340. “Volkslied und Kunstlied in Deutschland,” Beilage zur Allgemeinen Zeitung, Munich, Nos. 53, 54, March, 1898,—a paper first read in October, 1897.
341. Only the narrative song is here considered; for popular lyric see below.
342. “Volksdichtung und Kunstdichtung,” in Nord und Süd, LXVIII. (1894), 76 ff. It may be noted here that the temptation to take this easy attitude toward poetry of the people, as toward a fictitious and fanciful affair, is largely due to a misunderstanding of the evolutionary side of the case. The distinction is not one of coexistent forms of poetry so much as of successive stages of evolution. It is no hard matter to take so-called popular poetry of the day and reduce it to terms of art—the lowest terms, of course; but with poetry of the people treated as a closed or closing account, and with historical evidence about it in former times, a very different problem is presented. An important hint to this effect was given by Dr. Eugen Wolff in his paper “über den Stil des Nibelungenliedes,” Verhandlungen der vierzigsten Versammlung deutscher Philologen, etc., Leipzig, 1890, pp. 259 ff.
343. Norske Folkeviser, Christiania, 1853, pp. iii f.
344. Chants et Chansons Populaires des Provinces de l’Ouest, Niort, 1895, I. 12. For the authorship, Le Braz, remarks, Soniou-Breiz-Izel, Chansons Pop. d. l. Basse-Bretagne, Introd., p. xxv, “à mesure que les productions populaires deviennent plus médiocres, leurs auteurs se font un devoir de conscience de les contresigner.”
345. Songs of the Russian People, p. 40.
346. Krohn, “La Chanson Populaire en Finlande,” Proceedings Internat. Folk-Lore Congress, 1891, pp. 134 ff., a valuable paper. “La poésie s’est refugiée dans la pensée, mais elle n’a pu se maintenir intacte de trivialité.” See also Comparetti, Kalewala, pp. 16 f.
347. E. H. Meyer, Volkskunde, pp. 327, 331.
348. James Hogg (Famous Scots Series), p. 25.
349. In Mélusine, IV, (1888-1889), pp. 49 ff., and continued.
350. It is significant that the vogue of singing-clubs in German rural districts, which would seem to make for communal ballads, really drives them out. See Dunger, Rundâs u. Reimsprüche aus dem Vogtlande, Plauen, 1876, p. xxx.
351. The introduction to Rosa Warrens’s Schwedische Volkslieder, 1857, is by Wolf, and Grundtvig did a similar favour for her Dänische Volkslieder, 1858; opposed as regards authorship, the two are agreed on the source of a ballad in the homogeneous community. This even Comparetti recognizes: Kalewala, p. 21. See, too, Liliencron, Deutsches Leben im Volkslied um 1530, p. xi., and Baring-Gould, English Minstrelsie, Vol. VII. Introduction (“On English Song-Making”). But it is useless to pile up these references.
352. January 27, 1900.
353. Of course, one community may still sing, while another has forgotten. Beaurepaire, Étude sur la Poésie Populaire en Normandie, 1856, pp. 24 f., notes this, as well as the fact that some kinds of songs linger while others die. He found no vocero left in Normandy, but old choral wedding songs still were heard. The dance is going—the old village dance, the ronde: pp. 30 f.
354. Böckel, Deutsche Volkslieder aus Oberhessen, Marburg, 1885, has an introduction of great value, which shows how utterly German folksong is a closed account. Traditional ballads are still sung, but none are made; what is now made is mainly “Schmutz und Rohheit.” Factories, singing-schools, are putting an end to communal song. The process of decay, he thinks, began as early as 1600. For description of modern communal songs, see p. cxxviii. Folksong, he says (p. clxxxiii), is dead throughout civilized Europe.
355. See John Ashton, Modern Street Ballads, London, 1888. For the French, see C. Nisard, Les Chansons Populaires chez les Anciens et chez les Français, essai historique suivi d’une étude sur la chanson des rues contemporaine, ... Paris, 1867, 2 vols. Vol. II. treats street songs. This is really a continuation of Nisard’s Histoire des Livres Populaires, 2 vols., 1854, on almanacs, prophecies, divinations, magic, etc. Nisard’s account of origins is ridiculous,—or perhaps it is meant to be playful. See I. 69.
356. In addition to the material quoted in the introduction to Old English Ballads, see Nash, Harvey, and the other pamphleteers on nearly every page. Chettle, Kind-Harts Dreame (Percy Soc., 1841), particularly pp. 9 ff., has a lively account of ballad making, printing, selling, singing, in this lower stratum. What is so lewd, he asks, that it has not been printed “and in every streete abusively chanted”? For the state of things somewhat later, see a curious publication, Whimzies, or a New Cast of Characters, London, 1631; it describes in alphabetical order, “almanach-maker,” “ballad-monger,” and so on, down to “zealous brother”; for ballad-monger, see pp. 8-15.
357. Ancient and Modern Scottish Songs.
358. National Ballad and Song: Merry Songs and Ballads Prior to the Year 1800; 5 vols., privately printed for subscribers only, 1897. The fourth volume of the Percy Folio teaches a like lesson.
359. Werke, ed. Suphan, XXV. 323.
361. Poetik (well called Naturlehre der Dichtung, and an excellent piece of work), pp. 99 ff.
362. When folk read and write, they cease to improvise poetry, and the folksong really ceases; that the æsthetic impulse, however, abides with them, even in low levels, but has other results, is shown by Gustav Meyer in an interesting passage of his “Neugriechische Volkslieder,” Essays, p. 309.
363. Sir George Douglas, Hogg, pp. 38 f.
364. See the context of it in Lachmann u. Haupt, Minnesangs Frühling, pp. 221 ff.
365. Jeanroy, Origines de la Poésie Lyrique en France, Paris, 1889, Part III., shows conclusively the origin of these songs in the public dance.
366. “Balade” of the twelfth century: Bartsch, Chrestomathie Provençale, p. 107. Alavia = “away from us, begone,” the procul este profani of the dancers. See also G. Paris, Origines de la Poésie Lyrique, etc., a review of Jeanroy, Paris, 1892, pp. 12 ff. The rimes in -ar running through this stanza and the rest, and certain touches of art, show the changes in record; but the refrain and the spirit of the piece are quite communal.
367. Quellien, Chansons et Danses des Bretons, Paris, 1889, p. 11, notes that one event is not likely to be treated both in the song and in the tale: “ce qui est tombé dans le domaine de la narrative prosaïque est par cela même exclu desormais de la chanson.” Communal song must seize present things; in the tales it was “once upon a time.”
368. Buckle, Hist. Civ. Engl., I. Chap. vi., calls ballads “the groundwork of all historical knowledge,” and says they are “all strictly true” at the start. The use of writing, he thinks, put an end to their value.
369. This traditional, narrative song is called ballad throughout the present book,—unfortunately an equivocal term. The terminology of the whole subject is notoriously bad, and “ballad” is no exception to the rule. See Old English Ballads, pp. xviii ff.; Blankenburg, Litterarische Zusätze u. s. w., I. 387 ff., under “Dichtkunst”; for modern “ballad,” Werner in the Anzeiger für deutsches Alterthum, XIV. 165 ff., 190 f., XV. 259; for German names, Erich Schmidt, Charakteristiken, pp. 199 ff.; on balada, Jeanroy, Origines, etc., p. 403, who shows the passage of the word from its meaning as a dance-song to the technical term for a fixed form of verse. In Corsica a ballata can be a lament (see below under vocero), and derives from the dance round a corpse: J. B. Marcaggi, Les Chants de la Mort, etc., Paris, 1898, p. 121, note on the caracolu, “a sort of pantomime danced about the corpse by the mourning women, with gestures of grief,” but now fallen out of use. Of course, the only point here is to separate the ballad from songs like Greensleeves, from journalism (for the so-called “ballad” under Elizabeth shows that her folk were as anxious to get into print, or to keep out of it, as we are in days of the newspaper), from occasional poetry, scurrilous rimes, hymns, and all the rest. “Sonnet” was a word that then not only meant any short poem, but occasionally made a little competition with “ballad”; several of the ballads in the Rawlinson Collection, Bodleian Library, are called “sonnet” either by title or in the text.
370. Work quoted, p. lxviii. Critics look at this narrative and treat it as the only element in the ballad; but at every turn they should remember that the original ballad was always property of a throng, was always sung, was always danced, and was never without a dominant refrain.
371. Even Kleinpaul, sarcastic enough against Grimm, implies this condition in his nine characteristics of popular poetry: Von der Volkspoesie, published anonymously, 1860, and as supplement to his Poetik, 1870. See p. 29.
372. Introduction to Rosa Warrens’s Schwedische Volkslieder, p. xix.
373. Ancient Danish Ballads, 1860, I. ix.
374. Altgermanische Poesie, p. 118. See also p. 52.
375. Heinzel, “Beschreibung d. isländ. Saga,” Sitzungsberichte, Vienna Acad., phil. hist. class, 1897, p. 117.
376. Said of the Castilian and Aragonese ballads in Wolf’s Proben portug. u. catalan. Romanzen, Vienna, 1856, p. 6. Here, too, he opposes the idea, presently to be considered, that ballads are degenerate epic or romance.
377. A broader account of the origin of ballads is given by Comparetti, Kalewala, pp. 282 f. He refers them to the romantic and chivalric sentiment of the late Middle Ages—beginning, say, with the eleventh century—which passed from the “Romanic-Germanic centre of Europe” into various tongues, was delivered to oral tradition as popular verse, spread and flourished down to the sixteenth century, where it was collected as romancero, romanze, kæmpevise, ballad. But Comparetti neglects the communal conditions.
378. Of course it was the revival of learning, the humanistic spirit, dividing lay society into lettered and unlettered, which really broke up the communal ballad.
379. Characters, “A Franklin.”
380. Brand-Ellis, under Harvest Home. The “mell-supper,” may not derive its name from mesler, as suggested, but the fact is clear enough.
381. Grosse, Formen der Familie, pp. 134 f.
382. Proben, etc., p. 6, as above, and also p. 31.
383. Popular Tales of the West Highlands, new ed., IV. 114 ff.
384. Proceedings, Internat. Folk-Lore Congress, 1891, p. 64.
385. Even in the material itself there is a shading from highly artistic down to communal. Thomas Rymer undoubtedly comes from a romance. The Boy and the Mantle has the flippancy of its origin in the fabliau; Jeanroy, Origines, p. 155, declares such a touch of the cynical to warrant one in taking the ballad out of that class which he calls popular. King Orfeo is a distorted tale from the classics. Plain kin-tragedies, however, like Babylon, Edward, The Twa Brothers, are simple enough for one to leave them to communal origins, and not go source-hunting. Even where the motive seems international, details may be home-made; how much of Hero and Leander is left in that Westphalian ballad, Et wasen twei Kunnigeskinner? This story of the lovers and the lighted taper is found in many folksongs. See Reifferscheid, Westfälische Volkslieder, pp. 127 ff. In the classics and modern poetry,—witness Musæos and Marlowe,—it belongs to art. Comparative mythology laid hold of it, followed it back to India, and from India to the skies,—spring-god, sea, stars, autumn storms, and the rest. But this is needless bewilderment of a plain case; we have only to deal with the way in which Westphalian peasants sing of prince and princess. In three stanzas the story is told; all the rest deals with the situation so given, and here the communal elements (see below, p. 196) come in. The point is that study of subject-matter in ballads is distinct from the study of ballad elements. These are constant in good ballads, whether the subject be borrowed, or be local history, as in Bessy Bell and Mary Gray, and the Border ballads generally. In addition to the studies of ballad migration (e.g. Sir Aldingar) by Grundtvig and by Child, see a close piece of investigation by Professor Bugge, “Harpens Kraft,” in the Arkiv for Nordisk Filologi, VII. (1891), 97 ff.
386. In his introduction to the Canti Populari del Piemonte, p. xviii.
387. On the chasm between ballads of the collections and the recorded beginnings of national literatures, see Old English Ballads, p. lxxi.
388. See below, under Improvisation.
389. See remarks on “Crow and Pie,” Ballads, II. 478.
390. Essays, pp. 309 f.
391. See appendix on minstrels in the author’s Old English Ballads.
392. Social Forces in German Literature, p. 117. Talvj draws similar conclusions: Charakter., etc., pp. 339, 405.
393. Altdeutsches Liederbuch, p. xxii. The personal theory is much more temperately set forth, and with a better idea of throng-conditions, by Jeanroy, Origines, p. 396.
394. This leprous monk has been a godsend to the writers on ballad origins. But one might as well appeal to the ego in a passage from Thomas Cantipratensis, written near Cambrai, in 1263, and often quoted: Quod autem obscoena carmina finguntur a daemonibus et perditorum mentibus immittuntur, quidam daemon nequissimus qui ... puellam nobilem ... prosequebatur, manifeste populis audientibus dixit: “Cantum hunc celebrem de Martino ego cum collega meo composui et per diversas terras Galliae et Theutoniae promulgavi”.... Here are individual authorship—or collaboration: “I and a colleague of mine,” says the demon,—aristocratic origins, and Prior’s lady in the case.
395. Villemarqué, Barzaz-Breiz, Paris, 1846, II. 285. Le Temps Passé begins p. 273.
396. Or suppose one should pin the ego folk to a belief in the statement found in so many ballads that they are written by the person of whom they sing! This statement is a favourite in Basque songs. See F. Michel, Le Pays Basque, pp. 320 f.
397. Or take the Schloss in Oesterreich:—
399. No one now pretends that “Expliceth, quod Rychard Sheale,” at the end of the Ms. of the old Cheviot ballad, makes Sheale the author of it.
400. Work quoted, p. lvii. The implied protest against Grimm, p. lxxxii, must be read along with the passage just cited.
401. “Una creazione spontanea essenzialmente etnica.”
402. Histoire Poétique de Charlemagne, p. 2.
403. Romania, XIII. 617.
404. Ibid., p. 603.
405. Hist. Po. Charl., p. 11.
406. Driver, Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament, p. 389, sums up for a modified acceptance of this theory. It seems clear that some of the Psalms are distinctly individual in every way, and as clear that many others are congregational and communal.
407. “Ueber das Ich der Psalmen,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft, VIII. (1888), 49-148. Against him in toto is Dr. Robertson, The Poetry and the Religion of the Hebrews, 1898. See pp. 20 ff., 260 ff.
408. Religion of Israel to the Exile, p. 198.
409. Robertson’s objection to this is trivial (work quoted, p. 283), and shows a total lack of insight into the conditions of old communal song. “It is becoming more and more plain,” says Donovan, Lyre to Muse, p. 162, “that individuals could have had little to do with forming the fashions and manner of Hebrew song.” It sprang from the choral dance of the people, which later times called “idolatrous.”
410. Vore Folkeviser fra Middelalderen, Copenhagen, 1891, an admirable book. See particularly, p. 39; also Talvj, Charakteristik, p. 340.
411. Wright and Halliwell, Reliquiae Antiquae, I. 248 f.
412. Sc. fine,—finish, end?
413. Zeitschrift f. Völkerpsych., V. 201. He notes a curious close found in many ballads.—
414. The opening or close of Germanic epic is often of this “I” character. So the Hildebrand Lay, the Béowulf, the Nibelungenlied at its end. Later epic shows a poet in the case, who has his own wares to announce. See R. M. Meyer, Altgermanische Poesie, pp. 357 ff., and his references.
415. Steenstrup, work quoted, pp. 43, 28 f.
416. Often the reciter remarks that it is night; that he is tired, thirsty; let the hearers come again on the morrow and each one bring a coin with him,—and so on. See A. Tobler, Zeitschr. f. Völkerpsych., IV. 175, quoting from Huon de Bordeaux.
417. It was noted that the Botocudos had no legends, no song of the past. A narrative song in the legendary sense is unknown to primitive folk; what they sing is the event of the day, an improvised song of sentences almost contemporary with the facts, cadenced by the communal dance. The sense of time past is so slender even among North American Indians (Powell, First Annual Report of Bureau of Ethnology to Smithsonian Inst., 1881, pp. 29 ff.), that while they admit that grass grows, they “stoutly deny that the forest pines and the great sequoias were not created as they are.” Now this primitive trait of poetry is preserved in communal ballads; and from this strictly communal class, long historical ballads, like those in German collections, should be excluded. Kögel, Geschichte der deutschen Litteratur, I. 111, notes that “the epic song ... is one of the later kinds of poetry.... It cannot even be regarded as belonging to the common Germanic stock.” But the communal narrative song is another matter.
418. “On American Aboriginal Poetry,” Proc. Numismat. and Antiquar. Soc. Philadelphia, 1887, p. 19.
419. See Böckel, work quoted, cxix.
420. Steenstrup has some good remarks on this point, work quoted, pp. 188 ff., 203 ff.
421. Of far earlier date than ballads, this poetry is in a later stage of evolution. Wîdsið, the oldest recorded English poem, shows more art and more poetic dialect than many a bit of Scottish verse picked up a century ago.
422. See R. Heinzel, Ueber den Stil der altgermanischen Poesie, Strassburg, 1875; W. Bode, Die Kenningar in der angelsächsischen Dichtung, Darmstadt u. Leipzig, 1886; R. M. Meyer, Altgermanische Poesie. See too Uhland, Klein. Schrift., I. 390.
423. A kenning, with many branches in Anglo-Saxon poetry, calls survivors of battle “the leavings of weapons.” This may once have been literal; but in its context it looks as deliberate as Lamb’s phrase for a resuscitated victim of the gallows,—“refuse of the rope, the leavings of the cord” (Inconveniences Resulting from Being Hanged).
424. Pop. Tales, IV. 152.
425. The general testimony for all ballads. For example, Fauriel, Chants Populaires de la Grèce Moderne, I. cxxix; these, he says, are full of commonplaces and recurrent phrases; the diction is “simple, nervous, and direct, that is, it has few figures, almost no inversions, and progresses in short periodic and nearly equal passages.” Remains of oldest Greek folk song show the same traits: Usener, Altgriech. Versbau, p. 45.
426. Wolfram von Eschenbach, ed. Lachmann, p. 4.
427. This may well go back to the summer songs, May-day songs, chorals, and so on, of festal crowds; so Bielschowsky, Geschichte der deutschen Dorfpoesie, Berlin, 1891, p. 13, concludes for the songs of Neidhart. So, too, with songs on the conflict of summer and winter. Latin poets of the Middle Ages led the way in regular description of nature. See Wilmanns, Walther, p. 409. For the general case, Burckhardt, Cultur d. Renaissance, II. 15; Uhland, Klein. Schrift., III. 388, 469.
428. Færøiske Qvaeder, p. 74.
429. Child, Ballads, I. 170.
430. Refrain or burden, not printed with the other stanzas, but sung throughout.
431. Maid.
432. Of = by.
433. Deprived, parted.
434. The incremental repetition of this ballad could be matched by many other cases. Typical is the combination of simple and incremental repetition, also in triads, at the end of a French ballad, “Sur le Bord de l’Ile,” Crane, Chansons Populaires, p. 28. Typical, too, is the interesting Westphalian ballad, already noted, of the Hero and Leander story: Reifferscheid, Westf. Volksl., pp. 2 f.; see ibid., Nos. 2, 5. “Mother, my eyes hurt me,—may I walk by the sea?”—“Not alone; take thy youngest brother.” Reasons follow against and for this. Then repetition: my eyes hurt me, may I not walk, etc. “Take thy youngest sister,”—and incremental repetition of the reasons. Then:—
Usually each increment has a stanza, but now and then compression takes place, as in Motherwell’s version of Sir Hugh:—
So with three horses, and what not. This triad is not necessarily sprung from the “Dreitheiligkeit in der Lyrik,” of which Veit Valentin discourses in the Zeitschr. f. vgl. Lit. (New Series) II. 9 ff. “Dreitheiligkeit in der Lyrik,” comes rather from communal iteration in primitive song and dance.
435. See his letter to Mason, Works, ed. Gosse, II. 36.
436. Professor Earle confuses, in a very uncritical way, the garrulity of romances with the garrulity of epics and of ballads: see his Deeds of Béowulf, p. xlix. A “voluble and rambling loquacity,” he says, is the “natural character of the lay, and still more of the epic, which is a compilation of lays.” And presently he says that the romances are “the nearest extant representative of that unwritten literature which from the very nature of things was undisciplined and loquacious.” Confusion could hardly go beyond this.
437. Ferienschriften, I. 87.
438. “Das russische Volksepos,” Zeitschr. f. Völkerpsych., V. 187.
440. See Porthan, Opera Selecta, III. 305-381. I quote from the original dissertations de Poesi Fennica 1778, pp. 57 ff. He begins by lamenting the decay of old national song near the coast and under clerical influence; intimates that song was a universal gift and was improvised, although sundry bards are now eminent. Memorable events slip into song, now convivial, now satiric; and there is great store of proverbs. The description of dual singing begins with § XI.
441. “Præcentor, Laulaja ... adjungit sibi alium socium sive adjutorem, Puoltaja sive Saistaja dictum.”
442. “Quod facile jam ex sensu ipso, atque metri lege, reliquum pedem conjectando definire licet.”
443. “Rarissimi stantes canunt; et si contingit aliquando, ut musarum quodam afflatu moti stantes carmen ordiantur, mox tamen, conjunctis dextris sessum eunt, et ritu solito cantandi continuant operam.” They observe the rules of the game. Porthan, to be sure, notes the absence of dancing as a national and pervasive affair; but the statement must not go unchallenged. Long before this, Olaus Magnus (Hist. de gentibus Septentrion., Romæ, 1555, Cap. VIII. lib. IV. 141) said of the Lappland and other northern folk that they were often moved to dance,—“excitentur ad saltum, quem vehementius citharoedo sonante ducentes, veterumque heroum ac gigantum præclara gesta patrio rhytmate et carmine canentes, in gemitus et alta suspiria, hinc luctus et ululatum resoluti, dimisso ordine in terram ruunt,” a parlous state. Scheffer, to be sure, discredits this statement of the archbishop (Lapponia, 1673, p. 292); but Donner, Lieder der Lappen, p. 38, believes it, and says it is confirmed by the report of a recent Russian traveller.
444. Castrén, quoted by Comparetti, Kalewala, p. 66, note.