But refrains of artistic poetry are of subordinate interest for our study of primitive verse; and it is clear that all investigations which neglect the older and more popular phases, which neglect the primitive choral song and the primitive communal conditions, can lead to no valid conclusions about the refrain. It is something, of course, when Bujeaud explains this or that refrain of a modern song as imitated from sounds of some musical instrument, or taken from the argot of the streets;[[615]] but when Rosières[[616]] undertakes to tell the whole story of the refrain, and settle its origins beyond doubt, saying now that it “springs from the periodic return of full sounds,” now that it is a tra-la-la to take the place of musical instruments, now that it is “a little poem stuck in all the fissures of a big poem,” and now, with a passing recognition of communal conditions, but with sufficient vagueness, that it voices popular song, then, indeed, one feels the vanity of dogmatizing to the full.[[617]] The need of comparative, historical, and genetic study is also evident in a similar essay on the refrain in Middle High German. Freericks[[618]] regards the original refrain not as repetition of the words of a singer but as an expression of sentiment which they evoke, coming back in cries of sorrow or of joy. “When utterances of this sort continually interrupt the song, there is the refrain in its simplest form.” So too Minor,[[619]] in his book on German metres, calls the refrain “the original cry of the throng in answer to the song of the singer.” Against all this, Dr. R. M. Meyer, in two essays,[[620]] makes emphatic and successful protest. With an eye on conditions and not on theory, Meyer shows the refrain to belong to the oldest poetry of man,—inarticulate cries at first, in rhythmic sequence, to express fear, wonder, grief, affection. The refrain, for example, is the original part of a threnody, as we have seen very plainly in our study of the vocero; in short, so far from being an aftergrowth of communal song, this refrain is declared by Dr. Meyer to be the very root of the matter. With more attention to choral song in the horde or clan, Posnett has come closer to the facts than Meyer, who failed to appreciate all the communal conditions of such early verse; for while Meyer referred to inarticulate cries as a beginning of the refrain, it is evident that these immediately formed the chorus, and that the refrain is rather survival and deputy of this old chorus than the chorus outright. The refrain, in other words, allows one to feel one’s way back to the choral song of the horde,[[621]] but is not to be transferred to those primitive times even in its unintelligible and inarticulate forms. To make this clear, we must study the refrain in its various communal survivals.
Records of early literature and early religion show the refrain in its original guise as a part of the choral song, and it echoes audibly the steps of the dance. Nowhere is this echo more insistent than in that hymn of the Arval brothers, sung, of course, with a dance that was confined to the priests, and already come a long way from the shouting and leaping throng of primitive time; nevertheless, as a hymn used in processions about the fields, it is to be connected with the survivals of similar rites and the songs still heard from European peasants at the harvest-home. In the inscription which preserves it, each verse, except the last, is given thrice.[[622]] A free translation[[623]] follows:—
Help us, O Lares, help us, Lares, help us!
And thou, O Marmar, suffer not
Fell plague and ruin’s rot
Our folk to devastate.
Be satiate, O fierce Mars, be satiate!
Leap o’er the threshold! Halt! now beat the ground!
Be satiate, O fierce Mars, be satiate!
Leap o’er the threshold! Halt! now beat the ground!