That is, “I will walk into somebody’s home.” The following words proceed very cautiously. “The composer appears to commence with delicacy ... singing that he would walk into some indefinite home. The next line implies that he will walk into his or her home. In the third line ... he will walk into her home during some night. He then informs her that he will walk into her dwelling during the winter. In the fifth line”—it is really a stanza, with that eternal chorus—“he becomes decisive and bold, and says he will walk into her lodge this night.” So, too, the warrior sings:[[606]]—
I will kill, I will kill,
The Americans I will kill!
But the repeated air of that “cereal chorus,”[[607]] when a girl gets a crooked ear at the husking, has the stricter note:—
Wagemin, wagemin,
Paimosaid:
Wagemin, wagemin,
Paimosaid.
The work of developing poetry from a rhythmic chaos of wild and repeated cries up to a chorus of this kind was a communal achievement; art is responsible for increment and variation. Communal consent in rhythm caused the repetition of more or less articulate sounds, and so developed that most important element in primitive speech now known as emphasis. Repetition, which is modern emphasis in sections, marks the event or sensation which it records as something out of the common, holds it in the ear and before the mind as something to note and to keep noting, and so makes for memory, not idly called the mother of the muses, while it heightens the actual emotional state. Just as certain early efforts of plastic art expressed great wisdom by several heads, great strength by a number of hands, great fecundity by many breasts, so early man by the iteration of a word gave it poetic force; a better art seeks perfection of the single feature, and fitness of the single word. It has been shown already how poetry made a gain when repetition of a certain number of sounds gave ease to the instinct for harmony, and a yet greater gain when the regular recurrence of a louder sound or a longer sound satisfied the craving for finer distinctions;[[608]] it has been shown how the mere zeal of repetition was crossed by increment and variation, until the oldest element of poetry was made superfluous in the plainer form and was almost utterly driven out of diction, with no refuge but rhythm and certain forms of lyric sacred and profane. In this plain and outright form of repeated words, however, it lingered long in ballads, in festal rites, and of course among the savages; it is in the refrain, therefore, that one can still find some hints of the actual beginnings of poetry. The refrain has been touched incidentally in the treatment of repetition; it is now to be considered for itself.[[609]] Important as it is in ballads, the refrain has even weightier meanings when studied in what may be called the occasional poetry of the people.
The refrain, which in its communal function survives as repetition pure and simple practised by the throng, and in its artistic function has come to be the means of marking off a strophe or stanza, is really the discredited and impoverished heir of that choral song which by general consent stands at the beginning of all poetry. This choral song, under the influence of art and the reflecting, remembering, individual mind, was developed into such forms of epic, drama, lyric, as meet us, more or less divested of communal traits and conditions, on the threshold of every national literature. Greek tragedy is a well-known case in point. The refrain, however, is not a development but a survival,[[610]] so far, at least, as communal conditions are involved; and even in ballads what is called the refrain or the burden is a slowly yielding communal element fighting hopelessly against invading elements of art. In other words, as the ballad recedes into primitive conditions, the refrain grows more and more insistent, so that for the earliest form of the ballad, now nowhere to be found, but easy to reconstruct by the help of an evident evolutionary curve, one must assume not the refrain as such, but rather choral song outright. Different altogether from this communal survival is the artistic use of the refrain. The extreme of art and often of artifice is reached in those forms of verse which were developed out of the older minstrelsy of France, and are known as ballade, rondel, triolet, chant royal, with a refrain as their distinguishing feature; it is conceded, however, that in the first instance this refrain was everywhere taken from popular song.[[611]] Learned poetry of the Middle Ages,[[612]] to be sure, imitated not the vernacular refrain, but the refrain of classical verse; this, however, in its turn had been taken from the poetry of the people, and, whether one considers the Hymen, O Hymenaee of Catullus,[[613]] or the later Cras amet qui nunqnam amavit, which trips so featly through the Pervigilium Veneris[[614]] and keeps such true step with the popular rhythm of its stanzas, is at no great remove from communal song.