Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/91

Rh INTRODUCTION. bcxxv the popular dance in his own day, Neocorus speaks definitely of the parts played by the leader and the throng, so far as the ballad was concerned. The leader of the song, who usually holds a drinking-cup in his hand, and sometimes sings alone, sometimes calls in a colleague, begins the ballad. " And when he has sung a verse, he sings no further, but the whole throng, who either know the ballad, or else have paid close attention to him, repeat and echo the same verse. And when they have brought it to the point where the leader stopped, he begins again, and sings another verse." This is again repeated. Presently, with the singing thus under way, a leader of the dance comes forward, hat in same words at the close of each stave." The refrain is the repetition of a certain passage at regular intervals, and is thus of service in marking off a stanza : see, for oldest English, Dior's Song, or for later rimeless and unsung verse, Tennyson's Tearsy Idle Tears, or Lamb's Old Familiar Faces, In ballads, however, the refrain is undoubtedly the recurring verse or verses sung by the throng in contradistinction to the main body of the ballad, which for later times, was the business of the leader or minstrel. It is no easy matter to adjust the relations of the burden and the refrain. The latter may have been originally more like the burden in its strict meaning, and would thus imply constant, not intermittent, singing of the throng : see Jeanroy, Poisie Lyrique en France, p. 104, for a hint in this direction, and Professor Child's note. Ballads, I, 7. The question is very complicated : see Valentin, Studien Uber die schwedischen Volksmelodien, p. 9f. It is, for example, a temptation to infer from the greater proportion of refrains preserved with two. line stanzas, that the four-line stanza was developed out of this two-line stanza with double refrain ; but many facts lie in the way of such an assumption. Rosenberg's plea for the theory is rejected by Steenstrup, V. F., p. 120. It will be best, therefore, for present purposes, to use "refrain" simply as the recurrent passage or passages which seem to have been sung by the crowd, and to leave unsettled the actual manner of singing. The chorus was a whole stanza sung after each new stanza of the ballad, — as in The Twa Magicians, Child, Ballads, I, 403. Digitized by LjOOQIC