until they fell exhausted, but still raving.[[854]] These panic dances reproduce in some features the mad dance of mænads and all that “wild religious excitement,” that “Bacchic ecstasy,” which lay behind the Hellenic drama, and anticipate as mad a dance of as wild an ecstasy, though not religious, when the mob of Paris dances the carmagnole to its own singing; but all this belongs to the pathological side of the case, and one turns to the harvest-field, and to the village oak, where merry dances often set a rhythm heard in later and nobler verse. Not long ago, poetry of every kind was thought to start in some religious rite, and a god or goddess lay hid under the most harmless rime of the yokel; of late, however, a wholesome tendency has prevailed to stop the search of sky and storm-cloud and other far-away haunts for an explanation of the rustic dance and of the rustic refrain. On one hand, the chase, war, whatever concerned the routine of nomadic life, and on the other hand, among agricultural folk, the round of seedtime and harvest, days of plenty or of want, and in both cases, the common joys and sorrows of mankind, are now thought to be a better reason for communal dance and song. Primitive man did not go about with his eyes fixed upon the heavens; and it is not the goddess of spring and sunshine transferred to those harvested crops as signs of her presence which explains a Nerthus or a Ceres, but rather a slow inference from local delight in harvest up to a great feast of gathered and related tribes, involving wider ideas of divinity and arriving by easy stages at the abstraction of one beneficent deity sending out her largess of sun and quickening showers. The dance, then, with nomadic tribes was a triumph, an outburst of communal elation, dealing in its mimicry with scenes of the war or hunt, and cadenced by shout and song that echoed a clash of arms; with the agricultural community it was a harvest-home, with recapitulation of the rural year, imitated acts of sowing, planting, watching, reaping, storing, which survive in some sort to this day. In both kinds of life, nomadic and agricultural, the dance was an essential part of such rites as the wedding and the funeral, and is still considered in this way by peasants in remoter Europe. Thus in Dalmatia and Montenegro,[[855]] the kollo, that is, circle, “the figure of all their dances, though the steps differ,” is danced at weddings. “Twelve or thirteen women ... danced in a circle, singing a slow and rather plaintive song ... while waiting for the bride.... In the meantime, the men ... walked in procession to the court before the church door, and danced in a circle.” Evidence of this sort is everywhere; it has been studied under the refrain; but the festal idea may be repeated here in comment on the meaning of our old English word and suffix lâc, and the related Gothic laiks,[[856]] German leich, originally the combination of word, song, and dance—or march—in one communal act,[[857]] with an easy transition into the idea of battle, the “play of spears,” where, indeed, this communal act always served as prelude, as well as into the idea of feast, ceremony, merriment. A festal song and dance after the fight, easily turned into ritual and thanksgiving to the gods, but once mere fighting the battle over again, was called in Norse the sigrleikr.[[858]] Further philology would not be in place; enough that the earliest songs and poetry of Europe appear everywhere hand in hand with the dance,[[859]] and that this dance is partly the triumph of victorious war, partly a triumph of peace and plenty, always, however, a festal and communal affair.
In considering this communal dance of Europe, one finds that it is practically inseparable from song, and the song is mainly sung by those who dance. In modern Greece, even, Fauriel[[860]] found that “every new dance was the result of a new song, of which it formed the mimicry; it was never danced without this song, and fell with it into oblivion.” A study of the refrain showed how close this bond between song and dance must have been; and one sees how slowly and reluctantly the separation takes place, most reluctantly, of course, in the games of children. It must also be borne in mind that dancing by pairs is of comparatively recent date; Neocorus, one will remember, says it was unknown among his peasant neighbours between the German ocean and the Baltic until the middle of the sixteenth century, while Bladé makes this way of dancing a stranger to the Gascon countryfolk as late as seventy years ago. What they knew and practised was the old round, danced once to the songs of the dancers, but now dominated more and more by instruments;[[861]] the song, when used, is led by a soloist who improvises a line or so which is repeated by the dancers in chorus, with a refrain for all stanzas. This round, of course, is the carole[[862]] of Romance literature, known later as the branle, a dance or march of many, hand in hand, with chorus or refrain to time the steps;[[863]] it was the main amusement of aristocratic folk, but derived directly from popular usage. Such an aristocratic dance is described in the Romaunt of the Rose.[[864]] Dante refers[[865]] to the practise of singing with the dance; and if we had his chapter on the ballata, we should have riches. On the dance-song of these Romance nations, and its absolutely communal origin, enough has been quoted already from such authors as Wolf and Jeanroy; and it would be waste of time to heap up evidence of the English ballad[[866]] as it was danced in Elizabethan fields, and when the youth went out to “mix their songs and dances in the wood.” Dances of this sort we have already noted not only among shepherds, but in the Elizabethan theatre; besides the refrains of labour and merriment to which the actors danced, ballads were in demand. A good instance is in the old play of Like Wil to Like,[[867]] where Nichol Newfangle, the Devil, and Tom Collier are on the stage. Says Nichol,—
Godfather, wilt thou daunce a little before ye go home to hell?...
Then, godfather, name what the daunce shall be.
“Tom Coliar of Croydon hath solde his cole.”
Why, then, haue at it by my father’s soule.
[Nichol Newfangle must have a gittorn or some other instrument (if it may bee), but if hee haue not, they must daunce about the place all three, and sing this song that followeth, which must bee doon also althoug they haue an instrumenth.]
And the song follows. Jigs were songs, largely improvised, and sung by actors as they danced; they came after the play.[[868]] It was the fiddle, says Mr. Baring-Gould,[[869]] “which banished the ballad as a song-accompaniment to a dance. Nevertheless, as a very aged fiddler told me ... in his early days the lads and maids always sang whilst dancing to his music.” On the stage this substitution was more immediate and thorough; so that in the days of George II, when Nancy Dawson “produced the novelty of singing as she danced,” she took the town by storm; though one may conjecture that it was the survival, not the “novelty,”[[870]] in the case which thus aided her charm as a woman and her grace as a dancer. For rural England, like rural Europe, showed reluctance enough in giving up the good old way; a Scottish parson, moreover, writing in 1793, tells of a large stone, set up in one of the islands, about which he saw “fifty of the inhabitants” gathered on the first day of the year, and “dancing in the moonlight” with no other music than their own singing.[[871]] About such stones, but by preference about the village linden,[[872]] folk danced to their own singing in Germany down to modern times; and as the dance was an even movement in a ring, the dancers hand in hand, it was quite possible for them to sing the ballads which seem to us grotesquely unfit for the lively springing of single performers as well as for the rapidly gliding couples. Leaping, and livelier motions generally, followed the dance in a ring; but it was to the latter that ballads were sung and in the first instance composed.[[873]] The dances which go mainly to a refrain represent of course an older stage than those which are danced to a ballad, to a narrative song; the early dance knows only present action, and exhorts or describes, as in the Flemish dances[[874]] now mainly relegated to children.
As Mr. Thomas Hardy is so fond of reminding his readers, this is a merry, dancing world no more; even youth can hardly make shift “to revel in the general situation” as all men used to do. Weltschmerz is to blame, no doubt, and there is Mr. Baring-Gould’s fiddle, which has done a deal of mischief. Rivals to the human voice, successful rivals, were early at the dance,—harp, lyre, pipe, what not. South Sea islanders were fain, not of these, but of the drum. With the dominant note of alien music came a desire to break up the ring, to dance in pairs, or even to listen and look on. Meddlesome bishops and officials of every sort were bound to destroy this communal dance as a place of scandal; and we have seen how the chimney and the clean, warm fireside and the lamp drew sober folk from the village dances and left these to the baser element. One can take quite seriously that petition[[875]] of the would-be peasant to restore legal sanction to the village dance; and one is interested to hear the petitioner complain that it is the violin now where once was the bagpipe,—and once, too, he might have added, the echoing refrain. No, the dance as well as the dancing song, the ballad proper, is going out of date;[[876]] and not only the dance in this communal and social meaning, but the very fact of rhythm, which is the soul of the dance. Children play these games less and less, although the kindergarten makes some stand in the matter; and even in music, as Bücher[[877]] points out in those pages to which we have so often referred, teachers and artists are fain to give rhythm an ancillary place and put melody, harmony, in the foreground. One feels little displeasure, says Bücher, at the sight of unrhythmic movements; and what would be said of an orator who, like his Athenian brother, should address a political assembly as his “fellow dancers”? But the decline set in early; even in Sir Thomas Elyot’s day,[[878]] dancing is “that exercise whiche of the more parte of sadde men”—serious folk, that is—“is so litle estimed.” So, too, in imperial Rome. When the Romans hired mimes to dance for them, some lover of the old ways might have said of the communal dance, expression of social union and social equality and the strong, compact state, what the stern old orator said of his profession when he first heard hired applause in the courts of law: centumviri, hoc artificium periit,—“judges, oratory is doomed!” In both cases one is dealing with the decline of communal force and the growth of individual power.
Our business, however, is with the past. It is clear that movements of labour, particularly in a reminiscent festal act, and movements of the communal dance, furnished the raw material of poetry. In all cases the primitive dance, or what seems to come nearest to that state of the art, is a dance of masses of men for one purpose and to one exact rhythm.[[879]] Equal sets of movements gave the verse, and sets of these sets gave in time the strophe. Communal interest, resulting in the communal expression, added contents to form; and shout, movement, cadence, are all born of this absolutely social and communal impulse. To use the good old word, here is the poetry of nature; facing this communal material, what are we to say of the changes wrought upon it by individual art?[[880]]