IV

I go back and back to the same point, at the risk of boring you to

distraction. For it is a point which has much more "to" it than the

average modern will care to admit, unless he is forced to do so.

You remember the generalization about the eyes ... how they used to

look _out_, but now look _in_? Well, listen to this....

_I'm_ feeling blue,

_I_ don't know what to do,

'Cos _I_ love you

And you don't love _me_.

The above masterpiece is, as far as I am aware, imaginary. But it

represents a sort of _reductio ad absurdum_ of thousands of lyrics

which have been echoing over the post-war world. Nearly all these

lyrics are melancholy, with the profound and primitive melancholy of

the negro swamp, and they are all violently egotistical.

Now this, in the long run, is an influence of far greater evil than one

would be inclined at first to admit. If countless young men, every

night, are to clasp countless young women to their bosoms, and rotate

over countless dancing-floors, muttering "I'm feeling blue ... _I_

don't know what to do", it is not unreasonable to suppose that they

will subconsciously apply some of the lyric's mournful egotism to

themselves.

Anybody who has even a nodding acquaintance with modern psychological

science will be aware of the significance of "conditioning", as applied

to the human temperament. The late M. Coué "conditioned" people

into happiness by making them repeat, over and over again, the phrase

"Every day in every way I grow better and better and better."

The modern lyric-monger exactly reverses M. Coué's doctrine. He

makes the 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

daring, or some other phenomenal thing, natural or supernatural. And

now that this day, which will ever linger in their memories, is drawing

to its close, the members of the tribe draw round the fire and begin to

make merry. The wine passes ... and tongues are loosened. And someone

says a phrase which has rhythm and a sparkle to it, and the phrase is

caught up and goes round the fire, and is repeated from mouth to mouth.

And then the local wit caps it with another phrase and a rhyme is born.

For there is always a local wit in every community, however primitive.

There is even a local wit in the monkey house at the zoo.

And once you have that single rhyme and that little piece of rhythm,

you have the genesis of the whole thing. It may not be worked out that

night, nor even by the men who first made it. The fire may long have

died before the ballad is completed, and tall trees may stand over the

men and women who were the first to tell the tale. But rhyme and rhythm

are indestructible, if they are based on reality. "Not marble nor the

gilded monuments of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme."

And so it is that some of the loveliest poems in the language will ever

remain anonymous. Needless to say, _all_ the poems are not anonymous.

As society became more civilized it was inevitable that the peculiar

circumstances from which the earlier ballads sprang should become less

frequent. Nevertheless, about nearly all of the ballads there is "a

common touch", as though even the most self-conscious author had drunk

deep of the well of tradition, that sparkling well in which so much

beauty is distilled.