Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/93

Rh attributes the origin of the refrain to an arbitrary and often spontaneous invention of the minstrel. In a practical way, the refrain undoubtedly served to give the leader breathing-space, literal and figurative; the crowd took up the song, while he either recalled or improvised another stanza. But this accidental advantage is no ultimate reason for the refrain, and dwindles before the significance of the fact that refrains increase in importance as one approaches the beginnings of vernacular poetry, receding, so to speak, from the leader or the minstrel, slipping from his control, and at last dominating the ballad itself. Setting aside the vanity of dogmatizing, one feels inclined to assert that the original ballad must have been sung by all, as it was danced by all; the division of labor implied in the leader's song and the crowd's refrain surely indicates a later adjustment.

Dr. Meyer attacks the question of origins by a study of the unintelligible refrain. This, he says, was simply the inarticulate cry of primitive man, the sudden sense of fear, delight, wonder, grief, or love, expressed in a melodious sound or series of sounds,—the earliest form of poetry. This sound or series of sounds is preserved by the piety of a later age in its original and now meaningless form, imbedded among the articulate words of a developed song. Take, for example, the threnody. In earliest verse of the sort, says Meyer, one may fancy "a monotonous repetition of emotional sounds." Indeed, we