WORLD'S BEST LITERATURE

ANCIENT AND MODERN CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER

EDITOR

HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE LUCIA GILBERT RUNKLE GEORGE HENRY WARNER

ASSOCIATE EDITORS

Connoisseur Edition Vol. XV.

NEW YORK THE INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY

Connoisseur Edition

LIMITED TO FIVE HUNDRED COPIES IN HALF RUSSIA No. ..........

Copyright, 1896, by R. S. PEALE AND J. A. HILL All rights reserved

THE ADVISORY COUNCIL

CRAWFORD H. TOY, A. M., LL. D., Professor of Hebrew, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. THOMAS R. LOUNSBURY, LL. D., L. H. D., Professor of English in the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University, New Haven, Conn. WILLIAM M. SLOANE, Ph. D., L. H. D., Professor of History and Political Science, Princeton University, Princeton, N. J. BRANDER MATTHEWS, A. M., LL. B., Professor of Literature, Columbia University, New York City. JAMES B. ANGELL, LL. D., President of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich. WILLARD FISKE, A. M., Ph. D., Late Professor of the Germanic and Scandinavian Languages and Literatures, Cornell University, Ithaca, N. Y. EDWARD S. HOLDEN, A. M., LL. D., Director of the Lick Observatory, and Astronomer, University of California, Berkeley, Cal. ALCÉE FORTIER, LIT. D., Professor of the Romance Languages, Tulane University, New Orleans, La. WILLIAM P. TRENT, M. A., Dean of the Department of Arts and Sciences, and Professor of English and History, University of the South, Sewanee, Tenn. PAUL SHOREY, Ph. D.,

Professor of Greek and Latin Literature, University of Chicago, Chicago, Ill. WILLIAM T. HARRIS, LL. D., United States Commissioner of Education, Bureau of Education, Washington, D. C. MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN, A. M., LL. D., Professor of Literature in the Catholic University of America, Washington, D. C.

[Pg v]

VOLUME XV

VIGNETTE PORTRAITS

[Pg 5853]

FOLK-SONG

BY F. B. GUMMERE

s in the case of ballads, or narrative songs, it was important to sunder not only the popular from the artistic, but also the ballad of the people from the ballad for the people; precisely so in the article of communal lyric one must distinguish songs of the folk—songs made by the folk—from those verses of the street or the music hall which are often caught up and sung by the crowd until they pass as genuine folk-song. For true folk-song, as for the genuine ballad, the tests are simplicity, sincerity, mainly oral tradition, and origin in a homogeneous community. The style of such a poem is not only simple, but free from individual stamp; the metaphors, employed sparingly at the best, are like the phrases which constantly occur in narrative ballads, and belong to tradition. The metre is not so uniform as in ballads, but must betray its origin in song. An unsung folk-song is more than a contradiction,—it is an impossibility. Moreover, it is to be assumed that primitive folk-songs were an outcome of the dance, for

which originally there was no music save the singing of the dancers. A German critic declares outright that for early times there was "no dance without singing, and no song without a dance; songs for the dance were the earliest of all songs, and melodies for the dance the oldest music of every race." Add to this the undoubted fact that dancing by pairs is a comparatively modern invention, and that primitive dances involved the whole able-bodied primitive community (Jeanroy's assertion that in the early Middle Ages only women danced, is a libel on human nature), and one begins to see what is meant by folk-song; primarily it was made by the singing and dancing throng, at a time when no distinction of lettered and unlettered classes divided the community. Few, if any, of these primitive folk-songs have come down to us; but they exist in survival, with more or less trace of individual and artistic influences. As we cannot apply directly the test of such a communal origin, we must cast about for other and more modern conditions.

When Mr. George Saintsbury deplores "the lack, notorious to this day, of one single original English folk-song of really great beauty," he leaves his readers to their own devices by way of defining this species of poetry. Probably, however, he means the communal lyric in survival, not the ballad, not what Germans would include under volkslied and Frenchmen under chanson populaire. This distinction, so [Pg 5854] often forgotten by our critics, was laid down for English usage a century ago by no less a person than Joseph Ritson. "With us," he said, "songs of sentiment, expression, or even description, are properly called Songs, in contradistinction to mere narrative compositions, which now denominate Ballads."

Notwithstanding this lucid statement, we have failed to clear the field of all possible causes for error. The song of the folk is differentiated from the song of the individual poet; popular lyric is set over against the artistic, personal lyric. But lyric is commonly assumed to be the expression of individual emotion, and seems in its very essence to exclude all that is not single, personal, and conscious emotion. Professor Barrett Wendell, however, is fain to abandon this time-honored notion of lyric as the subjective element in poetry, the expression of individual emotion, and proposes a definition based upon the essentially musical character of these songs. If we adhere strictly to the older idea, communal lyric, or folk-song, is a contradiction in terms; but as a musical expression, direct and unreflective, of communal emotion, and as offspring of the enthusiasm felt by a festal, dancing multitude, the term is to be allowed. It means the lyric of a throng. Unless one feels this objective note in a lyric, it is certainly no folk-song, but merely an

anonymous product of the schools. The artistic and individual lyric, however sincere it may be, is fairly sure to be blended with reflection; but such a subjective tone is foreign to communal verse—whether narrative or purely lyrical. In other words, to study the lyric of the people, one must banish that notion of individuality, of reflection and sentiment, which one is accustomed to associate with all lyrics. To illustrate the matter, it is evident that Shelley's 'O World, O Life, O Time,' and Wordsworth's 'My Heart Leaps Up,' however widely sundered may be the points of view, however varied the character of the emotion, are of the same individual and reflective class. Contrast now with these a third lyric, an English song of the thirteenth century, preserved by some happy chance from the oblivion which claimed most of its fellows; the casual reader would unhesitatingly put it into the same class with Wordsworth's verses as a lyric of "nature," of "joy," or what not,—an outburst of simple and natural emotion. But if this 'Cuckoo Song' be regarded critically, it

will be seen that precisely those qualities of the individual and the subjective are wanting. The music of it is fairly clamorous; the refrain counts for as much as the verses; while the emotion seems to spring from the crowd and to represent a community. Written down—no one can say when it was actually composed—not later than the middle of the thirteenth century, along with the music and a Latin hymn interlined in red ink, this song is justly regarded by critics as communal rather [Pg 5855] than artistic in its character; and while it is set to music in what Chappell calls "the earliest secular composition, in parts, known to exist in any country," yet even this elaborate music was probably "a national song and tune, selected according to the custom of the times as a basis for harmony," and was "not entirely a scholastic composition." It runs in the original:—

Burden

The monk, whose passion for music led him to rescue this charming song, probably regretted the rustic quality of the words, and did his best to hide the origin of the air; but behind the complicated music is a tune of the country-side, and if the refrain is here a burden, to be sung throughout the piece by certain voices while others sing the words of the song, we have every right to think of an earlier refrain which almost absorbed the poem and was sung by [Pg 5856] a dancing multitude. This is a most important consideration. In all parts of Europe, songs for the dance still abound in the shape of a welcome to spring; and a lyrical outburst in praise of the jocund season often occurs by way of prelude to the narrative ballad: witness the beautiful opening of 'Robin Hood and the Monk.' The troubadour of Provence, like the minnesinger of Germany, imitated these invocations to spring. A charming balada of Provence probably takes us beyond the troubadour to the domain of actual folk-song.[2] "At the entrance of the bright season," it runs, "in order to

begin joy and to tease the jealous, the queen will show that she is fain to love. As far as to the sea, no maid nor youth but must join the lusty dance which she devises. On the other hand comes the king to break up the dancing, fearful lest some one will rob him of his April queen. Little, however, cares she for the graybeard; a gay young 'bachelor' is there to pleasure her. Whoso might see her as she dances, swaying her fair body, he could say in sooth that nothing in all the world peers the joyous queen!" Then, as after each stanza, for conclusion the wild refrain—like a procul este, profani!—"Away, ye jealous ones, away! Let us dance together, together let us dance!" The interjectional refrain, "eya," a mere cry of joy, is common in French and German songs for the dance, and gives a very echo of the lusty singers. Repetition, refrain, the infectious pace and merriment of this old song, stamp it as a genuine product of the people.[3] The brief but emphatic praise of spring with which it opens is doubtless a survival of those older pagan hymns and songs

which greeted the return of summer and were sung by the community in chorus to the dance, now as a religious rite, now merely as [Pg 5857] the expression of communal rejoicing. What the people once sang in chorus was repeated by the individual poet. Neidhart the German is famous on account of his rustic songs for the dance, which often begin with this lusty welcome to spring: while the dactyls of Walther von der Vogelweide not only echo the cadence of dancing feet, but so nearly exclude the reflective and artistic element that the "I" of the singer counts for little. "Winter," he sings,—

That is, "if spring were here, and the girls were going to the village dance"; for ball-playing was not only a rival of the dance, but was often combined with it. Walther's dactyls are one in spirit with the fragments of communal lyric which have been preserved for us by song-loving "clerks" or theological students, those intellectual tramps of the Middle Ages, who often wrote down such a merry song of May and then turned it more or less freely into their barbarous but not unattractive Latin. For example:—

The steps of the dance are not remote; and the same echo haunts another song of the sort:—

Or the song at the dance may set forth some of the preliminaries, as when a girl is supposed to sing:—

The greeting from youth to maiden, from maiden to youth, was doubtless a favorite bit of folk-song, whether at the dance or as independent lyric. Readers of the 'Library' will find such a greeting incorporated in 'Child Maurice'[8]; only there it is from the son to his mother, and with a somewhat eccentric list of comparisons by way of detail, instead of the terse form known to German tradition:—

The variations are endless; one of the earliest is found in a charming Latin tale of the eleventh century, 'Rudlieb,' "the oldest known romance in European literature." A few German words are mixed with the Latin; while after the good old ballad way the greeting is first given to the messenger, and repeated when the messenger performs his task:—"I wish thee as much joy as there are leaves on the trees,—and as much delight as birds have, so much love (minna),—and as much honor I wish thee as there are flowers and grass!" Competent critics regard this as a current folk-song of greeting inserted in the romance, and therefore as the oldest example of minnesang in German literature. Of the less known variations of this [Pg 5859] theme, one may be given from the German of an old song where male singers are supposed to compete for a garland presented by the maidens; the rivals not only sing for the prize but even answer riddles. It is a combination of game and dance, and is evidently of communal origin. The honorable

authorities of Freiburg, about 1556, put this practice of "dancing of evenings in the streets, and singing for a garland, and dancing in a throng" under strictest ban. The following is a stanza of greeting in such a song:—

These competitive verses for the dance and the garland were, as we shall presently see, spontaneous: composed in the throng by lad or lassie, they are certainly entitled to the name of communal lyric. Naturally, the greeting could ban as well as bless; and little Kirstin (Christina) in the Danish ballad sends a greeting of double charge:—

Folk-song in the primitive stage always had a refrain or chorus. The invocation of spring, met in so many songs of later time, is doubtless a survival of an older communal chorus sung to deities of summer and flooding sunshine and fertility. The well-known Latin 'Pervigilium Veneris,' artistic and elaborate as it is in eulogy of spring and love, owes its refrain and the cadence of its trochaic rhythm to some song of the Roman folk in festival; so that Walter Pater is not far from the truth when he gracefully assumes that the whole poem was suggested by this refrain "caught from the lips of the young men, singing because they could not help it, in the streets of Pisa," during that Indian summer of paganism under the Antonines. This haunting refrain, with its throb of the spring and the festal throng, is ruthlessly tortured into a heroic couplet in Parnell's translation:—

Contrast the original!—

[Pg 5860] This is the trochaic rhythm dear to the common people of Rome and the near provinces, who as every one knows spoke a very different speech from the speech of the patrician, and sang their own songs withal; a few specimens of the latter, notably the soldiers' song about Cæsar, have come down to us.[11]

The refrain itself, of whatever metre, was imitated by classical poets like Catullus; and the earliest traditions of Greece tell of these refrains, with gathering verses of lyric or narrative character, sung in the harvest-field and at the dance. In early Assyrian poetry, even, the refrain plays an important part; while an Egyptian folk-song, sung by the reapers, seems to have been little else than a refrain. Towards the end of the Middle Ages, courtly poets took up the refrain, experimented with it, refined it, and so developed those highly artificial forms of verse known as roundel, triolet, and ballade. The refrain, in short, is corner-stone for all poetry of the people, if not of poetry itself; beginning with inarticulate cries of joy or sorrow, like the eya noted above, mere emotional utterances or imitations of various sounds, then growing in distinctness and compass, until the separation of choral from artistic poetry, and the increasing importance of the latter, reduced the refrain to a merely ancillary function,

and finally did away with it altogether. Many refrains are still used for the dance which are mere exclamations, with just enough coherence of words added to make them pass as poetry. Frequently, as in the French, these have a peculiar beauty. Victor Hugo has imitated them with success; but to render them into English is impossible.

The refrain, moreover, is closely allied to those couplets or quatrains composed spontaneously at the dance or other merry-making of the people. In many parts of Germany, the dances of harvest [Pg 5861] were until recent days enlivened by the so-called schnaderhüpfl, a quatrain sung to a simple air, composed on the spot, and often inclining to the personal and the satiric. In earlier days this power to make a quatrain off-hand seems to have been universal among the peasants of Europe. In Scandinavia such quatrains are known as stev. They are related, so far as their spontaneity, their universal character, and their origin are concerned, to the coplas of Spain, the stornelli of Italy, and the distichs of modern Greece. Of course, the specimens of this poetry which can be found now are rude enough; for the life has gone out of it, and to find it at its best one must go back to conditions which brought the undivided genius of the community into play. What one finds nowadays is such motley as this,—a so-called rundâ from Vogtland, answering to the Bavarian schnaderhüpfl:—

A schnaderhüpfl taken down at Appenzell in 1754, and one of the oldest known, was sung by some lively girl as she danced at the reapers' festival:—

It is evident that the great mass of this poetry died with the occasion that brought it forth, or lingered in oral tradition, exposed to a thousand chances of oblivion. The Church made war upon these songs, partly because of their erotic character, but mainly, one may assume, because of the chain of tradition from heathen times which linked them with feasts in honor of abhorred gods, and with rustic dances at the old pagan harvest-home. A study of all this, however, with material at a minimum, and conjecture or philological combination as the only possible method of investigation, must be relegated to the treatise and the monograph;[12] for present purposes we must confine our exposition and search to songs that shall attract readers as well as students. Yet this can be done only by the admission into our pages of folk-song which already bears witness, more or less, to the touch of an artist working upon material once exclusively communal and popular.

[Pg 5862] Returning to our English type, the 'Cuckoo Song,' we are now to ask what other communal lyrics with this mark upon them, denoting at once rescue and contamination at the hands of minstrel or wandering clerk, have come down to us from the later Middle Ages. Having answered this question, it will remain to deal with the difficult material accumulated in comparatively recent times. Ballads are far easier to preserve than songs. Ballads have a narrative; and this story in them has proved antiseptic, defying the chances of oral transmission. A good story travels far, and the path which it wanders from people to people is often easy to follow; but the more volatile contents of the popular lyric—we are not speaking of its tune, which is carried in every direction—are easily lost.[13] Such a lyric lives chiefly by its sentiment, and sentiment is a fragile burden. We can however get some notion of this communal song by process of inference, for the earliest lays of the Provençal troubadour, and probably of the German minnesinger, were based upon the older