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.