modern lyric-monger exactly reverses M. Coué's doctrine. He makesthe patient repeat "Every night, with all my might, I grow worse and
worse and worse." Of course the "I" of the lyric-writer is an imaginary
"I", but if any man sings "I'm feeling blue", often enough, to a catchy tune, he will be a superman if he does not eventually apply that "I" to himself.
But the "blueness" is really beside the point. It is the egotism of the modern ballad which is the trouble. Even when, as they occasionally do, the modern lyric-writers discover, to their astonishment, that they are feeling happy, they make the happiness such a personal issue that half its tonic value is destroyed. It is not, like the old ballads, just an outburst of delight, a sudden rapture at the warmth of the sun, or the song of the birds, or the glint of moonlight on a sword, or the dew in a woman's eyes. It is not an emotion so sweet and soaring that self is left behind, like a dull chrysalis, while the butterfly of the spirit flutters free. No … the chrysalis is never left behind, the "I", "I", "I", continues, in a maddening monotone. And we get this sort of thing. …
I want to be happy, But I can't be happy Till I've made you happy too.
And that, if you please, is one of the jolliest lyrics of the last
decade! That was a song which made us all smile and set all our feet
dancing!
Even when their tale was woven out of the stuff of tragedy, the old
ballads were not tarnished with such morbid speculations. Read the tale
of the beggar's daughter of Bethnal Green. One shudders to think what a
modern lyric-writer would make of it. We should all be in tears before
the end of the first chorus.
But here, a lovely girl leaves her blind father to search for fortune.
She has many adventures, and in the end, she marries a knight. The
ballad ends with words of almost childish simplicity, but they are words
which ring with the true tone of happiness:--
Thus was the feast ended with joye and delighte
A bridegroome most happy then was the young knighte
In joy and felicitie long lived hee
All with his faire ladye, the pretty Bessee.
I said that the words were of almost childish simplicity. But the
student of language, and the would-be writer, might do worse than study
those words, if only to see how the cumulative effect of brightness and
radiance is gained. You may think the words are artless, but just
ponder, for a moment, the number of brilliant verbal symbols which are
collected into that tiny verse. There are only four lines. But those
lines contain these words …
Feast, joy, delight, bridegroom, happy, joy, young, felicity, fair,
pretty.
Is that quite so artless, after all? Is it not rather like an old and
primitive plaque, where colour is piled on colour till you would say
the very wood will burst into flame … and yet, the total effect is one
of happy simplicity?
V
How were the early ballads born? Who made them? One man or many? Were
they written down, when they were still young, or was it only after the
lapse of many generations, when their rhymes had been sharpened and
their metres polished by constant repetition, that they were finally
copied out?
To answer these questions would be one of the most fascinating tasks
which the detective in letters could set himself. Grimm, listening
in his fairyland, heard some of the earliest ballads, loved them,
pondered on them, and suddenly startled the world by announcing that
most ballads were not the work of a single author, but of the people at
large. Das Volk dichtet, he said. And that phrase got him into a lot of trouble. People told him to get back to his fairyland and not make such ridiculous suggestions. For how, they asked, could a whole people make a poem? You might as well tell a thousand men to make a tune, limiting each of them to one note!
To invest Grimm's words with such an intention is quite unfair.
[Footnote: For a discussion of Grimm's theories, together with much
interesting speculation on the origin of the ballads, the reader should
study the admirable introduction to English and Scottish Popular Ballads, published by George Harrap & Co., Ltd.] Obviously a multitude of people could not, deliberately, make a single poem any more than a multitude of people could, deliberately, make a single picture, one man doing the nose, one man an eye and so on. Such a suggestion is grotesque, and Grimm never meant it. If I might guess at what he meant, I would suggest that he was thinking that the origin of ballads must have been similar to the origin of the dance, (which was probably the earliest form of aesthetic expression known to man).
The dance was invented because it provided a means of prolonging ecstasy
by art. It may have been an ecstasy of sex or an ecstasy of victory …
that doesn't matter. The point is that it gave to a group of people an
ordered means of expressing their delight instead of just leaping about
and making loud cries, like the animals. And you may be sure that as the
primitive dance began, there was always some member of the tribe a
little more agile than the rest--some man who kicked a little higher or
wriggled his body in an amusing way. And the rest of them copied him,
and incorporated his step into their own.
Apply this analogy to the origin of ballads. It fits perfectly.
There has been a successful raid, or a wedding, or some great deed of
