ballad as musical and poetic form (1)

uHEEREREELERBEEELEBEERESEERREERS N Chapter Eight i THE ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE BALLAD AS A MUSICAL AND POETICAL FORM " N considering the origin of ballads as a gerre we must perforce leave the firm ground of observable pheno- mena and venture into a doubtful region of inference. We. can no longer limit our inquiry to what exists, and is therefore susceptible of analytical description. The beginnings of any form in art can seldom be determined very precisely, even when the product is one cultivated in urban centres and by restricted groups; and the difficulties are enormously increased when we have to ! deal with something not confined to the people of a single race and cultivated for the most part, as far as we can learn its history, by the humbler social groups, which et ' is the case with the ballads. We have to form our 7 theories on the basis of evidence that is scantier than we could wish and in some respects of doubtful worth. . Caution is necessary, yet without a certain boldness of conjecture the problem cannot be attacked at all. Scholars have been curious about the origin of ballads for a long time, and have disagreed rather violently in the conclusions they have reached. It is not because of any disrespect for what they have done, but because the whole matter has been somewhat clouded with pre- possessions and prejudices, that I shall avoid a set review of the positions that have been defended. We shall not profit, I feel sure, by continuing the intermittent war- fare that has been carried on for more than a century by communalists and individualists. Could the truth be reached along those lines, there would have been peace between the combatants ere this; but peace has not come.

oy 81 190 The Origin and Development of the Rather there has developed increasingly a sense of be- wilderment among fair-minded men, together with a lassitude that has retarded progress towards the solution of what is, after all, one of the most fascinating problems in the history of the arts. I do not flatter myself that I can guide the reader to a sure knowledge of how the ballad came into being as the particular sort of verse narrative with musical accom- paniment that it is. I am only too well aware that about certain important matters I cannot offer even a tentative explanation. I believe, however, that a fresh statement of th.e problem can be made, which will clarify it and perhaps suggest profitable studies for the future. A clear understanding of what we do not know about a question is muca more useful than an attempt to draw definite conclusions from insufficient evidence. Onlywith an aim'thus restricted should I darewrite about theorigin of ballads at all, for I realize clearly the difficulties that confront the explorer in this field. First of all, we must bear in mind that, when we are discussing the origin of the ballad form, we are not primarily concerned with the way this or that particular melody and poem came into existence. There are two distinct problems, quite evidently, both very interesting and important, but not to be confused. We should like to discover, on the one hand, what gave rise to the mould or pattern of ballads, and we should be glad to know, on the other hand, how and when the individual ballads of our traditional store were made in accordance with that pattern. Since many of them are comparatively modern, as is witnessed by the stories they relate, though others may well be of very considerable antiquity —ageless, if not exceedingly old—we can be certain that at least a great number were composed long after the mould was fully formed and set. This is stating the case with the utmost moderation. As a matter of fact, Ballad as a Musical and Poetical Form 191 it is highly improbable that a majority of them have an individual history that goes back to the Middle Ages, though we have convincing evidence that the type they represent was known in the thirteenth century. In so far as we can be sure that the tradition of making has not altered with the centuries, we have the right to use ballads composed in the sixteenth century in discussing the formal characteristics of the medieval type ; but we must be careful not to attribute a later fashion to an earlier day if by any possibility we can avoid it, and we must continually remember that nearly all the extant versions of our ballads stand at the end of a long chain of tradition. ‘The marvel is that Fudas should exhibit the same qualities as The Bitter Withy, and Foknie Cock as Fohnie Armstrong. The question we have to put to our- selves, when we speak of origins, is this : how and when was the pattern formed that has given rise, as a tradition in music and narrative verse, to the noble but somewhat tattered array that collectors and editors have gathered? In the second place, we ought never to forget that the ballads of different countries, although they have such marked similarities of narrativestructure as to belong un- mistakably to the same genre, differ widely among them- selves in metrical form and poetic style. The implications of this well-known fact have never been stated, so far as I know, by students of ballad origins; but they appear to be of fundamental importance, once they are clearly grasped. The song we call Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight (4), for example, is found in the oral tradition of at least ten countries, with versions so intricately inter- woven that they have baffled all attempts hitherto made to trace the wanderings of the theme with anything like certitude, yet quite clearly they compose a group by themselves. They are more intimately connected than are the scattered versions of the same folk-tale, in that they have structural qualities in common. At the same

fot 192 The Origin and Development of the time the metrical form of the narrative song in Hungary is not, I make out—and could not be expected to be— at all like the form prevailing in Scotland. Differences in language, differences in historic tradition, and in some cases a varying musical habit make it inevitable that a ballad like Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight would have to be recast—not simply translated—as it moved from land to land. In looking at the question of ballad origins, in trying to see how the pattein of them came into existence, we are thus faced again with two problems instead of one ; and we shall have more chance of eventually solving them if we keep the two distinct. We wish to know how it happens that people all over Europe sing their stories with a marked tendency to focus them on a single episode, to present the action dramatically, and to treat the material impersonally. We wish to know, in the second place, when it was that ballads with these charac- teristics began to be made in Great Britain, how they were made, and why they have the formal qualities that they share with similar narrative lyrics of certain other countries, though not of all countries. In other words, there is the question as to why the stories are told in the way they are, which is a constant throughout Europe, and there is the .question of their poetical and musical dress, which is a variable, I take pains to make these distinctions clear, because I am convinced that only by observing them have we much hope, now or in the future, of emerging from the fog that has enveloped the problem since it first aroused the interest of scholars. I do not say that we shall find easy and simple answers to our questions because we are able to put them plainly, but I believe that it is well worth our while to clarify our ideas about the goal we have in mind. At the risk of appearing over-precise and pedantic, 1 shall sum up the matter by saying that we ° N\ . (RN Ballad as @ Musical and Poetical Form 193 must try to answer three separate but interrelated questions: (1) What was the origin of the narrative form peculiar to ballads—to use the English term for something very differently designated in other languages ? (2) What was the origin of the melodic and poetical form found in the British ballads, as well as in some of their continental relations ? (3) What was the origin of the individual ballads that make up our collections ? In trying to answer all of these questions, we are hampered at the outset by the lack of any fixed dates. Just as we cannot hope to discover for most individual ballads a terminum a quo, we are equally unable to fix upon the century when such narrative songs as a class were first composed. Since the genre developed and has been perpetuated by oral tradition, we have no right to take as the period of its genesis the time when writers first mention it or some one records a set of words. Judas is found in a manuscript of the late thirteenth century, which proves only that by that time there were ballads in England with the form we know so well, but gives us no real clue as to how long before that date they existed, since only by the merest chance have we this scrap of evidence.” Without it, we should not know with certainty that anything of the sort existed before the fifteenth century. An oral tradition could thrive for a long while, naturally, without receiving the slightest attention from men of letters or compilers of common- place books. There is, in short, no direct evidence whatever as to the period when the ballad as a narrative form, or the ballad as a melodic and poetical form came into existence. Any opinion at which we may arrive must be a matter of inference. Yet it seems wholly improbable that the centred, dramatic, and impersonal story-song of medieval and ! Almost the same thing is true of Danish ballads. See Stecnstrup, The Me- dicval Popular Ballad, trans. Cox, 1914, Pp- 254-6.

06 194 The Origin and Development of the modern times goes back to a very remote century. The little we can discover about the singing habits of the people of northern Europe before and after the Great Migrations does not warrant the belief that theycomposed and chanted anrthing like our ballads. The poetry that survives in pre-Conquest English is, to be sure, altogether literary—the work of men who had read and to some extent assimilated the legacy of Rome. Yet it is so unlike anything of antiquity, both in form and spirit, that we have every reason to suppose that the differen- cing elements are characteristic of whatever tradition of poetry the Germanic peoples had when they encountered Christianity and the culture of southern Europe. In so far as Beowulf and W aldere are dissimilar from anything in Latin poetry, they may safely be taken as showing to - some degree the manner and form of northern narrative verse of the old time; but in no respect have they the slightest resemblance to the ballads of a later age. We know from Bede’s testimony® that singing took place on festal occasions in Anglo-Saxon England to the accompaniment of the harp; and we might be tempted to believe that such lays as Ceedmon’s fellows sang in turn were the precursors of ballads, save -that we get some notion of their quality from the songs reported in Beowulf. The narratives chanted at Hrothgar’s feast suggest in no way whatever the ballads of later tradition. What the carmina were that Aldhelm made and King Alfred esteemed so highly* we are unlikely ever to discover: we know only from his works in Latin that the elegant Bishop of Sherburne was not the man to write without conscious artifice. Even if his songs were narratives, of which there is no evidence, there is no reason to suppose that they had the characteristics of ballads. William ! Hisdoria Ecclesiastica, iv. 22, ed. Plummer, i. 259. 2 See William of Malmesbury, De Gestis Pontificun Anglorum, ed. Hamilton, 1870 (Rolls Ser. 52), p. 336. < ~\ . [T Ballad as a Musical amd Poetical Form 19§ of Malmesbury, who used Alfred’s now lost Manual as his authority, says that one of them was still ‘popu- larly sung’ in his own time, but regrettably gives no hint as to its nature. That stories in verse from the pre-Norman period circulated orally up to the twelfth century would be clear enough from another statement by William of Malmesbury, who rounds off an account of King Athelstan’s authentic history with some stories, for the truth of which—careful man!—he does not vouch. He says that the tales came ‘rather from songs worn down by the process of time than from books composed for the instruction of posterity’." Traditional songs these; but the detailed circumstances that William reports— relating to the birth of Athelstan and the death of his brother Edwin—are not what one would expect to find in ballads. Again we must regretfully conclude that the evidence proves nothing except the oral transmission of narrative verse. It helps us in no way towards establishing the early existence of the ballad form. Much has been made, and rightly—since they are very curious—of the two couplets that a twelfth-century chronicler of Ely inserted in his account of the founda- tion.* He says that King Cnut, while passing the monas- tery, heard the monks sing, and composed a cantilenam, or song, of which the opening ran as follows: Merie sungen the muneches binnen Ely Tha Cnut ching reu ther by. Roweth cnites noer the land And here we thes muneches sxng. ! <Magis cantilenis per successiones temporum detritis,quam libris ad instru- ctiones posterorum.” De Gestis Regum Anglorum, ed. Stubbs, 1887-9 (Rolls Ser. 90), i- 155. * See Thomas Gale, Historiae Britannicae,Saxonicae, Anglo-Danicae, 1691, in the Historia Eliensis, ii. 2. This work was compiled by Thomas not long after 1174, while the second book seems to be based ona chronicle begun by Richard of Ely between 1108 and 1131. Gale printed from the MS. now Trin. Coll., Cambridge, O.2.1, which is the only one containing the chapter in question,

Ig 196 The Origin and Development of the There follows a Latin translation of the verses, with the statement that they, and what followed them, are even to-day sung publicly in choruses and remembered in proverbs’." Just what the later verses of the song could have contained, and what the chronicler meant by saying that they were ¢ remembered in proverbs’, is hard to see. Certainly we have no right to conclude from his words that the song was a narrative;* but the English verses furnish evidence that the four-beat couplet with the ballad 1ilt was used as early as the twelfth century at least, and presumably in the eleventh. Thatis all, however. There is not even a hint in all this of a narrative with the struc- tural characteristics that appear after 1200. There is no point, furthermore, in attempting to prove the earlier existence of ballads with these characteristics by reference to the poetry of primitive races. When evi- dence is lacking for a period relatively more recent, it is idle to hope to find something more positive for remoter times by studying conditions among backward peoples. At best we should be dealing with analogies merely, and with analogies of a very dangerous sort. If we could dis- cover in Melanesia, or any other remote region of the world, a set of story-songs that conformed closely to the European traditional ballad, which no one has done, we should still be unable to argue with propriety that the - kind of lyrical narrative we are studying goes back to the distant past, for we should still lack proof of its existence in the cultures from which medieval civilization emerged. Neither the Roman world nor the races beyond the borders of the Empire furnish any evidence, and “without such evidence we cannot push back the probable date for the genesis of the type beyond the Middle Ages. as Professor A. Elsasser informs me. A later cdition is that of D J. Stewart, Liber Eliensis, Anglia Christiana Society, 1848. ! ‘Quae usque hodie in choris publice cantantur et in proverbiis memoraptur.’ * A point made by Miss L. Pound, Modern Language Notes, xxxiv. 162~ (1919). e SN, e Ballad as a Musical and Poetical Form 197 In three ways, and in three ways only, it seems to me, can the study of primitive custom be of any use to us in this matter. We can learn from such observation: (1) that the power or the habit of verse-making and music- making, though not universal, is more widely diffused among folk with a simple culture than among people whom we call civilized; (2) that songs are ordinarily made as the result of some immediate and definite stimulus, which is more often than not concerned with tribal matters and sometimes results in improvisation; and (3) that song is intimately related to the dance. The importance of these conclusions lies not in any evidence to be drawn from them that the history of ballads has been continuous since an early stage of our racial history, or even that ballads are primitive in quality. Attractive though the notion is, reason forbids our agreement with Gummere when he writes: ‘Ballads still hold their own as the nearest approach to primitive poetry preserved among civilized nations, scanty as the records are.’ No, all the arguments in this sense confuse valuable analogy with proof of identity. As we shall see, the poetry of primitive races differs essentially from the ballads and other folk-songs of Europe. Furthermore, the plain fact zs that we cannot trace the ballad beyond the later Middle Ages. We have no right to take a great leap in the dark from that point to an undesignated century when the European races were 'still primitive, and to say that the poetry of those times was probably like that of modern European folk-singers. We learn something of value, indeed, from observing the songs and the way of making them among peoples of lower culture; but it is neither the continuity of a particular form of lyrical narrative through uncounted generations nor the essential organic identity of ballads with primitive verse, but rather the remarkable similarity ' F. B. Gummere, The Beginnings of Poetry, 1901, p. 180. 7 U