Der Summa is wieder kumme,

Willkummen, lieber Summe![[772]]

Refrain and chorus of labour among savages have been noted here and there in the foregoing pages; to collect them to any extent would be useless. They are found everywhere, and show that stage of development at which the repetition of a single sentence, often of a single word, affords unmeasured delight or ease. Individual singing is almost unknown in many savage tribes,[[773]] and the refrain in its function as deputy of the older chorus, is less common than the chorus itself.[[774]] Where the savage is still mainly a hunter, mainly a warrior, the refrain is insistent whenever a connected bit of description breaks away from the choral song, as if artistic poetry could not yet walk by itself; and where he has begun to till the soil, or even merely to gather plants and fruits, there is the chorus and there is the refrain of a rude harvest-home. For the hunter and warrior we may quote Heckewelder’s account.[[775]] “Their songs are by no means inharmonious. They sing in chorus; first the men and then the women. At times the women join in the general song, or repeat the strain which the men have just finished. It seems like two parties singing in questions and answers, and is upon the whole very agreeable and enlivening.... The singing always begins by one person only, but others soon fall in successively, until the general chorus begins, the drum beating all the while to mark the time.” Their war-dance is described in the familiar terms; but Heckewelder adds a more interesting account of the feast which under agricultural conditions would be a harvest-home. “After returning from a successful expedition,” he says, “a dance of thanksgiving is always performed.... It is accompanied with singing and choruses, in which the women join.... At the end of every song, the scalp-yell is shouted as many times as there have been scalps taken from the enemy.” As to the rhythm, Heckewelder makes a statement much clearer than the accounts given in Schoolcraft’s question and answer, for he does not undertake to express Indian metres in terms of civilized poetry, but simply says that “their songs ... are sung in short sentences, not without some kind of measure harmonious to an Indian ear.”

These Indians, however, were not in the absolutely primitive stage, and the artist had elaborated dance, speech, song; in short, like European peasants of isolated communities a century ago, the redskin was at that point of poetical development where improvisation is a general gift, and every one is expected to compose his bit of song, leaning, of course, on the chorus, on refrain and repetition, and on those traditional phrases which even more than modern speech realized Schiller’s lines about the poet:—

Weil dir ein Vers gelingt in einer gebildeten Sprache

Die für dich dichtet und denkt, glaubst du schon

Dichter zu sein?

“The Indians also meet,” says Heckewelder, “for the purpose of recounting their warlike exploits, which is done in a kind of half-singing or recitative ... the drum beating all the while.... After each has made a short recital in his turn, they begin again in the same order, and so continue going the rounds, in a kind of alternate chaunting, until every one has concluded.” It is easy to see that while the chorus of war is an eminently communal performance, asking an exactness of consent which makes strongly for rhythm at its best, the conditions of nomadic and belligerent life must breed excellent differences, set apart the great warrior, the great orator, and work in certain ways toward communal disintegration and the triumph of the artist. Agricultural communities, on the other hand, foster the choral and social side of poetry, and discourage individual feats. So even with the Indians; witness that “cereal chorus,” as Schoolcraft calls it,[[776]] at the corn-husking, sung whenever a crooked ear is found by one of the maidens:—

Crooked ear, crooked ear, walker at night,—

with additions and variations. This crooked ear, wa-ge-min, is the symbol of a “thief in the cornfield,” and may have some relationship with Mannhardt’s corn-demon.[[777]]