Na ha, Yaw ne;
Na ha, Yaw ne.
But it is the vocero which we are now to study among savage tribes. A case or so from Africa and Asia will do for that side of the world—evidence is more than abundant—and then America may tell its tale at a time when borrowing is out of the question. M. Adanson, a correspondent of the Royal Academy of Sciences, travelled in Senegal about 1750; his account[[579]] of vocero and dance is fairly representative of the case. One night in a village he was awakened by a “horrid shrieking,” and found that a young woman had just died. What follows is interesting for comparison with the custom in modern Greece. “The first shriek was made,” says M. Adanson, “according to custom, by one of the female relations of the deceased before her door. At this signal, all the women in the village came out and set up a most terrible howl, so that one would have thought they were all related to the deceased;” the traveller forgets that in certain levels of culture the clan, even the horde, is above kin. The noise lasted till break of day; relatives then went into the dead woman’s cottage, took her hand, and asked her questions,—the common trait of the vocero everywhere. When she was buried, the lamentations ceased; but for three nights the young people danced a memorial dance. At this the performers sang a song, “the burden of which was repeated by all the spectators.” Then follows the description of certain erotic features of the dance, and the usual testimony to that exactness of time observed in song and movement and gesture. The vocero itself is mainly a lament; Mungo Park speaks of “the loud and dismal howlings,” another of “leaping and dancing”; while in Loango relatives “weep, sing, and dance” about the corpse.[[580]] In Korea, after a night of merriment the body is carried to its tomb; “the bearers sing and keep time as they go, whilst the kindred and friends ... make the air ring with their cries.”[[581]]
Interesting are the accounts of American Indians in the days of discovery. Jean de Lery, a Frenchman who went to Brazil with the Protestant emigrants in the sixteenth century, and wrote an account of his journey,[[582]] was struck by the likeness between the funeral laments made by savages, and the voceri of the women of Béarn singing over their dead husbands. He quotes one, a good document. “‘La mi amou, La mi amou: Cara rident, œil de splendou: Cama lengé, bet dansadou: Lo mé balen, Lo m’esburbat: Matî depes: fort tard au lheit.’ That is to say, ‘my love, my love, laughing face, fine eye, light limb, brave dancer, valiant mien, lovely mien, early up and late to bed.’” So too the Gascon women: “‘Yere, yere, o le bet renegadou, o le bet iougadou qu ‘here’: that is to say, ‘O the brave Protestant, O the brave player that he was!’ And so do our poor American women, who, besides a refrain for each stanza,[[583]] always throw in a ‘He is dead, he is dead, for whom we now are mourning,’ whereupon the men respond and say: ‘Alas, it is true; we shall never see him more until we are behind the mountains, where, as our Caribs tell us, we shall dance with him’—and other things of the sort, which they add in their response.” Lescarbot,[[584]] quoting Lery about the Brazilians, remarks the agreement in songs of lament between them and the Canadians “fifteen hundred leagues away.” Such a song ran—
Hé hé hé hé hé hé hé hé hé hé,
a monotonous performance on paper, with the notes fa fa sol fa fa sol sol sol sol sol, not too elaborate music; but bodily graces made up for this, since they then “shrieked and cried in fearful wise the space of a quarter-hour, and the women leaped into the air with such violence as to foam at the mouth.” Then once more the tuneful mood began, and they sang, “Heu heüraüre heüra heüraüre heüra heüra onech.” In this song they are mourning for their dead parents. As with Lery and Lescarbot, so the spirit of comparison is astir in Lafitau,[[585]] who, however, has less to tell of folklore at home, and a great deal to say of the ancients, as may be gathered from the title of his book; the laments for the dead he calls nénies, and speaks of the “matron” who plays the part of praefica. He tells, however, a plain story of the savage customs. When a corpse has been dressed and laid in state, tears and lamentations, restrained up to that time, begin to break forth, but in order and cadence. The “matron” leads the other women, who “follow in the same measure, but use different words, according to the relation which they bear to the deceased,”—second stage of the vocero, with a survival of the chorus, however, far more pronounced than in Corsica. Men, too, mourn their dead, but in a nobler way, singing the death-song and dancing the hereditary dance;[[586]] but these voceri of the women are of great interest. Grosse[[587]] quotes from Grey the Australian vocero for a young man, where “the young women sing—‘My young brother,’—the old women sing—‘My young son,’—and all in chorus sing—‘Never shall I see thee again, Never shall I see thee again.’”
In Schoolcraft’s[[588]] time things had undergone no great change; for “every person aggrieved makes his own complaint, and it is pitiful to see a married person commence wailing and singing kitchina takah, then wailing again kitchina,—‘men’s friend.’ These are all the words,”—a significant fact. “The same way in other deaths the deceased is bewailed.” Here is the single vocero; but it is a faint affair in comparison with the volume and sound of the funeral chorus. Schoolcraft’s evidence all runs this way. “Choruses,” says Mr. Fletcher,[[589]] “are about all the Indians sing.” Carver,[[590]] to be sure, like the other travellers, tells of a mother who seemed to improvise a song of lament over her dead child at the time when it was laid among the branches; but he is emphatic about the chorus, and calls it “a not unpleasing but savage harmony.” A recent writer,[[591]] noting the monotonous choral songs at funerals, thinks “these chants may no doubt occasionally have been simply wailing or mourning ejaculation.” As one comes to lower levels of culture, among the Patagonians, for example, and the interior tribes of Africa, mere choral iteration of monotonous sounds and beating the ground with the feet—perhaps not so much “to keep off the evil one”[[592]] as to find the communal consent—are the prevailing characteristics of the vocero. The funeral dance of the Latuka, which Baker saw,[[593]] really comes to this; while the feathers, the bells, the horns, are easily recognized as lendings of an incipient culture, and teach the plain lesson that the state of the African savage is not to be transferred outright to primitive man. Indeed, it is quite evident that such perfect consent of communal voice and step as was shown by the Botocudos may be confused and broken in what one must call higher stages of culture,—for example, that dance of the Latuka. In Nubia Miss Edwards[[594]] saw a ceremony, mainly dance, at the grave of a member of the tribe, which seemed to her artificial in the extreme. “The lamentation itself is a definite musical phrase executed by women who, beginning on a high note, proceed down the scale in third-tones to the lower octave or even the twelfth. It is taught, like the zaghareet, or cry of joy, by mothers to their young daughters in their earliest years.” It is only when the historian looks at all this evidence of savage dance and cry, of feminine song and choral response, of refrain passing into rite and myth, of detached and artistic lament, and when he applies to it the evolutionary test, the comparative and historical test, that it lies in true perspective and allows him to draw some definite conclusion about one at least of the beginnings of poetry. The vocero began as communal wailing, horde or clan or house mourning the brother and inmate in rhythmic cries to the cadence of the dance; with new domestic ties of blood, in which of course the mother and sister are supreme,[[595]] these two stand out as singers of the solitary vocero to which the crowd makes answer in refrain. The inevitable sundering of individual and chorus now makes headway, the former passing into literature, the latter, dropping its concomitant dance and surviving as refrain, dies slowly out in all save a few isolated communities, and in all recorded verse except here and there a chanted dirge. But in each of these diverging fortunes, as in the earliest, so in the last estate of the vocero, in elegy, threnody, ode, one common trait abides; and everywhere it echoes the insistent voice of repetition.[[596]] As an example of this repetition, as well as of the vocero in its earlier stage, we may conclude with an iterated verse sung by a negro woman, once a slave, who still lived with her master’s family in the South.[[597]] She had just buried her husband, but went about her tasks as usual and waited upon the children of the house. Suddenly, however, in their presence, and to their great fright, she burst out with these words,—
O dem ropes dat let him down!
and continued to sing them without ceasing, in a strange crooning way, the better part of an hour, and at intervals during some days. It were to consider too curiously, perhaps, if one should compare this crude case of “vision” with certain forms of poetry that bear a similar relation to the original song of grief.
So much for the vocero. It has led us from the ballads back to that ethnological evidence making so strongly, in diction as in rhythm, for the primitive note of iteration, for the fundamental element which marks the communal origin of poetry, precisely as variation has marked its individual and artistic course. Repetition of sounds, when joined with act of labour, with march or dance, with strong emotion of a festal or communal kind, made possible the perception of consent, or, to speak with Professor Baldwin Brown, of order. It begets this sense of order in other arts; repetition of a certain kind of line on a jar made a rhythm of decoration, just as a series of similar groups of words, of steps, made poetry and dance. How important repetition must have been in early poetry, and in any unrecorded verse, is clear when one reflects that the invention of writing turned poetry from an art wholly of time and succession to an art half plastic; we see the line, the stanza, nowadays, and repetition is an impertinence in poetry, because hearing has become a secondary and imagined process. The æsthetic value of repetition in primitive verse gets a new aspect when one considers