Min moder de mi slach't,
Min fader de mi att,
Min swester de Marleenken
Söcht alle mine Beeniken,
Und bindt sie in eensyden Dook
Legst unner den Machandelboom:
Ky witt! ky witt! Ach watt en schon vagel bin ich.
Such repeated rimes in a cante-fable vividly impress the memory, and it is in accordance with psychology that at times of trial and mental strain they haunt the mind from out the depths of memory. Shakespeare, like Goethe, put this fact to an artistic purpose. The impression which such rimes leave is recorded by Dickens in relating the tale of Chips and the Rats: "I don't know why, but the fact of the Devil expressing himself in rhyme was peculiarly trying to me. . . . The invariable effect of this alarming tautology on the part of the Evil Spirit was to deprive me of my reason. . . . For this Refrain I had waited since its last appearance, with inexpressible horror, which now culminated."[1]
Mr. Jacobs maintains in his English Fairy Tales that "The Cante-fable is probably the protoplasm out of which both ballad and folk-tale have been differentiated; the ballad by omitting the narrative prose, and the folk-tale by expanding it."[2] The theory is, I would say, hardly acceptable. As regards the repeated verse lines of the cante-fable, I would suggest that they mark incrementally the progress of the tale towards dramatic climaxes. In other words, the repeated rime forwards the action, and plays somewhat the same part in the folk-tale as what incremental repetition plays in the ballad. To regard the repeated rime of a cante-fable as serving an artistic function is quite a legitimate view to take, but it can hardly be placed in the same category with non-repeated verse mixed with prose such as is frequently found in folk-tale and prose saga. The necessity for repetition as a structural function seems so inherent in the folk-tale that the repetition often is in prose. In
