Thou alone, thou art sublime.
Who is sublime upon earth?
Thou alone, thou art sublime.
The Hebrew psalms[[626]] show very clearly a more or less artistic use of the refrain sung under congregational and therefore to some extent communal conditions.[[627]] These communal conditions can be guessed in their older and simpler form from such an account as is given of David and his dancing before the ark, when he “and all the house of Israel brought up the ark of the Lord with shouting and with the sound of the trumpet”;[[628]] the personal song detached itself from the rhythmic shouts of the dancing or marching multitude precisely as the song of the wife and sister over their dead came out clearer and clearer from the wailings of the clan. So, if D. H. Müller be right, following in the path marked by Lowth, the form of Hebrew prophecy was at first choral, then was divided into strophe and antistrophe, yielding in time to an impassioned solo of the prophet himself. In any case, this single prophet, in historical perspective, lapses into the throng, into those “prophetic hordes” which Budde compares with modern Dervishes, “raving bands” now forgotten or dimly seen in the background of a stage where noble individuals like Amos, still in close touch with the people, play the chief part, and hold the conspicuous place.[[629]] As Amos and his brother prophets yield to the later guild whose prophecies were written, so one goes behind Amos to the “bands,” to communal prophecy, to the repeated shouts and choral exhortation, and so to the festal horde of all early religious rites. The backward course would be from a prophecy written to be read, to the chanted blessing or imprecation of the seer; thence to a singing and shouting band under the leadership of one man, with constant refrain; and at last to the shouting and dancing of purely communal excitement, the real chorus. Moses and the children of Israel “sang a song unto the Lord, saying, I[[630]] will sing unto the Lord.... And Miriam the prophetess ... took a timbrel in her hand, and all the women went out after her with timbrels and with dances. And Miriam answered them, Sing ye to the Lord.” Here is certainly no premeditated verse; and it must be borne in mind that refrains, except where they have a sacred tradition behind them and are kept up by the priests, as in the Arval “minutes,” easily drop from the record. Oral tradition, on the other hand, is fain to hold fast to all these vain repetitions; they are the salt of the thing. Now and then an unmistakable refrain is preserved. “And it came to pass as they came, when David returned from the slaughter of the Philistines, that the women came out of all the cities of Israel, singing and dancing, to meet King Saul, with timbrels, with joy, and with instruments of music. And the women sang one to another in their play, and said:—
“Saul hath slain his thousands,
And David his tens of thousands.”[[631]]
That women in all nations and at certain stages of culture make songs of triumph like this, as they dance and sing, is known to the most careless reader; one or two chorals, strangely similar to these songs of the Hebrew women, may be noted from mediæval Europe. Now it is the singing of Gothic songs of welcome by those maidens who come from their village, as the women of Israel from their cities, to meet and greet Attila,[[632]] dancing as they sing. So the daughter of Jephtha greeted her sire with the singing and dancing maidens; and so in Cashmere a stranger is still met by the women and girls of a village, who form a half circle at the first house where he comes, join their arms, and sing eulogies of him, dancing to the tune of the verse. Malays and even Africans do the same.[[633]] Again, it is in the seventh century, and an obscure saint, Faro by name, has won the gratitude of a community; straightway a song is made and sung “by the women as they dance and clap their hands.”[[634]] It was not often that a saint’s name lent grace to these songs of the women and saved them from clerical wrath; the decrees of councils, the letters of bishops, refer perpetually to the wicked verses and diabolical dances in which maids and even matrons indulged at the very doors of the church. Sometimes, however, national glory covered the shame. In the chronicle of Fabyan,[[635]] who is here telling no lies, it is said that after Bannockburn songs were made and sung with a refrain “in daunces, in the carols of the maidens and minstrels of Scotland, to the reproofe and disdaine of Englishmen”; and Barbour,[[636]] mentioning a fight in Eskdale where fifty Scots defeated three hundred English under Sir Andrew Harcla, says he will not go into details, seeing that any one who likes may hear—
Young wemen, quhen thai will play,
Syng it emang thame ilke day.
One is even fain to believe that Layamon[[637]] was thinking of the women when he said that after a treaty of peace,