ballad as musical and poetic form (1)

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.

e 198 The Origin and Development of the between the habits of verse-making among uncivilized races and among those large majorities of civilized f:olk who have not fallen until of late under the immediate influence of schools and the traditions” of conscious artistry. If composing verse and music of a sort can be shown to be not a specialized function of a few persons, but a diffused habit, if making songs under stress of some immediate stimulus has been a common pheriomenon, and if dancing has been associated with such songsamong widely scattered races with no cultural connexions, we are safe in assuming these things to be constants in the development of any popular genre at any time. They cannot serve as criteria by which to define the ballad or any other form, but they may well serve to help explain the development of some of the qualities that ballads actually possess. o As to the first point, the diffused rather than specialized habit of musical and poetic expression, the evidence seems to me conclusive. This does not mean communal com- position in the sense of immediate participation by all the members of a group in the making of individual songs (or even communal proprietorship in every case), but simply a very widespread tendency to make songs of a rudimentary sort. We are dealing now with fact, not conjecture. Howitt reports of the Australian at?orlgmcs that their ¢ songs are very numerous, and of varied char- acter, and are connected with almost every part of the social life, for there is little of Australian savage life, either in peace or war, which is not in some measure connected with song’. He goes on to say that some of the songs ‘are descriptive of events which have struck the composer’, and that the makers ‘are the pogts, or bards, of the tribe, and are held in great esteem. Their names are known in the neighbouring tribes, and their songs are carried from tribe to tribe.”* It must be remembered ' A.W.Howitt, The Native Tribes of South-East Australia, 1904, Pp. 413~ 14- i 1 o s Ml =he Sl s . - k4 s\ PR L N Ballad as a Musical and Poetical Form 199 that Australian tribes are small, and their poets therefore relatively numerous. Similarly, we read of the Melane- sians: ‘A poet or poetess more or less distinguished is probably found in every considerable village throughout the islands; when some remarkable event occurs, the launching of a canoe, a visit of strangers, or a feast, song- makers are engaged to celebrate it."' Song-making is a function of tribal life, indeed, among all such peoples. The matter is thus bluntly stated with regard to the Melanesians of New Guinea: ‘Any one will compose a topical song; in fact, a man will begin singing one in the club-house, making it up as he goes on, and the others will join.’”* Even more striking is this evidence from the Andaman Islands: ‘Every man composes his own songs. No one would ever sing (at a dance) a song composed by any other person. There are no traditional songs.” This is an extreme case, no doubt, for most tribes keep songs in remembrance, but it is worthy of consideration. Although these Andamanese have the habit of composi- tion, they could not be expected to develop songs with special and typical characteristics—such as our ballads have, for instance. There is evidence from various parts of Africa that a professional class of singers has existed among the Negro and Bantu peoples, but not to the extent of monopolizing the craft. Miss Kingsley reported * from West Africa that she had met five such singers in various regions during her travels, and had heard of others: all provided with ¢song-nets’, in which were tied objects like pythons’ vertebrae, bits of hide, and the like. A story which the minstrel would sing for a fee was connected with each object. Slightly earlier such men had been found H. Codrington, The Melanesians, 1891, p. 334. W. Williamson, The Ways of the South Sea Savage, 1914, p. 237. R. Brown, The Andaman Islanders, 1922, p. 112. H 'R. : R. A, * M. H. Kingsley, West African Studies, 1899, pp. 149-50.

e 204 The Origin and Development of the indistinguishable from music.”* Under such conditions, and indeed wherever a close union between music and poetry of simple kinds has been maintained, spontaneous utterance under direct stimulus, but according to a traditional art, can be found. In the third place, dancing is habitually, though not invariably, associated with song among the peoples whose habits we have been considering. How close the connexion is may be illustrated from a tribe in North- East Africa, which uses the same word for both song and dance,? as we have just seen that some Amerindians fail to distinguish verbally between melody and verse. The ceremonial dances of the Indians themselves have been so often described that it is necessary to do no more than refer to them. Not all of them are accom- panied by song, though in default of it the rhythm is maintained either by the beating of drums or the clap- ping of hands. I myself remember the harvest dance of the Pueblo Indians at Acoma, the movements of which are curiously syncopated and timed to the thudding of drums, while what appears to be unrelated song goes on at a distance. More frequently, however, song and dance are united in Indian festivities, as they are among other races generally throughout the world. The excep- tions 3 do not, I believe, invalidate the idea of a fairly constant relationship, which is all one could expect. [ am not urging, please note, that song gave rise to dance, or dance to song, nor do I wish to argue that in the beginning of things the two invariably went together.t All we need to bear in mind is the simple fact, which no one is likely to dispute, that songs are not uncommonly ' F. R. Burton, op. cit., p. 106, Seealso A. C. Fletcher, op. cit, p- 121. * See R. Paulitschke, op. cit., p. 217. 3 See, for example, £, S. Craighill Handy, Tke Native Culture in the Mar- quesas, 1923, p. 316, ‘ * Though some observers believe that they did. See A. R. Brown, op. cit., P- 247. e - e e S\ w Ballad as a Musical and Poetical Form 205 danced among the peoples whom we classify roughly— and inaccurately enough—as primitive. I have made sufficiently clear, I hope, my opinion that we cannot hope to solve the problem of the origin of ballads by direct reference to the conditions of musical production obtaining among such races. In the long debate between advocates of the theory that ballads took their rise in choric dances and the determined op- ponents of that theory, evidence from this source has been used more or less frequently, but not with the effect of clarifying the difficulties of either party. Gum- mere," who stated the former view with a greater wealth of learning and a more brilliant scholarly ingenu- ity than any one else has shown in discussing the origin of British ballads, never distinguished quite sufficiently, it seems to me, between the question as to how poetry came into being and the wholly different question of the development of the ballad form in medieval Europe. He was thus led into presenting, as evidence for the develop- ment of the ballad type from communal festivities, phenomena that could at best be no more than analogues. Confusion immediately resulted. With stout common sense—as his critics have seldom done him the justice of noting—he recognized and more than once asserted that ¢ the actual traditional ballad of Europe is not to be carried back into prehistoric conditions’;* yet on the same page with a statement of this kind he could write of the ‘survival of primitive and communal poetry as it can be detected in the ballads and the popular rimes of Europe’. The difficulty is clear, I believe: having been impressed by the similarity that exists between the sing- ing and dancing habits of savage tribes and certain ' Introduction to O/d English Ballads, 1894, The Beginnings of Poctry, 1901, ‘Primitive Poetry and the Ballad ', Modern Philology,i. 193-202,217-34,373~90 (1904), The Popular Ballad, 1907, Cambridge History of Litcrature, 1908, ii. 449-74- 2 The Beginnings of Poetry, p. 163.

R 210 The Origin and Development of the ballad, we can at least push back the date of origin for the species by one century, and possibly by two, since Fudas was not written down till close upon 1300. The song is thus of the utmost importance in the history of balladry. To its metrical form we must later return. For the time being, however, we had perhaps best direct our attention to the problem of how the ballad—or whatever other name one chooses to give it—originated as a narra- tive type, drawing what conclusions we can from the rather thin evidence at our command. About this matter, it is proper to say frankly, we can at best do no more than make conjectural inferences from all too scanty material. In the opening chapter of this volume I drew atten- tion to the fact that European ballads in general possess at least three characteristics in common. I said that ¢a compressed and centralized episode is the ordinary narrative unit, “hat dramatic presentation of action is the ordinary narrative method, and that impersonality of approach to the theme is the ordinary narrative attitude ’.* What explanation can one give, we must now ask, for the appearance of songs with these qualities among European peoples from the twelfth centuryon? It will not help us to postulate a dancing throng that had been composing and modifying ballads since primitive times ; and it will be even less helpful to shut our eyes fast against the clear evidence of things, and deny that ballads are anything more than the cast-off brats of literature and music. We must scrutinize carefully such data as we can find, and attempt to weigh the prob- abilities of the case with all of them in view.." First of all, we may postulate that the habit of singing, both individually and in chorus, was as prevalent. in the tenth and eleventh centuries as it has been in most other ¥ See pp. 10-11. ———— Ballad as a Musical and Poetical Form 211 times and regions. Without this premise, we should not be able to proceed with an explanation of any sort. What people sang would of course depend in large measure on traditional custom, though innovations are always possible in any society. That narratives of some sort were sung even before the period we have in mind is beyond question. We know, furthermore, that danc- ing in village centres, often in and about the churches, had before this time been sufficiently common to disturb some at least of the clergy. As to the nature of the dances, we get no information more precise than that about Kolbigk, where the young folk joined hands, ac- cording to all accounts, and must therefore have engaged in some kind of round.’ Remembering these habits of the people, we may conjecture reasonably that stories would be sung to tunes like those used in the dance, whether the stories were made for the dance or not. Although Bovo and his friends appear to have danced to a melody which was the accompaniment of a narrative song, the matter of primary importance is not so much the association of story with dance as of story with dance tune. In other words, as I have intimated earlier in this volume,® it seems to me that the singing of a narrative to a2 melody is the kernel of the whole matter. Wherever and when- ever that adaptation was made, the ballad as we know it came into being. By the twelfth century it was accom- plished, and it may perhaps have occurred at least as early as the eleventh century. To put the case another way, the peculiarities of ballad structure, as they appear throughout most parts of Europe, are explicable if we remember that the ! Paris, 0p. cit., p. 735, n. 7, suggests that the dance cannot have been a closed ring, because the arm of the priest’s daughter is pulled in an attempt to remove her. But the dancers join hands, and ‘girando’ is used to describe their move- ments. 3 Seep. 73.