Tha weoren in thissen lande blisfulle songes.

That the record of these refrains is so meagre and baffling need cause no surprise. The histories of national literature are disappointing to the student of beginnings, for the reason that they almost invariably[[638]] study these beginnings as conditioned by the habits of authorship in modern times; they are always looking for original composition, for expression of individual feeling, for a story, and therefore turn aside from these stretched metres of an antique song. But the story, and the expression of personal emotion, are precisely what one seldom if ever finds at the beginning of a literature; one finds there, when one finds anything, the chorus or its deputy the refrain. The refrain was a constant element in early Greek song, “an essential mint-mark”;[[639]] not only the early melic verse, but a study of the chorus[[640]] in dramatic survival, proves this beyond doubt, and one is amazed to find Rosières, in the essay quoted above, saying that the ancients, particularly the Greeks, had no need of the refrain, and hardly used it at all. How important, on the contrary, this refrain must have been, how it works back through the alternate strains of chorus and solo to the throng of communal singers and dancers, could be shown for classical poetry, and can be proved by mediæval and modern refrains, some already noted under the vocero, and others presently to be considered in songs of labour and of the harvest. True, the records are scanty; and the unwary historian of English poetry in the early stage, reviewing his material, announces that, with the exception of some insignificant charms, there is just one poem with a refrain, the “Consolation” of Deor, the king’s minstrel out of place,—taking, that is, a lyric of individual and artistic reflection as the only example of that part of poetry which above all belongs to the communal and spontaneous expression of the throng. Recorded poetry has here a poor tale to tell, and even that is usually marred in the telling. Where, then, is the old refrain of the English folk, and where was the chorus? Had they no dances, no ballads, no communal singing? If the evidence of ethnology from tribes and communities of men in every degree of culture is to be accepted, it is certain that Englishmen of that early day had dance, ballad, chorus, and refrain. We know that their old heathen hymns went with the dance; and the dance means a strophic arrangement. What, then, has become of this refrain? So far as the old English poetry has found record at the hands of the monk, it is in a fixed alliterative metre, without strophes,[[641]] suited to epic and narrative purposes, suited to recitation and a sort of chant, but not, in its literary shape, suited to refrain and chorus.[[642]] One does not dance an epic, or sing it; it is chanted or recited; and even Anglo-Saxon lyric, barring that little song of Déor, is elegiac and highly reflective. The refrain, says Dr. R. M. Meyer,[[643]] is to be assumed for oldest Germanic poetry, although it was thrown out by the recited alliterative verse, only to come again into recorded literature with the introduction of rime; but no one supposes that Englishmen ceased in that interval to dance and sing. It is a defect of the record. The chorals and refrains, even the ballads of which William of Malmesbury speaks as crumbling to pieces with the lapse of time, were simply deemed useless if not harmful, and had no claim whatever to the life beyond life. Nor is this chorus, this refrain, simply assumed for oldest Germanic poetry; it is proved, and nowhere proved so well as in Müllenhoff’s essay.[[644]] Many conclusions of this sturdy and often too intolerant scholar have been rejected by later investigation; but his assertion in regard to choral poetry as the foundation of every literature remains an article of faith among those who deal at first hand with the material involved, and writers since his day who have undertaken to describe the different kinds of Germanic choral song have done little more than follow in his steps.[[645]] There is no need, then, to rehearse this proof of the existence of refrain and chorus as main form[[646]] of poetry among the ancient Germans; it is in order simply to trace these and other choral songs in the later fragments and the surviving refrains, whether sung at the solemn procession round the fields, or sung to the festal dance at harvest-home, or in whatever survivals they may be found, and to compare them with kindred refrains and kindred customs elsewhere. From this point of view, even the blackness of thick darkness which broods over Anglo-Saxon communal song, that darkness of superstitious fear felt by monks who knew these customs and these songs to be of the devil himself, and would not write them down, is lifted a little. We look, then, at refrains of labour, refrains of actual work, too trivial usually for record, and at those refrains and chorals of the harvest feasts, of plantings, sowings, reapings, which had the taint of heathendom upon them, and so were either left in silence or coaxed into a harmless formula; we look, too, at refrains and chorus of the dance, the sunnier side of life, and still more provocative than labour as an occasion of communal song. For the refrains of war, and even for the choral raised by a whole army as it marched to battle, an occasion which Müllenhoff calls the supreme moment of all Germanic life, the fierce and clamorous words needing no leader,[[647]] and the wild rhythm asking no aid from trumpet or drum, there is ample evidence; and indeed these war chorals might be connected by easy stages with the ridiculous marching songs already noted above. From the barditus to “ma poule a fait un poulet” were a pretty journey; but we will keep to the ways of peace, and the saure wochen, frohe feste of everyday life will yield material enough in regard to this communal refrain.

Songs of labour are found everywhere; but there is a great chasm between the actual refrains, the survivals of communal or even solitary song which come from the real scene of labour and from the real labourers, and those songs which are made for the labourer. Nowhere is the difference between volkspoesie and volksthümliche poesie so evident; and we have here no concern with poetry, however successful, which has been written for the edification of “honest toil.”[[648]] It is the song of actual labour to which we now turn, as it has abounded in all the activities of life, and which, like the ballad, is fast vanishing from the scene. Sometimes the labour was solitary, and the song was a plaintive little lyric when it was made by the lonely maiden grinding at her hand-mill:

Alone I ground, alone I sang,

Alone I turned the mill....[[649]]

but often even this grinding of the mill was social, as in Poland, where it was the manner of the women to repeat a word in chorus.[[650]] Plutarch has preserved an old Greek “song of the millstone,”[[651]] which he heard a woman sing; from the older Scandinavian literature[[652]] comes a lay, sung by two maidens, Menja and Fenja, as they grind out King Frodi’s fortune, which may hold bits of the actual refrain of labour, and has, too, its touch of folklore, explaining “how the sea became salt”; but the real and primitive choral of such labour is sufficiently attested by those women in Poland, and by a similar case among the Basuto tribe,[[653]] where, as Cassilis says, to relieve the fatigue of solitary grinding, “the women come together and grind in unison, by singing an air which blends perfectly with the cadenced clinking of the rings upon their arms.” There is plenty of evidence for this choral of the grinding women in places and times so widely sundered as to forbid all idea of borrowing, and to leave the conditions of communal labour and communal consent as the only explanation. Originally there was a spontaneous chorus or refrain[[654]]—in the strictly choral sense, that is, and not in the technical meaning presently to be considered—suggested by the movements, cadence, and sounds of the work itself; improvisation added words at will, until at last art seized upon the material and gave now a song like that of Fenja and Menja, now even a jolly refrain such as one finds in an audacious song of Beaumont and Fletcher’s Maid of the Mill.[[655]] Everywhere labour had its refrain and song, and even the scanty remains of Hellenic communal poetry tell of songs for reaper, thresher, miller, for the vintage, spinning, weaving, for the drawers of water, oarsmen, rope-makers, watchmen, shepherds, and for the common labourers marching out to their work. Rome itself, in the old silent period, has something of this song for the attentive ear;[[656]] and allusions scattered throughout the Bible show that the Hebrews sang at their work in house and in field. A few echoes of such singing come from Egypt; while darker and darkest Africa, along with savage tribes over the world, shows yet more elementary, and hence more insistent and necessary[[657]] connection between work and song. With the breaking up of communal conditions, with the advance of individual and initiative art, these songs of labour, like the ballad, like all communal poetry, tend to disappear or yield to alien verse. Often the individual works in silence, when his labour demands intelligent thought, but where labour is automatic or monotonous, wherever it is collective, the labourer sings, and always will do so; the important fact is that he now ceases to sing the old refrain or song of the labour itself, born, as Bücher[[658]] shows so plainly, of the very movements and sounds which it called forth. For good reason, andere zeiten, andere lieder. Neus[[659]] noted that the Esthonians, a century ago, sang their own songs, and sang always as they worked in the fields or came together for festal occasions; now,—and “now” is fifty years ago—he says that either the song is silent, or else it is changed for an imported German ditty. All the more need, then, to collect and study such survivals of the refrains of labour as can be found. Speaking of the decline of folksong in Germany, not only of the making but even of the singing, Professor E. H. Meyer[[660]] remarks that collective labour still has some power here and there to stir the old instinct into a fitful activity. Now it is in the spinning-room,—where Böckel[[661]] a few years ago could hear Hessian folksongs in the making—now at the berry-picking in Nassau, at the flax-breaking, and elsewhere in cases where companies of peasants still ply the monotonous tasks of their forefathers. And in all these cases, as in the beginning, so in the end, women are the mainstay of communal song.[[662]]

Of particular trades and callings, perhaps sailors, oarsmen, and watermen generally, would furnish more refrains than could be found in any one industry of the land. Sailors’ chanteys are still heard in every ship;[[663]] but they are now apt to echo those songs of the street and the dance-hall which have been picked up at port, and they have seldom a traditional interest. Here and there, however, the genuine refrain is clear enough, and attests itself by its power to withstand the discrimina rerum and the changes of time; it is said that modern Greek sailors, when reefing sails, have nearly the same melodious calls as those preserved in a play of Aristophanes.[[664]] Negro roustabouts on the Mississippi sing interminable refrains, while a capable leader improvises stanzas on the work in hand or on current events; a process which is matched by refrains and songs of manual labour in every part of the world. A well-known passage in the Complaynt of Scotland[[665]] gives the cries and songs both of weighing anchor,—where a leader sings and the rest answer “as it had bene ecco in an hou heuch,” like the echo in a hollow ravine, mainly in repetitions,—and of hoisting sail, with iteration of short running phrases such as:—

Grit and smal, grit and smal,

Ane and al, ane and al,—

and not stopping here, undertakes to set down the “chorus” of guns heavy and light as a spirited sea-fight begins. In the old play Common Conditions occurs a pirates’ song, the stanzas in quatrains, with a jolly refrain or chorus:—