_THE DANCE, THE BALLAD, AND THE GAME._
Entre Paris et Saint-Denis
Il s'élève une danse;
Toutes les dames de la ville
Sont alentour qui dansent.
Toutes les dames de la ville
Sont alentour qui dansent;
Il n'y a que la fille du roi
D'un côté qui regarde.
_Canadian Round._
Games accompanied by song may be divided into ballads, songs, and games
proper.
By the term ballad is properly signified a dance-song, or dramatic poem
sung and acted in the dance. The very word, derived through the late
Latin[14] from the Greek, attests that golden chain of oral tradition
which links our modern time, across centuries of invasion and conflict,
with the bright life of classic antiquity.
Still more pleasantly is a like history contained in another name for
the same custom. The usual old English name for the round dance, or
its accompanying song, was _carol_, which we now use in the restricted
sense of a festival hymn. Chaucer's "Romaunt of the Rose" describes
for us the movement of the "karole," danced on the "grene gras" in the
spring days. He shows us knights and ladies holding each other by the
hand, in a flowery garden where the May music of mavis and nightingale
blends with the "clere and ful swete karoling" of the lady who sings
for the dancers. This sense of the word continued in classic use till
the sixteenth century, and has survived in dialect to the present
day. Many of the games of our series are such rounds or carols,
"love-dances" in which youths and maidens formerly stood in the ring
by couples, holding each other's hands, though our children no longer
observe that arrangement. Now the word _carol_ is only a modernized
form of _chorus_. Thus childish habit has preserved to the present day
the idea and movement of the village ring-dance, the chorus, such as it
existed centuries or millenniums before another and religious form of
the dance accompanied by song had received that technical name in the
Greek drama.
Very little was needed to turn the ballad into a dramatic performance,
by assigning different parts to different actors. It is natural also
for children to act out the stories they hear. We find, accordingly,
that ancient ballads have sometimes passed into children's games.
But, in the present collection, the majority of the pieces which can
be referred to the ballad are of a different character. In these the
remainder of the history is reduced to a few lines, or to a single
couplet. These _historiettes_ have retained the situation, omitting
the narration, of the ancient song. We can understand how youthful or
rustic minds, when the popular song had nearly passed out of mind,
should have vaguely maintained the upshot of the story:
Here sits the Queen of England in her chair;
She has lost the true love that she had last year.
It is the tragedy told in a line; and what more is needed, since an
excuse is already provided for the kiss or the romp?[15]
Of lyric song we have scarce anything to offer. The fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries gave birth, all over Europe, to popular lyric
poesy, modelled on literary antecedents, and replacing in general
estimation the ancient dramatic ballad. Shakespeare, who merely refers
to the ballad proper, makes frequent use of the popular song of his
day. In many countries this taste has penetrated to the people; the
power of lyric composition has become general, so that a collection of
popular songs will contain many sweet and pleasing pieces. The ballad
has thus passed into the _round_. An inconsequent but musical babble,
like that of a brook or a child, has replaced the severe accents of
the ancient narration. But in English--why, we will not pause to
inquire--it is not so. Whatever of this kind once existed has passed
away, leaving but little trace. All that is poetical or pretty is the
relic of past centuries; and when the ancient treasure is spent,
absolute prose succeeds. The modern soil is incapable of giving birth
to a single flower.
Our rhymes, therefore, belong almost entirely to the third class--the
game proper. But though less interesting poetically, and only recorded
at a late period, it does not follow that they have not as ancient a
history as the oldest ballads; on the contrary, it will abundantly
appear that the formulas used in games have an especially persistent
life. As the ballad is a dramatic narrative, so the game is a dramatic
action, or series of actions; and the latter is as primitive as the
former, while both were employed to regulate the dance.
Most modern dances, silently performed in couples, are merely lively
movements; but in all ancient performances of the sort the idea is as
essential as the form. Precisely as the meaningless refrains of many
ballads arise from a forgetfulness of intelligible words, dances which
are only motion grew out of dances which expressed something. The dance
was originally the dramatized expression of any feature of nature or
life which excited interest. Every department of human labor--the work
of the farmer, weaver, or tradesman; the church, the court, and the
army; the habits and movements of the animals which seem so near to man
in his simplicity, and in whose life he takes so active an interest;
the ways and works of the potent supernatural beings, good or evil,
or, rather, beneficent or dangerous, by whom he believes himself
surrounded; angel and devil, witch and ogre--representations of all
these served, each in turn, for the amusement of an idle hour, when the
labor which is the bitterness of the enforced workman is a jest to the
free youth, and the introduction of spiritual fears which constitute
the terror of darkness only adds an agreeable excitement to the sports
of the play-ground. All this was expressed in song shared by the whole
company, which was once the invariable attendant of the dance, so that
the two made up but one idea, and to "sing a dance" and "dance a song"
were identical expressions.
The children's rounds of to-day, in which each form of words has its
accompanying arrangement of the ring, its significant motion and
gesture, thus possess historic interest. For these preserve for us some
picture of the conduct of the ballads, dances, and games which were
once the amusement of the palace as of the hamlet.
The form of the verses used in the games also deserves note. These
usually consist either of a rhyming couplet, or of four lines in
which the second and fourth rhyme; they are often accompanied by a
refrain, which may be a single added line, or may be made up of two
lines inserted into the stanza; and in place of exact consonance, any
assonance, or similarity of sound, will answer for the rhyme. Above
all, they possess the freedom and quaintness, the tendency to vary in
detail while preserving the general idea, which distinguish a living
oral tradition from the monotonous printed page; in these respects,
our rhymes, humble though they be, are marked as the last echo of the
ancient popular poetry.
There is especial reason why an Englishman, or the descendants of
Englishmen, should take pride in the national popular song.[16]
European mediæval tradition was, it is true, in a measure a common
stock; but, though the themes may often have been thus supplied,
the poetic form which was given to that material in each land was
determined by the genius of the language and of the people. Now, among
all its neighbors, the English popular poesy was the most courtly, the
most lyric, the most sweet. So much we can still discern by what time
has spared.
The English ballad was already born when Canute the Dane coasted the
shore of Britain; its golden age was already over when Dante summed
up mediæval thought in the "Divina Commedia;" its reproductive period
was at an end when Columbus enlarged the horizon of Europe to admit a
New World; it was a memory of the past when the American colonies were
founded; but even in its last echoes there lingers we know not what
mysterious charm of freshness, poetic atmosphere, and eternal youth.
Even in these nursery rhymes some grace of the ancient song survives.
A girl is a "red rose," a "pretty fair maid," the "finest flower," the
"flower of May." The verse itself, simple as it is, often corrupted, is
a cry of delight in existence, of satisfaction with nature; its season
is the season of bloom and of love; its refrain is "For we are all so
gay." It comes to us, in its innocence and freshness, like the breath
of a distant and inaccessible garden, tainted now and then by the odors
of intervening city streets. But the vulgarity is modern, accidental;
the pleasure and poetry are of the original essence.
We cannot but look with regret on the threatened disappearance of
these childish traditions, which have given so much happiness to so
many generations, and which a single age has nearly forgotten. These
songs have fulfilled the conditions of healthy amusement, as nothing
else can do. The proper performance of the round, or conduct of the
sport, was to youthful minds a matter of the most serious concern--a
little drama which could be represented over and over for hours, in
which self-consciousness was absorbed in the ambition of the actors
to set forth properly their parts. The recital had that feature which
distinguishes popular tradition in general, and wherein it is so
poorly replaced by literature. Here was no repetition by rote; but the
mind and heart were active, the spirit of the language appropriated,
and a vein of deep though childish poetry nourished sentiment and
imagination. It seems a thousand pities that the ancient tree should
not continue to blossom; that whatever may have been acrid or tasteless
in the fruit cannot be corrected by the ingrafting of a later time.
There is something so agreeable in the idea of an inheritance of
thought kept up by childhood itself, created for and adapted to its
own needs, that it is hard to consent to part with it. The loss cannot
be made good by the deliberate invention of older minds. Children's
amusement, directed and controlled by grown people, would be neither
childish nor amusing. True child's play is a sacred mystery, at which
their elders can only obtain glances by stealth through the crevice of
the curtain. Children will never adopt as their own tradition the games
which may be composed or remodelled, professedly for their amusement,
but with the secret purpose of moral direction.
We do not mean, however, to sigh over natural changes. These amusements
came into existence because they were adapted to the conditions of
early life; they pass away because those conditions are altered. The
taste of other days sustained them; the taste of our day abandons them.
This surrender is only one symptom of a mighty change which has come
over the human mind, and which bids fair to cause the recent time, a
thousand years hence, to be looked back upon as a dividing-mark in
the history of intelligence. If it should turn out that the childhood
of the human intellect is passing gradually into the "light of common
day"--if the past is to be looked back upon with that affectionate
though unreasoning interest with which a grown man remembers his
imaginative youth--then every fragment which illustrates that past will
possess an attraction independent of its intrinsic value.