; and the iterated cry, mere appeal to the dead, like those cris d’enterrement which Bladé heard at Gascon burials, was once sung by the swaying and dancing throng of mourners. Psychologically and physiologically this is quite in order; a kind of communal hysterics, intensely rhythmical, as with a badly frightened child, as with insanity, delirium, abnormal emotion of any kind, has the cadent and recurrent note at its utmost; and this woman, with her “lack of decorum,” like that peasant on the beach by the drowned boy, is the modern survivor and deputy of panic emotion, a belated case in the pathology of epidemic grief. Between this mere iterated cry, as was said above, and the later professional song of lament,[[542]] lie the bulk of Corsican voceri, sung by sister or mother of the dead, and most characteristic when it is a violent death which they deplore and when they will stir to vengeance a group of male relatives standing sullenly by the corpse. For while a vocero in the case of some peace-parted soul, such as the village priest, is often a decorous and comforting office,[[543]] the passion of the thing is felt only over the bier of a man murdered in feud. St. Victor, whom all the others quote on this point, describes the scene. At first, in the chamber of death, rises a great wail of lament, through which oaths of vengeance flash like lightning; men draw their daggers, and dash their guns upon the stone floor; women dip their handkerchiefs in the blood still oozing from the wounds;[[544]] sometimes they are moved to a frenzy that vents itself in dancing round the corpse amid loud cries, until silence is demanded and the dead man’s mother, wife, sister, moves to the bier and begins her vocero. There is no art in it; “the excuse for its violence is in its explosive force, ... it sings through the mouth of a wound.” It begins, however, in a plaintive way, calls tenderly upon the dead, then tells the story of his taking off; now the gently cadenced movements of the singer grow more violent, and presently she breaks into a storm of imprecations and into wild appeals for the vendetta.[[545]] One after another of these singers improvises such a lament, and for every stanza a chorus of sobs and cries and moans, often, one gathers, of articulate words, rises from the throng. The passion, too, is real; readers who come of northern blood must banish certain associations of the cardboard castle, the cloak and sword, loud baritone confidences, and stage moonlight. These voceri of vengeance are not rated as rant by the law, which often and vainly tries to put them down. Thus among the Basques, a race, as George Borrow declared, not of poets but of singers, laws were passed against the old fashion of the funeral;[[546]] it was forbidden “to make lamentations, to tear one’s hair, to bruise the flesh, to wound one’s head, to chant death-songs.” A Basque chorus of lament is described by Michel. “All the women join in it with deep sighs and cries of grief, addressed now to the dead and now to themselves; they begin with high tones, then fall into a deep note, and pronounce from time to time ayené, a Basque word which means Alas!” It is quite clear that in these repeated words of the chorus one finds the origin of the vocero, the “cry” of communal grief; and a study of such cries at the actual burial, as they are still heard in Gascon funerals,[[547]] shows to what beginnings one must refer the more elaborate voceri of the Corsicans. As early as 1340 a law was passed at Tarbes against “cries and lamentations at the return from a burial.” According to Bladé, the Gascon burial cries are a kind of recitative, lacking rime and even what modern ears demand in the way of rhythm, for they are now divorced from the dance, and at best are timed to the steps of the procession. They begin when a funeral procession starts from the church to the cemetery, and are a series of “distinct exclamations combined into irregular stanzas”; mostly they begin “in a high note, falling slowly, to rise again at the end.” The iteration of these cries is insistent; Bladé quotes a long cri of the sort:[[548]]—
Ah!
Ah! Ah! Ah!
Ah! Pauvre!