But though the author or authors of most of the ballads may be lost in
the lists of time, we know a good deal about the minstrels who sang
them. And it is a happy thought that those minstrels were such
considerable persons, so honourably treated, so generously esteemed.
The modern mind, accustomed to think of the singer of popular songs
either as a highly paid music-hall artist, at the top of the ladder, or
a shivering street-singer, at the bottom of it, may find it difficult
to conceive of a minstrel as a sort of ambassador of song, moving from
court to court with dignity and ceremony.
Yet this was actually the case. In the ballad of King Estmere, for
example, we see the minstrel finely mounted, and accompanied by a
harpist, who sings his songs for him. This minstrel, too, moves among
kings without any ceremony. As Percy has pointed out, "The further we
carry our enquiries back, the greater respect we find paid to the
professors of poetry and music among all the Celtic and Gothic nations.
Their character was deemed so sacred that under its sanction our famous
King Alfred made no scruple to enter the Danish camp, and was at once
admitted to the king's headquarters."
_And even so late as the time of Froissart, we have minstrels and
heralds mentioned together, as those who might securely go into an
enemy's country._
The reader will perhaps forgive me if I harp back, once more, to our
present day and age, in view of the quite astonishing change in
national psychology which that revelation implies. Minstrels and
heralds were once allowed safe conduct into the enemy's country, in
time of war. Yet, in the last war, it was considered right and proper
to hiss the work of Beethoven off the stage, and responsible newspapers
seriously suggested that never again should a note of German music, of
however great antiquity, be heard in England! We are supposed to have
progressed towards internationalism, nowadays. Whereas, in reality, we
have grown more and more frenziedly national. We are very far behind
the age of Froissart, when there was a true internationalism--the
internationalism of art.
To some of us that is still a very real internationalism. When we hear
a Beethoven sonata we do not think of it as issuing from the brain of a
"Teuton" but as blowing from the eternal heights of music whose winds
list nothing of frontiers.
Man _needs_ song, for he is a singing animal. Moreover, he needs
communal song, for he is a social animal. The military authorities
realized this very cleverly, and they encouraged the troops, during the
war, to sing on every possible occasion. Crazy pacifists, like myself,
may find it almost unbearably bitter to think that on each side of
various frontiers young men were being trained to sing themselves to
death, in a struggle which was hideously impersonal, a struggle of
machinery, in which the only winners were the armament manufacturers.
And crazy pacifists might draw a very sharp line indeed between the
songs which celebrated real personal struggles in the tiny wars of the
past, and the songs which were merely the prelude to thousands of
puzzled young men suddenly finding themselves choking in chlorine gas,
in the wars of the present.
But even the craziest pacifist could not fail to be moved by some of
the ballads of the last war. To me, "Tipperary" is still the most
moving tune in the world. It happens to be a very good tune, from the
musician's point of view, a tune that Handel would not have been
ashamed to write, but that is not the point. Its emotional qualities
are due to its associations. Perhaps that is how it has always been,
with ballads. From the standard of pure aesthetics, one ought not to
consider "associations" in judging a poem or a tune, but with a song
like "Tipperary" you would be an inhuman prig if you didn't. We all
have our "associations" with this particular tune. For me, it recalls a
window in Hampstead, on a grey day in October 1914. I had been having
the measles, and had not been allowed to go back to school. Then
suddenly, down the street, that tune echoed. And they came marching,
and marching, and marching. And they were all so happy.
So happy.